We live in an era of self-inflicted climate change, the direct effects of which are hard to ignore. Precipitation whipsaws between drought and flood, sunsets are turned blood red by the ash of forest fires, and extreme heat pushes our electrical grid to the breaking point. This historical moment easily inspires nihilism and despair- a sense that this crisis is immovable, cataclysmic, and unprecedented, and that we are powerless to change its outcome. However, we can contextualize our current situation by understanding the geological history of the Earth. The ecosystems of the deep past have a story to tell that serves as a warning about the effects of uncontrolled climate change, calling us to action. But they can also provide relief by demonstrating that in times of collapse and destruction, not all is lost. They show us how life reinvents itself and brings the world back into equilibrium. Earth’s history is pocked by climate crises and mass extinctions followed by periods of renewal and diversification. One such event, called the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse, can help us understand the causes of climate change, how the global ecosystem responds, and it can even give insights into how and why we should fight climate change today.

By the early summer of 2020, as new Covid cases surged passed 50,000 daily infections across the nation due to a hurried and botched reopening of the economy, the failure by political leaders to control the pandemic became apparent. With a further flood of cases expected to be ushered in with the cool weather in September, and political will to implement preventative measures fast eroding, I began to realize that the only path to returning to an approximation of normalcy would be the successful development and rollout of a vaccine. Hence, on listless evening at my apartment in Pittsburgh, PA, I looked up whether any clinical trials for Covid vaccines were available for local participants.

The first time that I set foot in a research lab as an 18-year old college freshman at Clark University, I knew that I was home and that I wanted to be a research scientist. That fall, I set to work synthesizing unusual and previously undescribed magnetic compounds from mixtures of copper ions and an assortment of organic molecules. I loved watching the chemical reactions in real time, the sound of the automatic stir bars whirring against the edges of my beakers. I loved the smell of the organic molecules hanging in the air and the quietude of the lab late at night. Afterwards, over a period of weeks or months, crystals of new compounds formed at the bottom of the beakers. They were beautiful- bright oranges, vibrant yellows, chartreuse and forest green. I relished being the first and only person with a supply of these new compounds. If the crystals reached a sufficiently large size- barely a millimeter across- I would scrape each crystal up into a vial and ship them off to collaborators a half a world away in New Zealand. There, scientists subjected my crystals to powerful x-ray radiation. The photons bounced off the electrons of each atom in the molecule, creating a unique diffraction pattern for each compound. They would then send the diffraction data back to our lab in Massachusetts where we would use it to solve the atomic-resolution structure of the novel compound for the first time. In parallel, I took magnetic measurements of crystals that had never been shipped to New Zealand. To do this, my professor and I cooled our compounds to nearly absolute zero, placed them in a magnetic field tens of thousands of times stronger than that of the Earth, and slowly raised the temperature to see how the electrons would align themselves. Learning the molecular structure and magnetic properties allowed us to glean insights into how subtle differences in molecular structure could lead to radically different magnetic properties. In the long term, this work builds scientific understanding of how to create superconducting magnets that could change the face of technology in ways both subtle and life changing.