Deadly drought
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2022
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
East Africa has endured more than two years on continuous drought. The latest predictions suggest the drought is not likely to end any time soon. We look at why climate change and weather patterns in the Pacific and Indian oceans are largely to blame.
Andrea Taschetto, chief investigator at the Centre on Climate Extremes at the University of New South Wales discusses the latest predictions Drought has also been an issue in Europe, comparable with events nearly 500 years ago.
Chantal Camenisch at the Institute of History at Bern University in Switzerland has been delving into European drought history and says despite the vast differences in living conditions there are many parallels with today. When a dinosaur killing asteroid hit the earth did it have company? A suspected impact crater discovered off the coast of West Africa may have been caused at around the same time . Heriot Watt University geostratigrapher Uisdean Nicholson and University of Texas geologist Sean Gulick have been investigating. And we have some of the answers to why T Rex had such small eyes for the size of its skull, Stephan Lautenschlager at the University of Birmingham has the gruesome answer.
Also, Have you ever wondered why waterfalls appear white when still water is transparent? Why clouds, or snow, appear white when they too are essentially just water molecules in different states? What makes something white, opaque or transparent? These are the questions CrowdScience listener Gerardo has been pondering ever since taking in the beauty of fallen water on a hiking trail in his home of Cantabria, Northern Spain. Presenter Marnie, sets off on a quest to find out the answers to all of those questions and more. What even is white? Is it a colour, the absence of colour or all the colours of the rainbow combined? Is black really the opposite of white? And what colours do we mix to make white or black paint?
Image: Woman carrying water in drought, Kenya Credit: Getty Images
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might |
| 0:04.7 | like our podcast too. You might. You might. It is called Sightracked with me, Nick Grimshaw. |
| 0:09.2 | And me, Annie Mack. And we talk about the week in music. All the news, all the cultural |
| 0:14.0 | happenings in the UK and beyond. And great guests. And it's on BBC Sounds. Yes, where you can |
| 0:19.7 | also enjoy lots of playlists, music mixes and |
| 0:22.6 | live radio, everything from my six music breakfast show to Radio 3 Unwind. But obviously start |
| 0:29.2 | with our podcast, sidetrack. Obviously. Obviously. So if you like music, listen on BBC |
| 0:33.7 | Sounds. Thank you for downloading the Science Hour from the BBC World Service with me, |
| 0:38.2 | Roland Peace. In half an hour, if water is clear, why then is a waterfall white? Waterfalls are white |
| 0:46.4 | for the same reason that sugar cubes are white, because the individual crystals of sugar |
| 0:50.3 | within a sugar cube scatter light in much the same way as those tiny droplets of water |
| 0:54.6 | do in a waterfall. And snow? Much the same thing. So you're crystals, tiny crystals of water. |
| 1:02.2 | Crowd science reflects on what's beneath the surface of colour later in the podcast. On science |
| 1:08.7 | and action before that, we're taking a look at T-Rex's Little |
| 1:12.3 | Eyes. And we've the little twin to the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. How many |
| 1:18.2 | impactors were there back then? They have bigger populations of asteroids that hit. Is it possible |
| 1:23.6 | that happened in the late Cretaceous to early paleo gene? That would be pretty exciting, |
| 1:27.6 | especially because one of them happened to change life on Earth. |
| 1:29.8 | But we'll start with this year's extreme weather. |
| 1:33.7 | First of all, the extreme drought that has gripped Europe. |
| 1:36.9 | Weeks of record-breaking temperatures of cloud-free skies that have left the soil-parched |
| 1:43.0 | and the rivers running low. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

