Earth in Circuit

Abstract

In Don Dellilo’s 1985 novel White Noise, an accident involving a tank car releases, “a feathery plume” and then “a black billowing cloud” that finally becomes “an Airborne Toxic Event”. On August 28 th 2017, a mist drifted toward the Sussex coastline at Birling Gap Beach, causing acute respiratory illnesses in over 150 people before dissipating without being identified. A symptom of the Airborne Toxic Event in Delillo’s novel is an acute sense of déja vu. The Sussex toxic mist was later traced to an oceanic plume emerging at the same spot that the SS Mira, a 3,700-tonne armed tanker, was sunk by a mine from a German submarine on October 11 1917, almost exactly 100 years ago. Atmospheric histories haunt an atmospheric present. Time folds uncannily on itself as we remember, and forget again, the heavy weather that once disturbed a night's sleep or an aerial journey; the repeated and prolonged violence of tropical storms in the Caribbean; the El Niño season that returned far too soon. Intrinsic to this forgetting, and to