Stories by Tony Bartelme

 My latest from Senegal.   https://www.postandcourier.com/environment/lessons-of-senegal-what-an-old-city-in-west-africa-teaches-about-rising-waters/article_8e16beb6-ffba-11ed-afea-0f0af84984ee.html#tncms-source=latest_posts

  Saharan dust acts like a hurricane switch that turns them on and off. Read my latest in The Post and       Courier about how climate change may affect this switch.   The Saharan Connection: Will hurricanes hammer the East Coast? We traveled to the Sahara Desert to find answers. 1. Sun Deep in the Sahara Desert , the sun heats the sand, and the air above it rises. The rising air carries dust — orange dust from Mauritania and Mali, white dust from an ancient lake in Chad. Clouds of dust that soon flow into a jet stream moving westward across Africa, an ochre haze moving toward a place where our worst hurricanes are born.   Read more here

 Finding the Clotilda Here's my latest, a story about the infamous slave ship Clotilda. I traveled to Mobile, Alabama, this winter to better understand the facts and fictions around this important historical story. In The Post and Courier https://www.postandcourier.com/news/special_reports/inside-the-search-for-the-infamous-slave-ship-clotilda/article_80344be8-b3a1-11ed-a80d-0b4100dd527c.html  

Greenland may be 3,000 miles from Charleston, South Carolina, but what's happening there will determine the city's fate.  Lauren Petracca and I connected the dots in a project we called "The Greenland Connection."   The main story features an Elvis impersonator and a shaman, among other things, and delves into an issue the national media hasn't really addressed in depth -- Greenland's powerful gravitational effect on ocean tides. Visit it here: https://www.postandcourier.com/greenland Here's how it begins: 1. Gravity So many things in Greenland are gigantic. Greenland is five times the size of California, and roughly 80 percent is covered with ice. Greenland’s ice sheet is a mile deep on average, but near the center of the country it rises 10,000 feet into the sky. Greenland’s ice sheet is so thick and heavy that it makes the Earth  wobble  a bit as it spins, like an unbalanced top. When the ice sheet meets the ocean, the ice sometimes cracks and falls wit

 Here's my latest piece, a deep dive into how some of South Carolina's public servants ... serve themselves. https://www.postandcourier.com/uncovered/news-deserts-and-weak-ethics-laws-allow-corruption-to-run-rampant-in-sc/article_df3f64fe-5a63-11eb-aa62-4fb6abe764b6.html    

 My latest project is called Ghost Bird. It's ostensibly about a rare bird called the eastern black rail. Birders know that the black rail is incredibly difficult to find, which has made it a target. This is a story about that bird, climate change, obsession and love.   1. The sun sets over a secret spot in a South Carolina marsh, casting amber light on the grass. At this twilight angle, the sunbeams add extra green to the blades, which are as high as your shoulders. The grass sways in a breeze gentle enough for dragonflies to land. They bounce on the tips, their wings glint in the softening sun, and, for a moment, your path looks as if it’s filled with tiny mirrors. A little black bird may be here, underneath these bouncing dragonflies, somewhere in these sparkling green waves. A rare bird called the eastern black rail. A bird so difficult to see that John James Audubon never saw one in the wild. A bird so stealthy that even the most ardent birders haven’t seen one, tho