Gretchen Ernster Henderson writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrative sciences. Her recent essays have appeared in Ecotone, Ploughshares, and the Kenyon Review, with coauthored articles in Nature Sustainability and Conservation Biology. She is the author of five books, including her latest, Life in the Tar Seeps. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and has also taught at Georgetown University, MIT, and the University of Utah, where she was the 2018–19 Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities.
Gretchen Ernster Henderson
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How Not to Get Stuck in a Tar Seep
13. Learn how to identify one. Nicknamed “death traps,” tar seeps are ghostly pools of raw oil that creep up from tectonic fractures and spread across the earth like tacky flypaper. Continue reading