Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Let's look at the story of how this happens in the very long term, over a million years
or so. One can recount this story either in the amazingly dry language of conventional
science, in which everything is treated as if it were just dead matter observed from afar
by a vastly aloof human intellect, or one can tell it by acknowledging our inescapable
embeddedness in Gaia, and our intimate connection to the animate qualities within every
speck of matter. Objectifying dryness utterly dominates conventional scientific writing
in both popular and technical genres, so I am going to draw on an unashamedly animist-
ic version of this (and other) Gaian stories by deliberately using personifying as a device
to help breathe life back into what might otherwise be a rather boring account, capable
of exciting the imaginations of no more than a few handfuls of ivory-towered special-
ists.
So let me begin at the ultra-microscopic scale by introducing you to
Emiliania hux-
leyii
(Figure 20)
,
a single-celled marine alga that lives at the surface of the cold oceans
as a member of the phytoplankton community.
Emiliania
is tiny, 4/1000th of a milli-
metre (4 microns) in diameter, so the wheel-shaped structures you see in the picture are
even tinier—you need an electron microscope to see the fine detail revealed in the pho-
tograph.
Figure 20: The coccolithophore
Emiliania huxleyii
, with its chalky plates. (
photo © Steve
Gschmeissner / Science Photo Library
)
Emiliania
belongs to a group of algae that revel in a delightfully romantic name: they are
coccolithophores,
meaning the 'carriers of little stone berries'. The berries in question,
the wheel-shaped structures or coccoliths, are made out of one of Gaia's most import-
ant molecular beings: calcium carbonate, a combination of three of the elements born
