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One of the real surprises to me in college was…bacteria. Now I had encountered these characters before (I guess everybody has, since more of the cells in a human body are symbiotic bacteria living inside of us than are…well our own actual cells). However, in college I learned the full history of life on Earth. It is mostly a history of bacteria: multicellular creatures only show up for the last 600 million years. For over 3 billion years, the world belonged to the bacteria alone. I also learned about extremophiles—bacteria that can live in boiling hot temperatures or in oxygen-free environments. Some extremophiles can metabolize inorganic things like sulfur and arsenic. They can live without the light of the sun in the fathomless depths of the ocean on poisonous elements. The oxygen we breath was created as a waste product by these first archaebacteria. The planet’s atmosphere was once a reducing atmosphere, where paper would not burn (assuming you had any…billions of years before trees plants evolved, much less paper-makers). Bacteria made it an oxygen world where things burn…including our metabolisms. They changed the world in a fundamental way that we industrial humans with our infernal carbons cannot match.
The archaebacteria sound like aliens (indeed, there is a real possibility they actually originally were aliens), but they are also our great-great-great ever-so-great-to-the-100th power grandparents. I don’t need to wonder whether evolution is real: I have seen it in a science lab when we put a pellet of penicillin on a petri dish and watched as the bacteria evolved resistance to it (not really a super-smart experiment in hindsight, but a super-compelling one). I wish I could impress upon you how astonishing bacteria are. They are the true sacred seed of life–the undisputed masters of Earth.
However, this is old news. The new news is that there are so, so many more bacteria than we realized. The earth beneath our feet is filled with bacteria…but the stone beneath that is filled with bacteria too. And the weird hot putty beneath that stone (the gabbro) is also filled with bacteria. There are bacteria in the depths of the world. Living bacteria have been discovered in the gabbro 1400 meters beneath the basalt floor of the ocean. There is a barely discovered world of secret life deep beneath our feet—a true underworld of secret unknown species of micro-organisms. The size of this ecosystem is enormous.
To quote a news article from..yesterday, “The record depth at which life has been found in the continental subsurface is approximately 3 miles (5km) while the record in marine waters is 6.5 miles (10.5km) from the ocean surface.”
If these are the true boundaries of the underworld bacteria biome, it means that there is a region of secret life twice as large as all of the world’s oceans combined. Based on past experience though, it is not unreasonable to doubt that deeper pockets of bacteria will be discovered as our drilling and bio-assaying become more sophisticated.
Most of the super deep bacteria spend enormously long periods in suspended animation. Sometimes they enter a metabolic suspension so profound that they seem dead or inanimate (which is maybe how we missed them for so long). At present, scientists and writers are calling them “zombie-bacteria” because of their half-alive status (which seems like an appropriate nomen based on their underworld habitat).
I wish I could tell you more about this realm of life on Earth, but I can’t. Not only am I not a bacteriologist or geologist, additionally we (meaning all of humankind) simply don’t know the answers yet. More research is necessary. Sadly, it is probably going to be slow to materialize. Our leaders seem incapable of grasping that surface life needs to continue longer than a few decades (at least if they hope for meaningful long term economic growth). I shudder to imagine them furrowing their brows at the concept of vast stone oceans of zombie one-celled organisms…and explaining to their constituents why we need to know more about such things. But we DO need to know. In the synthetic ecosystems of my youth, the lack of coherent sustainable bacterial communities was the root cause of disastrous failure. I don’t think our new underworld friends are going to fail or die any time soon, no matter what we surface beings do, yet if we want to take life elsewhere than Earth we are going to need to understand them much better. Perhaps life did not spring from some pool of irradiated scum or arrive on a comet from beyond the solar system. Maybe it came from the hot depths. Maybe we are all underworld beings.
Namib Naukluft National Park, Namibia. (Photo by Michael Poliza)
Once again I have been thinking about the Namib Desert–the world’s oldest desert–which calls to me for reasons I cannot fully explain. I wrote about some of the Namib’s strange animals and plants…but one thing I did not mention was its ergs. This is because I did not know what an erg is, but today I looked it up and the concept is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. An erg is a sea of wind-blown sand. This geographic feature is not unique to the Namib Desert—or indeed to planet Earth—but they do tend to be found only in vast & mighty deserts. Such a landscape is characterized by vast dunes—mountain-like sand hills composed of immense numbers of individual sand grains.
A sand dune in the Rub al Kali Desert
Geographers have seemingly fixed certain parameters on how large a sandbed must be to count as an erg—but I will let you look these up on your own—I think the word “sea” covers the scope of ergs. We are not talking about a child’s sandbox here.
Issaouane Erg, Algeria (photo from the International Space Station)
The word erg derives from an Arabic word “arq” which means dune landscape. The Rub al Kali Desert “the empty quarter” of Saudi Arabia is a vast erg—the world’s largest. There are a multitude of ergs throughout the Sahara (as seen on the map below) and they can also be found in central Asia, the middle of Australia, and the Atacama Desert (which I also really need to write about). Ergs are less common in North America than in Asia and Africa, but there a few notable examples mostly in the Sonoran Desert, but also including the unimaginatively named “Great Sand Dunes” in Colorado.
The geology of ergs is quite fascinating as the dominant agent of erosion and change is wind rather than water. When wind activity shapes the surface of the Earth (or another planet), geologists describe the varying sorts of erosion, deposition, and weathering as “Aeolian processes” in homage to the ancient Greek god of the winds who crops up in the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Ergs do not just feature great dunes but also strange sand sculpted rocks and dry river beds.
White Sands, New Mexico
As noted, ergs are not a phenomena exclusive to Earth, but can be found on other planetary bodies too (if they have silica and atmospheres). Ergs have been discovered on Mars where vast erg fields ring the polar caps. The Martian winds blow the ergs into bizarre patterns and shapes (usually I would say “otherworldly”, but that seems too pedestrian a word here). Venus also has ergs (discovered by the Magellan probe) and Cassini’s radar spotted huge parallel ergs on Saturn’s great moon Titan. Indeed ergs may be the dominant surface feature of Titan.
Martian Polar Dunes (photographed by the Mars Odyssey Spacecraft)
I have never been to an erg. There are none in Brooklyn (yet). However I would like to see one…although I admit to a certain amount of trepidation. They do not seem like places for life, and indeed they are among the most lifeless places on all of Earth. Ergs are beautiful but also terrible and dangerous. At least they should stay free of suburban sprawl for long enough for me to visit one (and it will probably be a very long time indeed before we cover the ergs of Titan with strip malls).
Erg Chebbi in Morocco (Bjørn Christian Tørrissen)
Artist’s Concept of WISE J224607.57-052635.0
Ferrebeekeeper has featured some mind-bogglingly strange astronomic entities before—black holes, ultra-dense stellar remnants, hyper-giant stars with a million times the mass of the sun, colliding neutron stars—but today we move up to a vastly greater order of magnitude! Astronomers have just discovered a new class of galaxy which emits energy at unimaginable levels. Using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), scientists have discovered what are being tentatively called “extremely luminous infrared galaxies” (ELIRGs).
One of these galaxies (with the not-very-snappy designation “WISE J224607.57-052635.0”) is producing 10,000 times more energy than the Milky Way, despite being much smaller than our familiar home. The newly discovered galaxy is putting out more energy than 10 trillion suns (or, more correctly, I should say it was putting out the energy of ten trillion main-sequence yellow stars). Scientists consider it the brightest known galaxy in the universe.
WISE J224607.57-052635.0 is 12.5 billion light-years away. Since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, what we are now seeing dates to a whole different era of galactic dynamics. Today maybe WISE J224607.57-052635.0 is a burned-out remnant…or a perfectly respectable middle-aged galaxy like the Milky Way. Who knows? But twelve-and-a-half billion years ago it was releasing an inconceivable amount of energy—so much so that astronomers are having trouble adjusting their theories to it. Perhaps some embryonic galaxies have black holes which gobble up stars at a much greater rate than initially thought or, alternately, some unknown set of circumstances has allowed the black hole (or holes?) at the center of WISE J224607.57-052635.0 to somehow surpass the theoretical threshold of black hole feeding.
Clearly astronomers are going to be sorting out what exactly happened out there for quite a while, but in the meantime, when you look up at the night sky remember you are looking at an invisible fountain of energy ten trillion times brighter than the sun. [Ooh, I made myself dizzy]
The Elk (Cervus Canadensis)
The Elk (Cervus Canadensis) is one of the world’s largest deer: adult male elk can weigh up to 331 kg (730 lb) and stands 1.5 m (4.9 ft) at the shoulder. The magnificent antlered beasts are believed to have originated in Beringia, a now vanished steppeland which connected North America and Asia during the Pleistocene. The poor Elk suffers substantial name confusion. In Europe, moose (Alces alces) are known as elk. When Europeans arrived in North America, they thought the animals were similar so they christened Cervus Canadensis as “elk”. Native Americans called the creatures wapiti. Now elk are known by the European name “Elk” in America and the American name “wapiti” in Eurasia (so that they are not confused with moose which are still called elk). Ugh!
The current range of elki/wapiti (dark green) versus the original range (pale green)
Elk currently live in the great grasslands of northern China/Siberia and in the unpopulated western reaches of the United States and Canada (where they tend to be found in places like Wyoming and Colorado), however their range was once much more extensive. Before development and farming became universal, elk could be found in South China and in the Eastern United States. Kentucky has been experimenting with returning the great Elk herds to lands where they once last roamed wild before the Civil War. Obviously nobody wants to abandon farmlands or private forests to the ungentle hooves of a giant deer-monster, but Kentucky was extensively and abusively strip mined. The mountains were blasted down and great tracts of worthless wasteland was left. Far-sighted conservationists imported elk from out west, and the animals flourished tremendously. In less than two decades the Kentucky herds have become the largest in the nation outside of the world’s largest herd in Wyoming!
The elk have brought tourism and national interest to their new (old?) home but there have been problems too as elk refuse to jump out of the way of cars and angry drivers, refusing to yield the right-of-way, drive blithely into the immense creatures (to the benefit of neither party). The elk also damage cultivated trees and gardens. Yet issuing hunting permits in order to manage the herd has brought waves of hunters.
A votress of Artemis poses with a trophy elk. Have I mentioned how BIG elk are?
Additionally, the elk are beautiful–and were here before we were (well, probably… it’s a little hard to tell when humans came across Beringia, but we had to get there from Africa, whereas the elk started out there). Nearby states are also excited by the programs so Virginia, Ohio, and West Virginia may soon also have beautiful deer monsters of their own for the first time in centuries!
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