I have a sense of foreboding about the unabated BP gas and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The sugar-sand beaches at risk, from Pensacola east and south on Florida's gulf coast, are among the most beautiful beaches in the world.
If this disaster continues, what can my children expect to see when they go to the Redneck Riviera on their college spring break? Instead of coping with red tide, will they be forced to swim between bobbing tar balls, the shallow gulf waters devoid of life?
My thoughts turn darker: is man reversing in his short tenure on earth what took hundreds of millions of years of natural improvisation to bring to life in the seas and oceans?
Stromatolites are the first building blocks of earthly life, the single-celled organisms (see the picture) that can be found fossilized in ancient mud. You are looking at a life form billions of years old. And the key constituent ingredient making such life possible is oxygen.
Until these cyanobacteria were producing oxygen on their own through the very first photosynthesis--thereby promoting further experimentation with life--carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane and other gases unfriendly to life predominated in the atmosphere.
What the latest evidence says about the spill is that oxygen could be the first casualty. If oil and gas globules are deeply submerged and suspended in ten-mile-long blobs, how could marine life not be at threat of asphyxiation?
We simply don't know yet what the outcome is.
No comments:
Post a Comment