Mar 6, 2010

Bloody Mary


Continuing on the "global birth pains" theme:

Antarctic Glacier Has Five-story Blood-red Waterfall of Primordial Ooze
Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of "primordial ooze." The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.
via Good Blog

3 comments:

David Stewart said...

Nice association Michael - a little disturbing maybe - but in lite of your recent posts it certainly resonates.
Jeremiah 4:31 "A voice has come to my ears like the voice of a woman in birth-pains, the pain of one giving birth to her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, fighting for breath, stretching out her hands, saying, Now sorrow is mine! for my strength is gone from me before the takers of life."
Might that relate to the "ego-death" you wrote about?

Michael said...

Hi David, that's exactly what I thought: disturbing but meaningful.

The Jeremiah verse is fascinating, thanks for that. I'll go dive into Jeremiah in my personal bible study, in a way the anguish of Jeremiah echoes my own, witnessing the ruin of my people.

Esperanto Grrl said...

The blood falls are some absolutely incredible stuff, and reading about it has blown my mind.

Check out my blog post on the Blood Falls.

Sufficed to say, when you call it a sign of a pained world you're absolutely right beyond even the startling image and the metaphor. Studying anoxic environments like this can give us greater understanding of some of the greater man-made oceanic disasters, like oxygen-suffocated oceanic "dead zones."

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