Unintended Consequences

I recently saw an article about wildfires in Oregon, which are much worse than they would have been naturally because of the conscientious efforts to prevent forest fires in past decades. (Remember Smoky the Bear?) Without human interference, forests burn frequently enough to clear out underbrush and make room for new growth. Without periodic fires, the underbrush keeps accumulating to build up a copious supply of fuel, so when fire does eventually break out, it's disastrous.

That phenomenon is only one example of how human good intentions in manipulating the natural order can generate unforeseen negative consequences. Back when wolves were considered dangerous pests that ravaged livestock and attacked people, wolf packs were systematically eliminated in the U.S. More recently, they've been restored to their old habitats, thus repairing (many researchers believe) damage done by their removal. There's a theory that reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park, through predatory pressure on elk, allows the growth of certain trees (whose young shoots and saplings elk graze on) that beavers need to thrive:

Wolf Reintroduction

Everybody knows about the rabbit overpopulation in Australia, where introducing bunnies as a food source for colonists seemed like a good idea at the time.

Proper hygiene to eliminate disease-causing germs has saved millions of lives. Yet it's recently become known that a too-clean environment in infancy and early childhood makes children more likely to suffer allergies, asthma, etc. in later life. Apparently a little dirt is good for kids! Doctors used to recommend postponing introduction of potentially allergenic foods such as peanuts and wheat until well after the first year of life. On the contrary, new studies suggest that early exposure to such substances actually reduces the risk of becoming allergic later. The same principle seems to apply to pets; it's nice to know for sure that a lifetime surrounded by cats hasn't harmed our offspring.

Many decades ago, some doctors recommended that pregnant women take up smoking to lose weight! In the early twentieth century, feeding babies formula from bottles was the modern, "scientific" thing to do. My first obstetrician, an elderly man in the mid-1960s, must have been trained when this attitude prevailed, for he actually tried to discourage me from breastfeeding. (We moved to a different state in the middle of that pregnancy, and I'm glad I stuck to my plan even though nursing instead of bottle-feeding was still rather rare then.)

In the American Southwest, goodness knows how many millions of gallons of water are poured onto lawns to make people's yards resemble eighteenth-century English gardens, rather than cultivating plants native to the climates and ecosystems of those regions.

To paraphrase an old TV commercial, it's not nice to mess with Mother Nature—or, at least, we should investigate all possible angles before we do. Something to keep in mind when we eventually colonize other planets.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Microworlds

Imagine pores in a human skin. If you wish, imagine blackheads in pores in human skin. Now imagine each dark pore is teeming with life forms, and each one contains a slightly different and isolated ecosystem.

You'd have a one disgusting world, wouldn't you?  Or myriad disgusting microworlds.

There is a similar phenomenon in the world's glaciers, and there is a 3-page, illustrated story about it in this month's DISCOVER magazine. The authors of that article mention man-made global warming, and say that the cryoconite phenomenon is exacerbating the melting of the glaciers.

As I read about the sticky airborne bacteria flying through the air, gathering up dark dust and fragments of salts and minerals and black waterbears, then landing on glacial ice and absorbing sunlight into the dark matter and thus melting tiny holes the ice like road salt does on iced roads, I thought of all the recent volcanic activity.

I don't think the article mentioned volcanic ash, but the focus was on how the tiny dark pools form, and how ecosystems are created and fed by sunlight and photosynthesis, and how the dark dust sinks to the bottom, attracting warmth and sunlight, and increasing in size, and life thrives and evolves.

Volcanoes seemed more likely to me, especially since there was Eyjafjallojokull in 2010 (which shut down most of the European airports for several days) and then the biggest series of Icelandic volcanic eruptions in centuries through 2014, and more in 2015.  One can find a list of which volcanoes are currently erupting here: http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/erupting_volcanoes.html and more about volcanoes here: http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/news.html 

How can one talk about dark dust on glaciers and not talk about volcanoes?

So, I googled "volcanoes + cryoconite", and sure enough, someone--Patrick R Dugan PhD-- has written an excellent and highly informative book about the effect of volcanoes on "climate change" and on glaciers.

https://books.google.com/books?id=RF5HAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=Volcanic+ash+%2B+cryoconite&source=bl&ots=wJ2yhXaGn0&sig=mZUKgch1Viq0UGjdrkpIJRF5U2Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvu9ew3dnMAhWMWSwKHb5WBNUQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Volcanic%20ash%20%2B%20cryoconite&f=false

With my copyright activist hat on for a moment, I have to express my astonishment that Google displays over 40 consecutive pages of a 64 page book that is in copyright and for sale on Amazon. How that is an insignificant snippet of the work that cannot affect sales... is beyond my comprehension.

As one might expect, volcanoes throw up an uncommon mixture of minerals, salts, fragments of rock,  ash, dust, and no doubt bits of whatever happened to be living on the top or side of the mountain before it erupted. That explains the waterbears in the air!

As a writer of alien romances, I imagine alien worlds from time to time, and --forgive me if I've mentioned it previously-- I like the idea of multiple ecosystems developing in parallel, and in otherwise hostile surroundings.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry