Anyone want to illustrate "Biology Comix"? Line drawings or watercolors give one more scope but photoshopped photos would do.
Cloud Story
The sea surface is full of micro-organisms—single celled bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, viruses. One dives through them into the sea. The photosynthesizing plankton, the algae and cyanobacteria, are the grasses of the sea.
The turning earth generates winds.
The winds blow up waves and generate currents.
The photosynthesizing micro-organisms of the planckton, the basis of the ocean’s food chain, are fed by nutrients coming from below, pushed up by storms, transported by currents.
Bubbles slide up the surface of the waves, concentrating the plankton and a chemical they secrete, dimethyl sulfide (DMS).
As the waves break, the bubbles burst and the plankton and DMS escape the water’s grip and are swept up into the atmosphere.
The wind carries them further and further aloft.
High in the atmosphere, water starts to condense about the molecules of DMS.
Clouds form.
The airborne plankton live in the clouds, on organic acids and alcohols and on sulfur and nitrogen compounds. Some of this material comes from the smokestacks of power plants and the tailpipes of cars, and some from passing ships, but much of it is natural.
Micro-organisms are abundant in clouds. They divide and reproduce and live happily there.
The clouds float over the earth, reflecting the sun during the day (and cooling the earth), keeping the warmth in at night (making the earth warmer). No one knows the overall effect of clouds but it is thought they cool the earth. Without clouds, temperatures would be more extreme.
When the micro-organisms are tired of living in the clouds, they secrete proteins that make ice form around them.
Then they fall from the clouds as pellets of ice, perhaps melting as they pass through a warmer layer of air, and falling to earth as rain; or refreezing to fall as snow, on the sea, a lake, or the land below.
Then they begin life in their new environment. Thus these micro-organisms constantly recolonize the earth.
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(This in lieu of drawings for the comics)
ReplyDeleteBorges quotes Shakes: "Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish".
I'll go on to quote from "The Book of Imaginary Beings", chapter on The Eastern Dragon:
The Sea Dragon Kings live in resplendent underwater palaces and feed on opals and pearls. Of these Kings there are five: the chief is in the middle, the other four correspond to the cardinal points. Each stretches some three or four miles in length; on changing position, they cause mountains to tumble... Their breath boils up and roasts whole shoals of fishes. When these Sea Dragons rise to the ocean surface, they cause whirlpools and typhoons; when they take to the air they blow up storms that rip the roofs of the houses of entire cities and flood the countryside. The Dragon Kings are immortal and can communicate among themselves, without recourse to words, in spite of any distance that separates them.