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Coral reefs, deep gardens, and rolling rocks

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  A purple rhodolith from Fiji. Three ways to build a reef Check out this knobbly pinkish lump about the size of a golf ball, and another one over here about the size of my fist. It feels like a rock and looks like one. But it is alive. It has been growing, very slowly, for decades or even centuries, and while you were holding it, you may have disturbed a dozen small animals living in its cracks and tunnels. You picked up a rhodolith, and if you really found one on a beach, you would probably not even notice it. Some of the most important habitats in the ocean are built by organisms that turn seawater into stone. They pull calcium and carbonate from the water, lay down a hard skeleton, and leave behind structures that other organisms use for feeding, hiding, and raising young. These are ecosystem engineers that build reefs. A reef: a bright, shallow tropical coral reef full of fish. Familiar, but that is only one way to build a reef. Herein, I want to look at three: tropical coral ...
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Lake 223 and The Man Who Made Acid Rain

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Schindler in arm cast (from a float plane accident)  David Schindler grew up in a small town in Minnesota, in the Red River Valley. His father farmed potatoes and sunflowers. His mother taught music. It was the kind of upbringing where you fixed things yourself, or they stayed broken, and Schindler later credited that farm logic with allowing him confidence in tinkering, in taking things apart to understand how they worked. Minnesota is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, ancient Precambrian rock that is the core of North America. Lakes are everywhere up here. In High School, he took a month-long fishing trip into northwestern Ontario, into the boreal lakes cut from the Precambrian rock. Something about the place must have resonated with him. In college, Professor Gabriel Comita gave him his first real research opportunity, studying lake food web energetics, and that was enough. He was off.  In 1962, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford. He began working under Nikola...
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