BRINICLE

Published by DEIA, Jan. 5, 2012




How many secrets holds our planet? What life processes are hidden in each and every corner of this small living greenhouse called Earth? On many occasions, and after noticing a shocking amazing episode of nature, I think that there must be countless of unique events taking place around us and for various reasons they remain unknown or far away from our knowledge.

Not long ago, a BBC team working on the documentary series FROZEN PLANET directed by David Attenborough, has managed to record a historical event in images, something absolutely fascinating. The challenge was to film for the first time a phenomenon that only occurs in very cold-water. The truth is that there is a moment in which a portion due to the cold-water freezes creating an ice wrap around it that freezes everything. That layer of ice slowly but steadily falls due to the density of salt until hitting the bottom of the sea, at which at that point the path continues along the surface freezing anything it touches including any form, whether it is alive or not, anything that crosses its path. This phenomenon, never before filmed, is known by the name of Brinicle. The recording took place on the island of Razorback taking advantage of its geographical position is more likely to form Brinicles, the team had to work very hard, because all this discovery forced them to repeat again and again dives without knowing if they have achieved what they were looking for. Finally, after long periods under water, they achieved what more they desired, images showing once again the countless treasures of our home, Earth, which holds the most fascinating life forms and the most amazing natural processes.

Healthy envy is what I call the feeling I have when imagining the adventure of this team of people who had the courage and boldness to embark on such a project when no one before had done it. What a treat to experience it in person!

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IRAGAN GUNE

Published in DEIA, Nov. 4, 2010


WHERE do we come from? Where do we go? Personally, I am more interested in the first one than the second. The future is still to decide and to become. I feel more attracted by the past because it is tangible, demonstrable. Our history is a succession of success and errors, of calmness and tempests that work in a cyclic way. But there is something in the past that impassions me. Where do we place the beginning of life? And who were their true main characters? Little by little, one realizes that the answers to all these questions are right in front of us. Just as to every disease supposedly has its own cure, just the same, every mystery has its explanation if we know how to look for it well, in the most unsuspected corners of our own planet. In an article of the National Geographic discovered that the Geomicrobiology Lab of the department of Geoscience of the University of Pennsylvania, USA, Jenn Macalady, is analyzing the chemical compounds and the ways of life that populate the so-called Bahamas Blue Holes. They are submarine caves in the Bahamas that simulate what could have been the land before the invasion of oxygen. It is believed that life on earth began 4 billion years ago and only 2.5 billion years that oxygen appeared on the planet. During the next 1.5 billion years the life on earth was based in lathe beings that were ignorant of the use of the oxygen as a source of energy itself. Because of conditions, these Blue Holes are the perfect ecosystem to study how life could have existed without oxygen and to solve many doubts of the beginnings. But it also opens a wide door to possible explanations to assume that the absence of oxygen does not limit the existence of life for us, not even in each and every one of the million planets that exist in the universe. At the end studying the past we create our future. What's magical of all this is carrying out an investigation over something we do not know, because it brings us closer to the true mystery, which is at the end what we feel attracted to, to the unknown.


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