by Guy Murchie
Whether carried by water, air, ice, avalanche or bulldozer, most sand eventually comes to rest on the ocean bottom in vast beds (sometimes a mile thick off a river mouth), where it "sleeps" for eons, gradually consolidating or "pupating" like a spent caterpillar into sandstone or gneiss, which may still be roused, hundreds of millions of years later, metamorphosed like a new butterfly, in the diastrophic upgrowth of young mountains. In this way it achieves a kind of rebirth with crystal "wings" and the prospect of eroding into sharp fresh sand to start flitting seaward on wind or stream all over again, an almost unimaginably slow cycle of reincarnation, which nevertheless has been deduced to occur naturally perhaps many times in the strange, immortal life of most minerals, not the least of them common sand.
And besides this outer existence of the mineral it also lives within like other creatures of Earth to some degree, if more slowly - in its own way feeding, growing, healing its wounds, even procreating off-spring! As you may have guessed, it is the crystal structure of the solid mineral that gives it these attributes of life, the essence of a crystal being the steadfast equilibrium of its lattice skeleton. In fact the crystal is so constructed that it always tends to maintain itself in stable balance, automatically restoring its shape whenever it is forced a little out of line in any direction. In effect it "wants" to hold onto the exact anatomy it has got - and maybe annex more of the same sort of structure if offered half a chance. That is why a string left hanging in a bowl of sugar water overnight will assemble rock candy around it. Once the sugar molecules start crystallizing into solid form, the crystal is predisposed to continue accepting these moving molecules from the surrounding liquid and fitting and locking them to its solid body. One might say it is a mineral version of drinking soup.
It is also a healing process because any hole or scratch on the crystal soon gets filled with the same kind of molecules that compose the rest of its body.
And it is a reproductive system as well because the molecules that construct the layers of growth, if they are to be accepted at all, have no alternative but to attach themselves at exactly the correct angles for whatever the substance is: 90° in the case of salt or sulfur, 60° in snow or quartz, odder angles in odd crystals like axinite or rhodonite. It could even be called a rudimentary genetic process because the crystal lattices themselves serve as "genes" in admitting only one specific kind of molecule to fasten and grow upon them. Very probably it was life's first and simplest reproductive technique on Earth (page 448). And it has evolved dozens of different (apparently organic) forms such as the pealike clusters of bauxite crystal, the hairy ones of asbestos, the sea-urchin-shaped radial globes of wavellite, the "asparagus sprouts" of limonite, the foliated nuggets of copper, the nervelike branches of psilomelane and the serrate leaves of muscovite - all of them crystal species with growth habits that dramatically reveal their kinship with the rest of life.
The fact that very hard stones called whewellite (found in coal beds), weddellite (discovered in Antarctica) and struvite (magnesium ammonium phosphate hexahydrate) all commonly grow from "seeds" in human kidneys and bladders, building themselves up layer by layer like their crystal counterparts outside, is just further evidence that rocks can be a very intimate part of life - even your life. And viruses exemplify this even more, being present in virtually all organisms from bacteria to whales and now proven to be inert crystals when dormant yet, when the right amounts of moisture and warmth awaken them from their stony slumber, they spring eagerly to life, invade other beings, reproduce themselves and evidently feel utterly at home in each and all the kingdoms.
If viruses then are animal-vegetable-minerals, combining attributes from the three most accepted kingdoms, the same can be said of soil - indeed of Earth herself and presumably of other planets. In support of this, a random ounce of fertile soil has been found to contain about 1 million algae, 30 million protozoa, 50 million fungi and 150 million bacteria, some of whose spores invariably will survive being dried up for years, doused with poison, frozen solid or boiled for an hour. And life's capacity for natural recovery from an atomic holocaust was demonstrated in 1964 when scientists waded ashore on the remains of Namu, a coral isle of the Bikini atoll whose entire top had been blown off by an H-bomb in 1956, and found it covered with sedge, beach magnolia, morning-glory vines and the white-blossomed messerschmidia tree with many kinds of birds flying gaily about, singing and raising their young, insects buzzing and burrowing, fish swarming in the lagoons...
If we add to the three familiar kingdoms of animal, vegetable and mineral the celestial kingdom of hot plasma, our resulting four-kingdom animal-vegetable-mineral-plasma relatives will obviously include the blazing suns that spawn the planets, more distant cousin stars and, by extrapolation, all the galaxies and supergalaxies to the farthest reaches of the universe. Every star, by this reasoning, should be at least as alive as a rock or a grain of sand. And Earth we are part of, all the more so. In fact, as I look at her I cannot but think of the uncountable influences that live and diffuse and sweep across her cloud-churned skin - forces subtle and swift that, in essence, may not be so very different from germs on an apple. When you see an apple rotting on a shelf over a period of a few days, the wave of brownness that creeps over it is quite literally a tide of bacterial generations advancing across its latitude and longitude like a population explosion upon a planet, only a million times faster - giving you a rather startling realization of the potency of demographic forces even after making allowance for the bacteria's capacity to evolve as much in a day as man does in a millennium, which, more than coincidentally, is the approximate frequency of each gyration of genes throughout mankind.
THE LIVING EARTH
The earth thus rolls through invisible space in hushed but potent ferment - a something embedded in nothing - a sphere that is a spore upon which the mysterious excrescence of life suffuses and smolders inexorably, kingdom after kingdom welling out of the void - lonely atoms proliferating into gases that condense into dust from which rocks are cooked and crystallized and their juices pooled into oceans that brew microbes that sprout weeds that mutate and thicken into trees that build islands that spawn and nourish animals that evolve mind and spirit, including the curious new mammal man who rather incredibly (if not mystically) emanated from trees and fields and was sown like seed over primordial Africa and Asia and blown across the Pacific by the willful typhoon in countless unplanned one-way voyages followed by treks that eventually implanted him upon every continent.
Naturally we cannot expect too much of man yet, for he is still so young and new here. Indeed he has barely begun to waken to his own existence within the planetary organism. His halting and largely unnoticed attempt to recognize himself - something no other creature on Earth has ever been known even to undertake - may, if it succeeds, become the miracle of the millennium. Looking back into the microcosm, if a germ cannot be presumed aware of the living state of the body it dwells in, how can man's somewhat similarly circumscribed view afford him much more comprehension of the total aliveness of his planet today? Yet a beginning of sorts seems every now and then very casually, if not inadvertently, to be made. I remember a day in 1936, for example, when I was piloting a small airplane over Illinois and inexplicably caught something I like to think may have been a glimpse of Earth's super-animus. I noticed a country road far below me, along which a car was moving intermittently. I guessed right away that the driver must be a rural mailman on his delivery route, for he was stopping at every mailbox. And then it struck me that his tempo and function were curiously like those of a bee visiting flowers beside a garden path, the only obvious difference being that the man's stops were hundreds of times farther apart in space and time. A few miles and minutes later I saw bug-sized people bustling to and fro in the street of a town, now stopping to confront one another, now moving onward. To me they might as well have been ants. Naturally I could not hear their words or see their nods or glances or passing fancies - but neither would I have detected conve
rsation between real ants, who often seem to spend just as much time at it - "ant time" that is, which presumably flows faster (page 21).
So who can deny that any creatures from viruses to whales are part of the body of their planet? And who can fail to recognize terrestrial traffic circulation on any scale or tempo as a real symptom of the living pulse of the flowering superorganism Earth? For there are wave effects between vehicles on a crowded superhighway that nicely express the metabolic rhythm of Earth's outer body - like the car I heard about that stopped suddenly in the left lane of heavy one-way, four-lane traffic, causing a screeching blockage of hundreds of others behind it before it turned into the next lane to the right, followed by another jam. Thus in a series of jerks, it worked its way across all four lanes until finally it disappeared up an exit ramp. But thirty-five minutes later, according to a traffic engineer's report, the waves of congestion the car had created were still visible to a helicopter hovering a mile overhead.
But even the ancients appear to have understood that planets are alive and besouled. Indeed that premise probably founded the venerable science of astrology and was surely a motivating factor in Kepler's propitious search for the laws of planetary motion. Why then should we find the idea of an actual organism of celestial magnitude so unthinkable? After all, we learned from the likes of Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur that there is an unsuspected, unseen world of living creatures in a drop of seawater, in a drop of rain, of blood, of saliva. Why could not some genius of an astrobiologist one day discover an equally unexpected form of life in the Milky Way? The obvious similarity between telescopes and microscopes testifies to the essential symmetry of the greater and lesser worlds. If they also turn out to be homogeneous why shouldn't an astral variant of the conditioned reflex be found a factor in the triggering of an exploding star?
With this thought in mind, it is most enlightening to scrutinize Earth as we see her from out here: an organism (specifically a superorganism) basking in the nourishing environs of her paternal star, the sun. The nourishment of course comes in the form of heat, light and other radiation streaming continuously out of the sun along with actual atoms and molecules in what is called the solar wind. And, like smaller creatures, the earth literally stirs in her "sleep," the while quietly breathing in her vegetal way, her skin slowly wrinkling, her sore spots volcanically breaking out but almost as quickly healihg over again, her magma juices circulating, her lithic flesh, skin and breath metabolizing, her electromagnetic nerves flashing their increasingly vital messages. Intermittently she also rumbles with confined internal gases, utters earthquakes, itches a little, dreams strange dreams and (through her inhabitants) feels self-conscious.
At first glance one notices only obvious things like the swirls of clouds rolling around her plump form that floats upon the spangled shroud of space, the steady advance of the soft edge of night, the buff areas of great plains and deserts, the green of shallow seas deepening toward blue with the rise of tides. But when one remembers recent discoveries of science regarding continental drift and plate tectonics, one begins to realize that her continents are dynamically related, even if their motion is almost unimaginably slow, each land mass acting as a kind of terrestrial flipper with its leading edge ahead, its trailing edge behind, as it advances a few inches a year under the complex pressures of planetary circulation.
What goes on thousands of miles below the crust isn't easy to find out, but long-range measurements of seismic waves and a great deal of chemical and geological deduction have given scientists a fair idea of the flow patterns of magma between the inner core and the outer crust. The core is a ball of solid nickel-iron bigger than the moon immersed in a molten outer core, and there seems to be an oscillating transfer of spin between the two with the heavier material still slowly settling toward the center despite a very gradual weakening of gravity. But above the outer core and reaching all the way to the crust is what's known as the mantle. It contains five sixths of Earth's volume, two thirds of her mass, and is made of red-hot olivine laced with garnets and other rocks, which collectively churn and twist and turn, mainly clockwise north of the equator and counterclockwise south of it, including rising columns of the hottest material and settling regions of cooler stuff, irregularly pushing volcanic islands up out of the sea, wedging apart huge crustal plates 60 miles thick containing continents and seas, even splitting a few into groping fingers that drag whole mountain chains with them.
There are some pioneers in symmetry who theorize that the earth's magma flows in dynamic crystal patterns similar to those of the five Platonic solids, an idea said to be supported by the new science of cymatics that was instituted to explore the relations between fluids and vibrations. In any case, Earth's tectonic activity seems to have got going about two billion years ago when Earth's crust had become brittle enough to break into plates. No one knows what a world map would have looked like then, but careful study of the location of the oldest known rocks and their magnetic lineation offers solid clues to the direction and movement of the magnetic poles, suggesting that large sections of the crust have been drifting around more or less independently ever since - bunching together, however, every few hundred million years into what is known as a pangaea, a world supercontinent with huge mountain chains scuffed up at points of collision, leaving a superocean on the planet's other side, then separating again for perhaps another half billion years. In such a cyclic progression Earth's continents reached what geologists consider a maximum separation around 500 million B.C., then gravitated together about 250 million B. C., leaving a super-Pacific Ocean known as Panthalassa opposite the last great pangaea.
During this most recent eon of world collision the Appalachian mountains were shoved up when Africa rammed North America, but much of the resulting supercontinent was marshy and it was the age of giant reptiles, pines, tree ferns, palmlike cycads and ginkos. Then Pangaea slowly split apart for the last time (to date) when a huge north-south trench eased the Americas away from Africa and Europe and grew into the Atlantic Ocean. This redistribution of her drying land masses of course led to Earth's present configuration, as India and Australia broke away from Antarctica to drift northward, Madagascar left Africa and Arabia joined Asia. It also had a diversifying effect on evolution, as the separating lands with their animals and plants got isolated for long periods, especially in South America and Australia (which missed the invention of the placenta), where mammals, birds and flowers, evolving independently, created some of their most distinctive forms.
The various aspects of superorganism Earth are so involved it isn't feasible to describe them adequately here, but I can't forgo mentioning that her magma circulation with resulting continental drift and intermittent earthquakes have been enough to produce a measurable wobble in her rotation - which in turn alters her circulation, including its oceanic and atmospheric effects - and all such factors influence her magnetism and, external radiation belts. There is no clear consensus yet as to why Earth's magnetic field spontaneously but irregularly switches polarity from north to south on the average every four hundred thousand years, but (as the diagram shows) it has happened at least ten times in the last four million years and the same normal rate has continued for at least 72 million years before that.
Internally the field appears geared to the planet's axis of rotation with various overlapping lesser components that shift irregularly, yet have been measured to move westward at an average rate of more than a mile a month, so as to complete a full revolution about every 1600 years - suggesting that the Earth's moving core and mantle exert a force upon each other comparable to the armature and field coils of an electric motor. Her poles, both geographic and magnetic, have likewise been found to shift, in this case only a few inches a year but going back at least to 700 million B.C., when the north pole seems to have been in what is now Arizona, then probably a shallow area of some long-lost pre-Cambrian sea. Earth's magnetic changes also seem to affect her climate and life. The last major polarity reversal (700,000 years
ago) was accompanied by a copious tektite shower, many extinctions of sea creatures and an ice age. And the field's shape in outer space resembles the corona around a comet because the solar wind, a perpetual out-blast of ions and atoms streaming past Earth at 250 miles a second, blows the field away from the sun, giving the scarcely visible aura of the planet a blunt head on the day side and a long auroral tail on the night side, at the same time as a positive charge
(from excess friction) along the morning edge and negative charge (from reduced friction) along the evening edge, with lots of complex folds between - the whole great nimbus fluttering majestically across the sky, a medusan figure so alive that hydromagnetic waves a thousand miles long ripple through its plasma at thousands of miles a second.
As to Earth's overall organic nature, she is clearly a very fluid thing, not only in her internal (semisolid) and outer (gaseous and plasmic) circulations but, most significantly, in her surface (liquid) circulation. Indeed, as the wettest planet known, her oceans, lakes, rivers, glaciers and atmosphere contain somewhere around 300 million cubic miles of water, 300 cubic miles of which evaporate every day, enough to lower the world's sea level a tenth of an inch (were it not continuously replenished by river and rain), which means there is a complete cycle of water circulation through Earth's land, sea and sky every three millenniums. Other cycles of course circulate her energy, mostly in the form of angular momentum, radiation and heat, and there are cycles of such elements as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. The energy cycle of the biosphere naturally participates in the atmosphere and oceans, while its solid part diversifies into two main food chains: the grazing-browsing chain and the decay chain, both of which partake of the tenth of one percent of the energy Earth receives from the sun that is fixed in photosynthesis which is the chemical source of virtually all organic matter (H2960 01480 C1480 N16 P1.8 S) on the planet. As for how long it takes for all water on Earth to go through animal and vegetable cells, particularly through photosynthesis, it has been estimated at two million years. But oxygen that's not bound up in water is free to complete its cycle a thousand times faster: in two thousand years. And carbon dioxide faster still: 300 years, a period that is progressively decreasing as man's lungs, chimneys and exhausts keep pouring more of it forth every year.