by Guy Murchie
The life of lakes is not basically very different from that of rivers, for lakes obviously are related to them, often on the mother's side, as when the overflow of a gravid pond gives birth to an infant stream. The scientific study of lakes is called limnology (from the Greek limne for pool) and one of its best established findings is that, compared to rivers, mountains and most of the seemingly long-lived features of the landscape, lakes are notoriously short-lived. Indeed almost all the natural lakes now on Earth were born around the end of the last major ice age (say 10,000 years ago) when glacial lobes that had scoured out basins (sometimes damming them with moraines) melted to flush them brimful with clear, cold water. Thus if rivers are often the offspring of lakes, lakes are more often the offspring of glaciers. And lakes that, from my spacial perspective, are essentially only the splash of a retreating ice age must expect to dry up and die within a few millenniums, depending of course on the size of the body and its rate of metabolism, which specifically is the net flux between its intake on the one hand and its discharge (including evaporation) on the other.
This expectation turns out to have been well founded, for limnologists' records prove that the average lake steadily matures from a cold, deep, clear, liquid, virgin body into a warm, shallow, soupy, degenerate one as fermenting vegetation and rotting animal matter gradually corrupt and fill it, layer upon layer, eventually curdling the whole organism into a bog before it clots into hard peat, then dry land and perhaps finally a town. This brewing or ripening process also involves a progression of vegetables from algae, sphagnum moss, waterweeds, reeds and willows to birches, evergreens, planes and other woodland and urban species, and a succession of animals from trout to perch, bass, carp, ducks and water bugs, followed by mudminnows, frogs, turtles, herons, snakes, beavers and eventually the likes of foxes, deer, wildcats, house cats, goldfish, canaries and pet poodles. Even the five Great Lakes of North America, collectively the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth (the only bigger "lake" being the brackish Caspian Sea), are dying at an alarming rate that has recently accelerated because of thoughtless pollution, particularly in shallow Lake Erie. And the story is similar in Europe, a noteworthy example being Lake Zurich in Switzerland, which has quietly aged from youth to senility in a century.
SEMILIQUID BODIES
Of course there are all sorts of other liquid and part-liquid relatives of rivers and lakes, like salt marshes and estuaries, which not only have their superorganized life but grow myriads of animal and vegetable constituents in their rich gardens that are home to nearly every kind of creature from bat-winged sea slugs to great blue herons. Some of these semiliquid bodies have a kind of mercurial impetuosity that is undeniably close to the quick of life, a phrase that may bring to mind the infamous quicksand, whose legendary predacity, however, stems from nothing more perilous than the fact that, while it looks solid, it is in effect a liquid since its grains are immersed in water which coats and separates them to the degree that they are in suspension and, though you cannot walk on quicksand, if you can keep your head you may float in it and even (to the extent that it is liquid) swim.
Far more dangerous than quicksand, albeit in a different way, is the rarer quick clay, a bluish-gray, water-soaked glacial deposit that can suddenly "melt" from a solid into a fast-flowing liquid that is known to have perpetrated a number of deadly landslides in Scandinavia and eastern Canada. A recent case was in Nicolet, Quebec, where at 11:40 A.M., November 12, 1955, a section of the town as big as four football fields and 30 feet thick suddenly started to slump downhill and in less than seven minutes had flowed into a river, carrying with it many buildings and crushing or drowning several people who could not reach solid ground. Worse still was the quick clay gush in Verdal, Norway, in 1893, which liquefied three and a half square miles of the town in ten minutes, killing 120.
This kind of phenomenon, that one might be tempted to call "the swallower," has a truly weird and abstract body: a kind of epicene anatomy that typically assumes the dumbbell shape of an ameba procreating into two offspring cells, one of them negative (losing material), the other positive (gaining material). The negative cell of course occupies the uphill side or mouth of the landslide and ungrows (negatively) as the clay is engorged out of it to slide down through the throat into the positive cell or belly below, where it spreads and grows (positively) into a bloated morass.
Examined under the microscope, clay is seen to be composed of crystalline silicate flakes (page 95) which, in the case of quick clay, are smaller than two microns in diameter and saturated with water. When such stuff was deposited on the ocean floor many millenniurns ago, of course the water in it was salty but, after the diastrophic forces toilsomely heaved it up above sea level, centuries of rains leached away most of the salt. And because the salt ions had served as an "electrolytic glue" binding the clay flakes together, their absence unlocked the flakes again so that, except when they were unusually dry, almost any physical provocation (like an earthquake tremor or a sonic boom) might collapse them like a house of cards, letting them melt or slip past one another in parallel paths.
Thus the evidence shows that the monster of quick clay is naturally and normally triggered by shock. In one actual case, a slide was started by the bumping of railroad cars, in another by a pile driver, in another by a stroke of lightning. As one investigator explained it, saturated clay behaves singularly like a gel (such as iron hydroxide), which, when jarred, melts and runs away even down an almost imperceptible 1° slope. (There is also a natural phenomenon called quick asbestos, known to almost no one outside of the mountain town of Coalinga, California, where there have been several remarkable slides in recent years, some a mile long, whose substance was pale, pasty, rain-drenched shale with a main ingredient assayed to be shortfiber asbestos.)
And far more important, if very difficult to observe, are the giant "turbidity currents" under the oceans, which seem to be propelled by submerged avalanches in which clay in suspension has been known to flow at an average speed of 14 mph along a flat undersea valley of less than 1° slope for hundreds of miles. One notable quick clay illapse in 1929, provoked by an earthquake three miles deep and almost 200 miles south of Newfoundland, swept such tremendous masses of this material for perhaps a thousand miles under the Atlantic that twelve transoceanic cables in its path were stretched and broken, one after the other, from north to south.
When a flow approaches this magnitude, almost inevitably a meander effect begins to manifest itself that is obviously akin to the kind we described in rivers on land. And, I'm told, the Gulf Stream, like other great "rivers" of the ocean, meanders (with its own bias toward coastal and Coriolis influences) on a measured average wavelength of 60 miles and amplitude (width) of 9 miles. For that matter, one could consider all sorts of entities such as waterfalls, whirlpools, rapids, swamps and bayous as metabolizing organisms distinct from rivers, lakes or oceans. And the list might include even dripping stalagmites and stalactites in caves, the caves themselves, watersheds, canyons, puffs of smoke and rainbows, any and all of which are growing, developing and interrelated systems of life on Earth.
LIFE IN STORMS
Of course the atmosphere has its own cycles and meanders: dramatically evident in the globe-circling jet streams of westerly winds that snake around our world at hundreds of miles an hour eight miles above the temperate zones in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The momentum that engenders such aeolian life is fed into these vital flows by the tireless turbulence of the lower air familiar in the irregular eddies of low pressure we see on weather maps and photos from space as storm systems perpetually pirouetting a few thousand miles apart around the middle latitudes. And there are even more vital, if rarer, vortexes known as hurricanes and typhoons, with girls' names and violent dispositions, spawned over the tropical seas -great cyclonic cells hundreds of miles in diameter that mesh like giant gears with lesser parasitic storms, including thunderstorms, roughly five miles in diameter, which have been observed to
grow, move, roll, fuse, multiply and sometimes die, much like certain species of bacteria. Parent thunder cells indeed sprout buds from time to time, which later (appropriately) spring off as offspring stormiets, grumblingly foliating into adolescence a league distant, where they repeat the life cycle needed to proliferate their way across continents and seas, generation upon generation of them in the kind of amebic immortality that collectively comprises the five thousand thunder cells meteorologists estimate are prowling the skies of Earth on every average day. And they even excrete little hyperparasitic organisms like tornadoes, waterspouts, williwaws and dust devils that occasionally spin out quite respectable careers of their own.
As all these breeds of gaseous organisms inhabit our modest jot of Earth, no one should be very surprised if something comparable turned up on the million-times-bigger sun, who is gaseous not just in his fiery outer atmosphere but composed all the way through of very hot gases like hydrogen and helium in the disintegrated, ionized state known as plasma. And, sure enough, a continuous fluid system, proportioned rather like the double jet streams of Earth, has been found on this parental star of ours. Its first discovered features were dark hurricanes a hundred times bigger than earthly ones but relatively the same in comparison to the larger body, and these whirling storms, better known as sunspots, turn out to be but eddies in tremendous, invisible magnetic rivers (which scientists call magnetohydrodynamic waves) flowing in twisted doughnut courses all the way around the sun, corkscrewing down and up like the probing roots of some scarce-conceivable celestial tree, yet mysteriously guided by the multiple solar moments of force. The volatile solar supersphere, reeling imperiously through space, naturally could not be expected to turn uniformly, and it has actually been measured to spin about a third faster at the equator than the poles, not to mention its even swifter spin at deeper levels, producing thus an extradimensional circulation system that is far more complex than our terrestrial one yet comfortingly similar to both our Gulf Stream and jet stream anatomies in its staggered zigzags - that zig three times as far as they zag, taking only eight meander wavelengths to complete the global circuit, writhing with a tenacious limp that somehow articulates a flamboyant, empyreal life no mere human can deny.
All in all, I'd surmise the blazing sun is at least as much a living organism as is a volvox or any other spherical creature in the waters of Earth, for the total sun includes them all and a lot more. His spots also may correspond to embryos of future generations after his presumed eventual explosion, for he has a complex metabolizing body. And I assume he must even have a kind of consciousness through the bulk, momentum and interrelations of his moiling gases and his orbiting fertile planets which give him what amount to a memory and, for all I know, a mega-soul.
FIRES
If you think that fire is the deadly enemy of life and that the sun, whose coolest spots have been measured at about 10,000°F., therefore could not possibly harbor any sort of life, perhaps you should consider the modern science of combustion. Using high-speed photography it has discovered that, when a flame is born, it can grow in less than a thousandth of a second all the way from a microscopic seed spark to a cell mature enough to sprout offspring cells around its edges. Full grown, fire turns into a complex, surging fluid that proliferates in turbulent, bubblelike shapes. Its corporeal metabolism is swifter than that of any known animal as it devours and digests all combustibles within reach, inhaling oxygen and exhaling smoke, running with the wind while casting its seeds before it: glowing spores which may at any instant germinate and blossom forth into lineal flames.
Fire ecology, the study of fire's impact on the rest of nature, is an even more rapidly growing branch of learning. Ecologists now know that prairie and forest fires, the natural conflagrations kindled by lightning in times of drought, have been raging almost every year since there was dry land to support grass and trees. To them wildfire is a phenomenon well established as a factor in evolution, indeed probably a vital means of enriching the forest and ennobling the earth, without which the giant sequoias of California could not exist in their present stature, if at all, and many other types of vegetation as well as birds, mammals and lesser creatures would have become extinct eons ago.
I am not saying that forest fires are not often very dangerous, indeed extremely destructive, or that one should be indifferent to them, but I notice that when fire breaks loose in fields or woods it is much like an outbreak of lions from a circus. An alarm is sounded and dozens of trained men rush to the spot to round up the wild beasts who have been making the most of their rare chance for freedom. Fire, however, does not necessarily ride roughshod over everything it encounters. For normally it is quite selective, more like a herd of cattle grazing or a gang of peasants pruning a vineyard. I mean it is alive in the sense that it metabolizes and finds its own sustenance. And the phrase "feeding the fire" is curiously apt, because feeding, like breathing, is a combustive, oxidizing process not basically different from burning, though rather too slow to give off flames or visible smoke. Even when it goes roaring ravenously across parched California brushland apparently out of control, a fire will retain its finicky appetite and stop almost dead at an oasis of lush greenery or a forest of hard-barked trees, damped down to a creeping pace for lack of dry provender. And from here, to the surprise of many an observer, the still-burning fire, while charring the trees, may not only fail to kill them but will likely help them (the stronger ones at least) by pruning away most of the competing saplings around them, not to mention diseased branches, gnawing insects and the heavy blanket of duff upon the forest floor. And chemical analysis has recently revealed that, even where it kills, fire recycles many nutrients from burned trunks into the soil, thus preparing the land for new plant and animal growth.
Study of the rings of thousands of old trees in California has also shown that forest fires have burned virtually all of them severely enough to leave permanent scars inside the bark on the average once every seven or eight years. When visible, these common scars are known as cat faces in the northern areas because they are black patches that normally start with a "chin" on the ground and end in pointed "ears" several feet up the trunk. Only rarely are even the biggest of them deep enough to kill, for it has been found that as much as 95 percent of a tree above ground can be burned without its dying if only the surviving part includes enough connected cambium cells. However, almost any fire is likely to interrupt what ecologists call plant succession (page 66), in this case a natural progression from sunloving trees (such as pines) in a new, dry, open forest to other evergreens (including sequoias) a decade or two later, then trees better adapted to shade and moisture and, after a century, nothing but trees (like cedars and hemlocks) that thrive and reseed themselves in the deep shade of the climax forest.
Such a succession, even if undisturbed, may take several centuries to attain its climax as each new invading species gradually crowds out its predecessors, insidiously outgerminating and outgrowing them through subtle adaptations to the increasing shade. But disturbances in the forest are just as much a part of nature as is succession and they naturally include incursions by fire, weather, bugs, fungus and, increasingly often, man. So if fire gives big pines, firs, sequoias and their parasites a helping hand at the expense of cedars, hemlocks and certain diseases, it has to that degree become a positive element in the life of these fire-favored trees (just as it has become a correspondingly negative element in the fire-retarded cedars and hemlocks), and this is not to imply that its effect is merely abstract since (to cite one case) the seed of the immemorial sequoia - surely not by chance alone - germinates better in ashes than in unburnt duff. The timing of a fire is also critical, particularly in determining whether it will be more helpful to the forest or the field, for foresters have noted that a fire just after a rainy spell favors woodlands while a fire at any other time almost always favors the grasslands.
Among plants most stimulated by burning, there is the ubiquitous flame-colored fireweed sprouting quixoti
cally out of soot, and several pines such as the knobcone and lodgepole species of the Rocky Mountains. There is also the jack pine, a veritable fire tree whose natural home is burnt-over woodland in the Great Lakes region and whose cones, after reposing tightly closed for a decade or a century, will spring open (triggered by scorching heat) within seconds of a fire, tossing their seeds to the hot updrafts, which quickly cool off enough to sow them downwind upon the hospitably warm bed of ashes from which all competitors have just been eliminated. I will add to this only that I have seen a forester's report which began by describing a typical Minnesota wilderness with an average of six jack pines per acre at the time it was consumed by fire, and ended with a plant census the following year, estimating 15,000 jack pine seedlings per acre already arisen phoenix-like out of the ashes.
