Prisoner of a snowball earth

Once upon a time there lived a little fairy. Her name was Miranda. She was pretty and she loved to frolic in the warm ocean. She played in the aquamarine waters and rode the white foaming crests of high waves till she landed on snow white surfaces of golden sand. As she scanned the horizon she could see no one and nothing...just a wide stretch of paradise, blue skies and a lovely red Sun. Now we all know that fairies live forever. At least long enough for us to think in terms of 'forever'. And they never grow old. They live as pretty as a lark for as long as they want and then.... they dissapear...

Now, recently Miranda was having a bit of a trouble. Why! the sand was not warm enough these days and the water was cold..and getting colder each day. This worried her. She flew over the blue mountains and scanned the skies. um um..nothing that could be bothersome..except the nagging feeling inside her  that things were not quite the same and she had a premonition that it would get even worse. Amidst all this confusion came the cruel winter. And Miranda, as every year, went off to sleep in a little shell on the warm sand, where the ripples from the ocean once in a while rocked her cradle..and she slept on like a baby. The little shell folded itself around her. It would again open with the first hints of the summer Sun......

It was a few millions of years before Miranda woke again. And she woke startled..and cold. Shivering. Where was the sun, where was her shell..and what was this big ugly thing into which she was trapped. She flew to every wall. But it was not to be shattered. It was dark inside and probably dark outside too. Oh! where was her paradise? Who was the ugly grinch who took it away for her...and could she ever ..ever, find her way back to those golden shores she loved so much?

Scientists were excited to have finally 'discovered' a life form in a rock. They said that the rock formed on the ocean floor about two billion years back. This was unprecendented. The sensational news hit major newspaperooms across the globe. They did not yet know what it was or how it lived. But from what little they knew of life forms that old, it seemed that it used to live in tropical coastal waters. Much like that of the present day Caribbean. The 'thing' seemed to have somehow been trapped in the rock which was mostly a mixture of sand and mud. Scientists knew that this rock belonged to a time in history when the earth was covered in ice from pole to pole. Meaning that if a polar bear wanted it could trample all the way from the Arctic across Paris, New York, Capetown and over the Atlantic to have lunch with the penguins in Antarctica. Of course it had to walk pretty quick. But if it wanted it could. You see all the world's ocean at that time was covered in thick ice layers..so thick that  wrestlers and polar bears could easily jump on the icy layer without the fear of falling through it into the cold oceans beneath.

Now why did ice do such a thing ? After all now it seems to melt and freeze pretty regularly. Which is why you have glaciers in the winter that melt a little during the summer and grow back again in the winter. Why did it behave so weirdly back then?

Turns out that back in those days the sun was particularly feeble. Young and helpless in those early days when the solar system had just about formed. So the sunshine was not strong enough. But the adolescent earth was very energetic. It wobbled and weebled, flipped and flopped , tossed and turned...and while on its crazy behaviour it might have so happened that it cut itself off from the small heat of the Sun even temporarily (say for a few million years?). Ice crystals saw this oppertunity and slowly assembled to travel all the way from their home in the poles to the tropics. They thought they would warm themselves up a little. After all the Poles are not great places to live in. But Alas! as soon as the ice crystals made their way to the sandy, lovely tropics, they spread their cold so much..that the  ocean water, the lakes and all that was on the earth froze over. It was a white, dark, cold, hostile world. A world covered in ice. And because the ice was shiny it refelcted all the sunlight right back into the blue sky where there were no clouds to hold on to the heat and so it escaped unabated leaving behind the icy world.

Miranda couldn't get out of her tough prison. When she was quite tired of running around and crying in vain she fell asleep...again for a long long time. But the next time when she woke up, instead of fruitlessly beating on the walls she started to think. She saw that she was actually floating in ether...and it was full of transparent cells..much like the one she was in..and it had little things trapped inside them ..some even contained the golden sand like material ..maybe a just a little bit darker. Could it be dust..like the ones she saw in the dry summer season blowing out from the sandy sea, far inland? And it started to make sense..maybe the paradise had converted to ether..but if so..where did these sandy things come from? And where there places in the paradise which escaped the brutal ice invasion? or was there a source of these shiny, small things underneath this dark ether?

Scientists think that the end of the cold period lay in the fact that although the globe was frozen on its surface, inside the young earth was just as restless. Infact enough to keep the molten interior moving, sloshing and spewing lots of fiery volcanoes. And boy do volcanoes have heat! Volcanoes spew huge amounts of smoke and gas into the sky. These gases and smokes now start to hold on to those escaping sunrays and heat starts building up in the earth. Legend has it that this heat accumulation over long time eventually did succeed in melting the ice and that forever ended the cold episodes of such a very long time.

But there are problems with this. Turns out that the gases from volcanoes alone cannot hold on to so much heat. And even if it did it would take an awefully long time. Much longer than scientists think the cold weather actually lasted for. What is it that they have missed...they scratched their head even harder looking at this new lifeform they have discovered....

Miranda thought and looked hard..she noticed that shiny things were coming up from somewhere down below...she could not quite see from how deep. And she saw tiny cracks in her prison as it wobbled up close to those shiny things. Looked like they were caught up in some kind of a updraft. Was it warm? For as soon as her prison came into contact with these particles it developed scratches...as if it was melting. And She started to scratch her ideas into the inner face of the walls.  Soon it was all filled up with ideas..for she went through a number of cycle of sleeps, looked deep and thought hard.

After what seemed an eternity Miranda noticed that the ether through which she was floating was gradually accumulating more and more of such 'prisons'- each having many many particles...some shiny, some dark..and some even seemed to have somebody trapped in them. Why! there were so many like her. And they were all trapped . So maybe they were all going together somewhere? Maybe this was how she could get back to her paradise?

Miranda started feeling warm...and she saw that her prison was finally melting..just like all the rest and soon before she even knew it she was rushing through torrents of water with the others into huge water bodies !! carrying all the shiny, dusty, sandy things and was hurtled face down onto a sandy surface....aaah!!! liberation!! But soon she was being pushed into the sand. She was screaming. Wanting to get out..breathe...

Scientists looked at the lifeform carefully..and the best they could do was guess that it had forever lived in the ocean water and unable to adjust to the abrupt onset of the cold environment, died. It must have floated in the water for sometime and then come to settle in the ocean bottom. Finally it was buried under layers  upon layers of mud and dust that have been liberated from the melting the icy layers as the world was emerging out of the icy seclusion. Yes, thats pretty much what had happened. They were certain.

Miranda knew her wings were torn and lost in the torrents of dust, sand and slosh...she would never fly again. Maybe she could just ride the wave crests..once this nightmare was over and she was back in her paradise...

Photograph by Ritayan Mitra

P.S: There were periods in Earth's history when the  Earth was covered in ice from pole to pole. There were several such episodes. The latest were ~ 2.45 Byrs. Geologists refer to such periods as the 'Snowball Earth'. It is not clear how the Earth gets into and out of such a state. It is a field of active research. 

For more information please visit  www. snowballearth.org


Also ' Miranda' has been recently ' discovered'. Its true.

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Most-Emailed-Photos/ss/1756#photoViewer=/091122/481/f4559ecbe9d64fe8951a320fb00e17eb

The House

It was around evening. Dusk was setting in. In the Big House she never quite felt the need to look at time. It sufficed to know whether it was morning-noon-evening-night. It seemed to her that time was playing a kind of hide and seek game with her in this house. It was a fun game that she had come to love from that day she first set foot in this house. Couldn't even remember when that was. But for sure it was a very long time back. At least, it seemed to her that way.

P was married at a very young age. Her parents died when she was only six. Since then she somehow grew up till she was married to a very rich merchant. The earliest memories she had were of the house into which she had stepped that hot-humid day. Was probably a Sunday. No maybe it was a Friday. She couldn't remember. She was just sixteen. It was a rich household. An old household. Someone had told her that it was nearly three hundred years old and had been a part of the 'family' ever since. Even on that first day she had felt that time, as the rest of the world knew and valued it, probably had little use here. The house was plentiful in its demands and equally well equipped with servants to cater to every wish and necessity, quickly and unobtrusively. She was told that many people lived there. She met almost no one..except that day when there were so many of them to welcome her 'home'. From then on she met them all only on rare occasions when one of them either left the household or joined it. You might already have started to pity her..feel her loneliness...

You are so wrong. So very wrong.

She loved moving around the house. In the afternoon she loved to sit in her room with blinds drawn. There was a mantle clock on the old fireplace and if she left the blind on the west facing window just a little bit parted, the crystal pendulum would catch the late afternoon sulight and the reflections would create a magical world of brightly lit moving polka dots. The oscillating pendulum created in that late afternoon, a world for her where time went crazy and she had the leisure to let it do its trick....while she thought...well thoughtless thoughts .....all through the lazy sunny afternoon. She had spent countless hours of her life here, in this polka-dotted-dimly lit-world. It had so happened many a times that a servant had caught her looking at the moving dots with an aimless expression.

She had fallen in love so many times in this house. Almost anyone who would catch her fancy. Could be anyone. The poet she had recently read...or maybe that postman who came clanging the feeble cycle bell ever so often. In her imagination she had explored the world of love with many men...all of them diverse..all of them unique. Alone in the house she felt free to love without any guilt..without any remorse. She had made love, yielded to passion, sobbed at seemingly painful departures. Nobody ever never knew any of these. least of all the men she had secretly loved and lost. She was not sure she would want them to. At night she made love to her husband. Loved every second of it. Writhed in pleasure...the kind of guilty pleasure that comes with the forbidden love. She suspected that had the house been a little bit smaller, a little more crowded, she would not have been so free to express herself to the mirror on the wall.

But of all magical places she had discovered in that house, the one she loved most was the slightly elevated platform by the old window overlooking the lane that led to the main door of the house. The house was just a block away from the main street..and yet this little lane brought a quality of seclusion to it. As if it broke the connection of the house with the rest of the world and their ways of appreciating time and space and people. The window had long vertical iron bars. There was a thick coat of rust on them. Years of negligence has had this effect. P would sit by the window for hours looking out to a very small part of the globe through those rusty bars . But through these bars lay her world ...the milkman, the priest, the postman- their arrivals and departures. Their routines on that lane. What they did once they walked out of that lane was where she took over..

It had kept her so happy and occupied.

Years have gone by and she had grown from a teenage to a woman in that house. And now she still lived in a big house... even now she never did meet anyone very much. she did not miss anyone or anything in particular...but only for the mantle clock and the window with its rusty bars...without these two she could not be happy any more. There were so many clocks around this place. Here also time had lost its value. Well she never quite had any use of it anyway.