Today, Monday, we all woke up early in the morning, and after a first cup of coffee I said goodbye and thank you to Barry, since he was going early to work, and Mellissa and I sat down to breakfast and one of those easy talks you have with old friends. She is a very wise and kind woman, and it was fun to talk about her interest in healthy foods and healthy living, her experience as an emergency response nurse, her children growing up to sound adults, and her experiences with her Please Man husband as they moved from post to post through Australia. Now she and Barry are ready to enjoy themselves traveling for fun (I believe the next destinations are Japan sometime next month and Bali a few months later).
We also talked about the difficulties I have at clearing a cluttered house, motivating my students, and my plans for the near and far future. I loved it, but all good things have to come to an end (at least until we meet again in France or California), and with a last hug I got on my way.
You are going to think I am obsessed, but I am still hurting from The Great Stromatolite Bust, and will chance going 100 km south, to Lake Clifton, to see what they have there. Eureka! I did find a stromatolite bank in the brackish waters of the lake/coastal lagoon that is separated from the ocean by a barrier bar, and is only fed by seepage of seawater through the bar and groundwater seepage from the land.
They may look like stepping stones, or minions, but these mounds of slime and cyanobacteria took on the hard task, 3.5 billion years ago, of gradually pumping oxygen into the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is at the same time the most miraculous biochemical process, and the most inefficient, depending as it does on the sluggish enzyme RuBisCO (it has an impossible name, but is nickname is meant to rhyme with Nabisco), which with solar energy allows the synthesis of CO2 and H2O into glucose, at the same time getting rid of extra oxygen. In contrast with other enzymes, which do their job very quickly, RuBisCO is slow, painfully slow, so the O2 is released in very small quantities and very slowly. Enter the patient stromatolites, which for billions of years released O2 that first went on to oxidize the dark rocks and soils of the young Earth, then started diffusing into the atmosphere just to be scrubbed by rainfall, and finally accumulated to levels that allowed the development of more complex organisms. Yes, we should all bow our heads in thanks to our great-great-great-
The ones at Lake Clifton are not billions of years old, but apparently started accumulating 2,000 years ago in the inhospitable brackish shores of Lake Clifton.
Rats! I just got notified that my 6 pm flight to Adelaide got cancelled :( Fortunately I am connected to the world through my cell phone, so I was able to negotiate a rebooking to a Qantas flight at midnight to Melbourne, and from there to Adelaide, so I will arrive there at 8:30 am. I can now look forward to another uncomfortable night on the seat of an airplane.
So, what am I going to do in the meantime? I decided to go south to see the beautiful southwest coast that Mell had told me so much about over the last couple of days. I went as far as Bunbury, and from there turned north and followed the beautiful coast up to Mandurah, where I stopped at the Public Library to use their internet and look around. Afterward I continued north into Perth, to pay a visit to Helen and Dan, friends of Anita and John, and had a delightful time making new friends and sharing a lovely dinner and a nice bottle of wine.
Eventually I made it to the airport, parked my car in Terminal 1, and the nice fellow at the Hertz counter asked me to what airline I was headed. “Qantas”, I replied, to which he said in alarm “Oh, that is Terminal 3 and is very far. You better drive the car there”. “But surely there is a bus to take me from T1 to T3”, I remonstrated. “Oh, no”, he said, “it is very far, so you better take the car”. So I got back in the car and drove to T3, and as I arrived there I confirmed that there is a very fine inter-terminal airport bus. But then again, I made this young man happy, and I had nothing better to do.
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