By now you know that I am good at keeping a stiff upper lip when it comes to handling the small disappointments that I experience when traveling. This time, however, I have to admit that a round trip of 2,000 km, nearly $1,000 of car rental and fuel, two hotel stays at usury prices, and a lot of wear and tear on my old bod have been for naught. Nada!
To put it succinctly, I had come all the way from Perth to Shark Bay for the sole purpose of seeing a living stromatolite reef. A stromatolite is a bulbous form that builds up from a sand bed as slime binds together unicellular prokaryotic bacteria and sand. To be formal, slime is a mucous substance excreted by said unicellular bacteria to serve as a repository of nutrients and excretions, and for protection from UV radiation. Stromatolites were the thing 3 billion years ago (because there was nothing else alive that far back in Earth’s history), but they are precious rare in our days because other organisms feast on the slime and disrupt stromatolite formation. Enter Shark Bay, the often quoted place where you can see stromatolites forming today. In my mind, then, this 2,000 km trip was worth it the same as if I had to go to the other side of the world to see the only remaining dinosaur.
Unbeknownst to me, in April 2021, severe tropical cyclone Seroja, struck Shark Bay and severely destroyed the elevated pathway that admiring pilgrims used when visiting this holy chapel of Earth’s evolutionary history. This was two years ago. Yes, two years ago, and in the meantime nobody had the decency to inform traveling geologists that one could not get closer than 100 m to the stromatolite patch! So I saw stromatolites, from a distance of 100 m and was severely under-impressed. From the way you hear it, the hole floor of Shark Bay is covered by stromatolites. Oh, no. The patch is maybe 300 m long, and extends into the shallow water of the bay only 100 m or so. Nobody is quite sure why, but in this small patch the salinity is much larger than in the rest of the bay. The tidal range is also very small, and the stromatolites seem to prefer being submerged in depths of less than 1 meter.
There are many slime mats elsewhere in the world, and if you fill like it you can wade through them at your closest beach. There are also many reefs with slime mats, so you can go scuba diving through them, but if you actually want to see living stromatolites you will have to wait until the powers that be get off their …. and fix the elevated pathway.
Feel free to take stromatolites off your bucket list.
Despondent I drove the 200 km back to Carnarvon, poured myself a stiff whisky, and then went to look at their Space and Technology Museum (Carnarvon is one of the NASA tracking stations), the peer of the Gascogne River, and the old railroad bridge. Tomorrow I will have to drive back the 1,000 km to Perth, where I will visit with the Castle family for a couple of days before flying to Adelaide.
Tonight I am going to eat me some kangaroo kebabs.
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