Emiliania Huxleyi

Emiliania Huxleyi –

a tiny one-celled alga so small

it takes five thousand lined into a

row to fill a single inch of space  –

contain within each single cell a

mitochondrion, Golgi body, 

nucleus and chloroplast, all that

it needs to feed and reproduce

and at the last to die – essential

elements of life as we know it;

infinitesimal perfection,

pulling nourishment from watery light.

And more – a coccolithophore, it

builds within itself exquisite shields,

fretworks of calcium and carbon

known as coccoliths, astounding shapes

produced inside a tiny globe by

means half-understood, for reasons

quite unknown, these oval wheels with spokes

and rims and two-tiered delicacy,

extruded whole and lovely from the

cell, garnish their maker, sitting rim

to rim or overlapping, twenty or

more around the sphere’s circumference.

Emiliania Huxleyi

are insignificant alone, but

in their billions stain water milky-

white in blooms a hundred miles across.

Thus their life; and when they die, they sink

for weeks through ocean depths to come to

rest at last on the abyssal plain,

sit softly on limey sediment.

Then over countless spans of time, the

slimy mass grows thick with age, sly

cementation fills pores between each

microscopic block, and in the end

it turns to limestone, dolomite or

chalk; a million years may pass as one-

celled algae live and reproduce and

die and in their deaths build depths of stone.

Then sheets of sedimentary rock are

carried on the tides of earth and rise

by gentle increment to make the

underlying crust of continents,

or galvanized by cataclysmic

force build mountain ranges standing tall –

wondrous, one-celled, earth-shaping algae,

Emiliana Huxleyi!

                                               

                                                

Sr. Sue Elwyn, SSJD

Toronto, March, 2006