United States or Taiwan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was found to be full of diatoms, which are flinty-shelled microscopic animals of every variety of shape, such as stars, crosses, semicircles, and spirals yet soft as are the jelly-fish, they can consume them.
Now I should have been in a towering passion at this, if in my travels I hadn't discovered a race of little creatures as much smaller than polypes as a mouse is smaller than an elephant. I heard two learned men talking about diatoms, as they sailed to Labrador; and I listened. They said these people lived in both salt and fresh water, and were found in all parts of the world.
This may perhaps be accounted for by our not having struck their belt of depth with the tow-net; or it is possible that when we found it on the 11th of February the bottom deposit was really shifted a little to the south by the warm current, the excessively fine flocculent débris of the Diatoms taking a certain time to sink.
Algal spores took hold, desmids and diatoms swam in and settled down, little fish wandered in and out of the crevices, while large ones nosed at the entrances. Then Mother Earth turned slowly onward; the moon, reaching down, beckoned with invisible fingers, and the air again entered this no man's land.
I saw in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado where they were laid down horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms.
Stirred up the littoral margins of the ditch with stick found in the path, and the drip showed Gemiasma rubra and verdans mixed in with dirt, debris, other algae, fungi, infusoria, especially diatoms. Observation 26. I was myself seized with sneezing and discharge running from nostrils during these examinations.
The diatoms cannot multiply without light, and the ice formed since February can be distinguished in the pressure-ridges by its clear blue colour. The older masses of ice are of a dark earthy brown, dull yellow, or reddish brown." The break-up of our floe came suddenly on Sunday, August 1, just one year after the 'Endurance' left the South-West India Docks on the voyage to the Far South.
Sanders Island and Candlemas were sighted early in the afternoon, and the 'Endurance' passed between them at 6 p.m. Worsley's observations indicated that Sanders Island was, roughly, three miles east and five miles north of the charted position. Large numbers of bergs, mostly tabular in form, lay to the west of the islands, and we noticed that many of them were yellow with diatoms.
Examine a piece of the shale from one of the oil districts of California, and you will discover that it is a very peculiar rock, for it is made up almost wholly of minute organisms which once inhabited the ocean. Among the forms which you will find are the silicious skeletons of diatoms, the calcareous skeletons of foraminifera, scales of fish, and, rarely, the whole skeleton of a fish.
Again, there is a kind of rock called Mountain Meal, which is entirely made up of the remains of diatoms. Examined under the microscope, thousands of minute flint shields of various shapes are seen. This rock, or earth, is very abundant in many places, and is sometimes used as a polishing powder. In Bohemia there is a layer of it no less than fourteen feet thick.
Word Of The Day