The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 Read online

  Another eco-friendly alternative comes from kangaroos – or rather, their poo. As they roam around the few kilometres of their home range, they eat leaves and drink water, leaving little balls as they go.

  ‘The kangaroos are effectively sampling all of the plants in the area for us,’ says Hill. ‘So we put on our latex gloves, pick up the poo – usually it’s fairly dry – then we can grind it up just like if we were looking at plant material.’

  If there’s something promising inside, the geologists go back and look for exactly where the minerals might be by sampling the leaves.

  ‘The roo poo tell us the haystack, the plants might tell us where to find the needle,’ he says.

  * * * * *

  Far above the treetops, a different kind of hunt is on. Carsten Laukamp from the CSIRO uses remote sensing by satellite to map the surface of Australia.

  ‘The maps we are creating look like Google maps, but Google maps are collecting only data from the visible part of the spectrum of light – everything we can see with our eyes,’ says Laukamp. ‘In the infrared spectrum there are more colours that we can’t see.’

  The colour, or frequency, of the light seen by satellites depends on the surface reflecting the sunlight. ‘Every rock type, house and road has a certain spectral signature. It’s like a fingerprint of the material,’ Laukamp explains.

  The satellite data were collected by ASTER (the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission Reflection radiometer), which is one of the instruments on NASA’s Terra-platform satellite orbiting the Earth.

  Gold can’t be detected directly, so geologists must look for host rock types or other minerals, like quartz or micas, which suggest there’s gold nearby.

  Laukamp says these maps can help geologists target their fieldwork – but there are challenges. ‘With this remote sensing technology, we are not only mapping the rocks but everything between the sensor and the Earth: its vegetation, its clouds, its roads … we can’t see through material.’ The CSIRO is finding ways to minimise this problem so their highly detailed, colour-coded maps cover as much of the country as possible, including places that are tough to visit on foot.

  And gold isn’t the only treasure waiting beneath the surface. In north-west Queensland, Riversleigh is a world heritage area containing fossils of prehistoric bats, tree-dwelling crocodiles and ancient koalas. Paleontologist Mike Archer from UNSW Australia wondered whether remote sensing could ‘retropredict’, or rediscover, Riversleigh’s known fossil deposits. Archer asked his PhD student, Ned Stevenson, to see if satellite data could identify areas that had fossils in the same way the ASTER project finds minerals.

  ‘It took a few months and he came back and he’d done it,’ says Archer. ‘But the exciting thing was he said “wait, there’s more” – and then he backed off the scale of the map and showed us that way beyond the world heritage area was another, bigger area giving the same signal. It was somewhere we had never been before.’

  When Archer had the opportunity and permission from the Waanyi community, the traditional custodians of the land, he took a helicopter to the area, and, ‘Bang – there were fossils’.

  The area is even bigger than the Riversleigh area. ‘This new find from Wholly Dooley site, as it was called, looks like it’s got very strange animals in it for two reasons,’ he says. ‘One, it includes some species we haven’t seen before, and that suggests it’s from a different age. We’re guessing maybe the age called the Late Miocene, and perhaps it’s around 10 million years old.

  ‘The second reason this deposit is strange is that all the fossils we’ve been finding – and this is going to sound weird – they have got worn teeth.’ Worn teeth are normal in modern wombats and kangaroos, but rare in the Riversleigh fossils that are from a time when the environment was lush. This new find might fill a gap in the fossil record when the vegetation became tougher stuff – and exploration on the Wholly Dooley site has only just begun.

  A short walk in the Australian bush

  The carnivorous platypus

  The carnivorous platypus

  John Pickrell

  Was this animal for real? It sounded more like something from a poorly scripted, low-budget horror film. Could an ancient relative of everyone’s favourite venomous, duck-billed, egg-laying mammal really have grown to epic proportions and had a taste for flesh? I could picture the scene through the Hollywood lens: maniacal monotremes marauding through the sewers of Sydney, ready to burst out of drains and clamp their bills around the ankles of unsuspecting pedestrians, dragging them to untimely deaths.

  Implausible as it sounded, this prehistoric Platyzilla really did exist – even if descriptions of it were a little overblown in the press. Researchers led by Professors Mike Archer and Sue Hand, at UNSW Australia, announced in late 2013 that they’d discovered the remains of a metre-long species which had powerful teeth for preying upon turtles, frogs and fish. Obdurodon tharalkooschild inhabited pools and rivers in the rainforests that covered Queensland’s Riversleigh region 5–15 million years ago.

  The description of this animal as ‘giant’ in news reports conjured images of an animal the size of a small car, so I was disappointed to find it had been much smaller. Nevertheless, by monotreme standards, it was huge. Today’s platypus is about half a metre in length and, as an adult, doesn’t have teeth, instead relying on horny pads in its bill to crunch up invertebrates. Although O. tharalkooschild was only twice as long as a modern platypus, it is likely to have been about four times the weight.

  Former UNSW student Rebecca Pian, now at Columbia University, discovered a fossil tooth at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area in 2012. The size and eating habits of the new species were later determined from a detailed study of the size, shape and function of the tooth, which is yet to be dated definitively.

  Fossil discoveries over the past 40 years have given us snippets of information about platypus evolution, and have shown that similar animals have been a part of the Australian story for at least 110 million years. The most ancient platypuses have also been found in Antarctica, South America and possibly Madagascar. By around 25 million years ago, however, they were left only in Australia, where up to three species shared the streams of the lush north and centre of the continent.

  In 1975, the first known ancient platypus was described from fossilised teeth found in central Australia – by Mike Archer and US palaeontologists Michael Woodbourne and Richard Tedford. They named the 26-million-year-old species Obdurodon insignis. Obdurodon means ‘persisting tooth’ and distinguished this genus of prehistoric toothed platypuses from their modern descendants.

  A second toothed platypus, Obdurodon dicksoni, was discovered by Mike Archer’s group at Riversleigh in 1984 and dated to about 15 million years ago. Even more exciting was the discovery of the teeth of a 61-million-year-old South American relative in 1992. Hailing from Patagonia, Monotrematum sudamericanum demonstrated how widespread these early platypuses had been.

  The newest species is significant because it is much larger than any of the other five known relatives, suggesting that the family tree is more complicated than we thought, and with unexpected side branches. This hints that there may be other weird and fascinating platypus relatives waiting to be discovered in Riversleigh’s rich fossil deposits.

  The species descriptor tharalkooschild comes from an Aboriginal creation story about the platypus: Tharalkoo was a disobedient female duck who ignored her parents’ warnings and swam downstream, where she was ravished by a water rat. Later, when she laid her eggs along with the other young ducks, she was horrified to discover they contained not ducklings but platypus, with their mixture of rat and duck features.

  This indigenous cautionary tale was then itself a horror story of sorts, one which had been told and retold over countless generations.

  High-tech treasure hunt

  The eye in the sand

  The eye in the sand

  Rebecca Giggs

  One bright October morning in 2012, a blu
e eyeball the size of a melon appears on Pomano Beach in Florida. No one can say where it has come from, what creaturely skull once held it. It shows signs of having been plied out with a knife. The eyeball has a dark blue pupil, surrounded by an egg-blue iris, set in a steely blue sphere. ‘It was very, very fresh,’ declares the beachcomber Gino Covacci, who found the eyeball, rocking in the surf. ‘It was still bleeding.’ He took it home in a bag, and put it in his fridge. Then he called the police. In footage he mimes holding the blue eyeball, standing atop a mass of tumbled jetsam; weeds, netting, shredded consumer goods. He stares aghast into the open cup of his palms. The camera pans out to the indecipherable sea. Dazzle and distance. What unfinished animal patrols there, sweeping the deeps with its blue, cyclopean beam?

  * * * * *

  Blue, as the American author and activist Rebecca Solnit puts it, is the ‘colour of distance … the colour of where you are not’. Landmarks seen from afar, scenes from the softening edge of the terrain, indigo gloom spooled in ocean caves. Blue speaks of vastness and the unexplored, of places it takes a day or longer to get to. Who will you be by the time you get there? This is known as the Rayleigh scatter effect; the strewing of atmospheric light particles as they reach far-flung places. Blue is the colour that can’t be caught up with – it trundles out ahead. ‘There’ is forever retreating, even as we draw the hall-runner of the world towards us. Arrival destroys blue. For that reason we are inclined to view it as a kind of deceit, and a species of art. Blue stands not just for the unknown (that which might eventually become known); blue represents an imperative in our popular imagination to signify that which will never be fully knowable, a zone outside comprehension and creative perception. The end of imagination, we imagine, is an immaculate blue vault in the sky.

  * * * * *

  Australians have a profound attachment to the blue wash of remoteness. Scale is a national obsession here, and notions of expansiveness pervade our social and political dispositions. Where the European impulse is for personal space (noli me tangere), and public collectivity is the spatial ethic of the Chinese, Australians are prone to romanticise not just open scapes, but aspects. The land of sweeping plains is loved best when viewed long-range. Oh, the tenderness we feel towards a distant dusky chasm, the dissolving perspective of an upland plateau! Ours are the bluest mountains of all, over which sheets of airborne oil are drawn, released by the leaves of the coachwoods and sassafras below. On hot days the colour of the ranges deepens to a rich and roiling azure.

  Blue is trusted in Australia, speaks less of artifice than of authenticity. To call someone ‘true blue’ means they are a patriot. The Southern Cross constellation, against a blue field, whips in the wind atop government buildings. Our only major historical rebellion took place under another navy-blue flag. The attachment is to a belief in the undiscovered and undefined, to the wilds we won’t (but could) enter; a kind of oblivion. ‘Blue-sky thinking’ is imagination untethered from topography – the brain permitted to drift like a balloon. There are places to stand in this country where the sky comes down to your ankles. Where, at night, the entire galactic dome is set down over your sleeping body like a drinking glass. Blue’s mood is yearning, with a zealous or violent bent. To have ‘a blue’ is to fight, to be beaten blue and black.

  And then, of course, there’s the sea.

  * * * * *

  As is the condition of our networked era – to be compelled to exhausting topics of marginal importance – so I have become obsessed with looking at photographs of the blue eyeball. The eyeball gazes back at me through the screen, seeming to convey some great challenge as yet unmet by human ingenuity. (Twice dead as it is – being actually dead, having been detached from its host, and then killed again by excessive circulation in the kookier regions of the internet.) Five days after its discovery, and the owner of the eye has not yet been located or declared. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission run DNA tests, but the results are not immediately clear. One expert posits a swordfish or other billfish, based on a fragment of bone-casing left on the outside of the eye. (Xiphid is the species name for these types of fish, but that doesn’t sound like something aquatic to me at all – more like a brand of hayfever medication or a pesticide.) Colossal squid, speculates yet another expert.

  The possibility is debated, dismissed and then revived, that the eyeball could belong to animal as yet unknown to science. A gliding voyeur of the deep. An evasive animal, in need of huge eyes to penetrate the murk. What body tugs behind the eye, out of the dark, up onto the beach? I call my friends to ask if they have heard anything new about the eyeball.

  What eyeball?

  That eyeball in Florida.

  N. says – What are you talking about?

  M. says – I’ve heard a little over 32 years of silence on the subject of eyeballs in Florida.

  B. asks – Specifically?

  The eye from the sea.

  And then I have the great delight of sending them photographs of the big blue eyeball, glowing in the gloved hands of a scientist. Why, I wonder, does some local fisherman not fess up to having gouged the proverbial leviathan? What a big fish story that would be! Not one of my friends has any useful information, but every one of them confesses to being startled by the eye, to being unable to look away. Perversely, someone has posted a recipe for cooking the eyeball on a forum site. It involves pineapple for tenderising. There is, in fact, a popular eating-fish in Australia called ‘Blue-Eye’, but it is a smaller, schooling fish. I resist the urge to buy a fillet of Blue Eye from the fish markets and try the pineapple method.

  During this time my mind keeps returning to a Ted Hughes story, called ‘The iron man’. More specifically, I think often of the beginning of ‘The iron man’, in which the mechanical giant of the title falls off a cliff and is shattered in the surf below. How his eyeball (‘its light glowed blue’) is located by the giant’s hand, after narrowly avoiding being eaten by seagulls, and then the hand goes hopping about over the rocks, looking for the rest of the machine to assemble. It drags pieces of itself up the beach; legs, arms, head. The other eye is slurped back into its socket and lights up there.

  This is the dream of the self-identifying monster.

  * * * * *

  What the atlas makes clear is that, pound for pound, there is more weight of blue on the surface of the Earth than any other colour. Blue is too big to fail. Yet, setting aside the sea and the sky (both of which acquire their colour from spectral refraction), nature doesn’t make much blue. Name a blue mammal. A blue tree; a blue rock. There are not many. In the tropics reptiles and amphibians are sometimes blue and poisonous, but most are not. Blue-ringed octopi, about the size of a baby’s fist, broadcast their venomous intent by flashing blue circles on their limbs – yet they’re easy to miss amidst their weedy, coral kingdoms.

  The pure blue rose, meanwhile, has been coveted by generations of horticulturalists. Rudyard Kipling wrote a tragic poem in which he quests for one sapphire bloom while his love lies dying. In 2004 a Japanese whiskey company patented the first genetically engineered blue rose, Applause™ (although it is really an amethyst colour, closer to violet than to blue). There is still big money to be made for the scientist or gardener who manages to cultivate a truly vivid, blue rose. Some people in the world have made it their life’s work.

  The German Romantics – in particular, an author known as Novalis – saw blue flowers as emblematic of the merging of self and nature; a kind of ür-plant for ecological awareness. During the late 18th century, young men wearing bright blue coats swarmed in the mountains, meadows and salons, composing deeply melancholic literature and hosting candle-lit ceremonies. Doctors of the era declared that too much time spent reading had compressed their stomachs and turned them into a joyless lot, driven to questing, abnormal sentimentality and obsession.

  * * * * *

  As a dye for fabrics and a pigment or pastel for artists, the alchemy of a holdfast blue was one of the most avidly pursued discoveries
of the middle ages. By the early 13th century, ultramarine cost more than gold. Only aristocrats could afford blue garments, and then the Virgin Mary began to wear blue too. Ancient wars were funded by trade in the blue gemstone lapis lazuli. (More recently, conflict in Afghanistan has been supported by lapis sales, such that trafficking in the stone was outlawed by the occupying forces of the United States.)

  Once painters and chemists had figured out how to make dyes and coloured plastics cheaply, ersatz blues pollinated the globe. The blues we make today are featured in some of the most obdurate products manufactured by the human hand, and it would not be unreasonable, I think, to argue that the weight of artificial blue in the world is increasing. More plastic bags, for example (blue ghosts of the supermarket); more blue-capped bottles for bottled water; more blue ‘tuff ’ twine and blue tarpaulins; more blue toys for small boys, and blue jeans, and blue cars and bubble wrap and blue dishcloths and gimcrack blue silk hydrangeas, encrusted with blue specks of plastic dew. Above all our blue rubbish heaps, so many bluebottles buzz. Where once it was invaluable, blue is now highly disposable.

  * * * * *

  There are other blue flowers, and not all of them are engineered in a laboratory: you might know some to name. During the summer months the fields not far from where I grew up in Western Australia become drenched in the purple-blue of a weed called Paterson’s Curse (Echium plantagineum). Horses and sheep emerge dip-dyed in the pollen like creatures pardoned from ritualistic worship. Paterson’s Curse is an opportunistic species, not a native, and so (to spring from Novalis) the kind of ecological awareness it triggers has more to do with the uncanny realisation that vegetative interlopers can be astonishingly lovely, even as they smother the indigenous plants or cropping varietals below. Over the toppled bushland Paterson’s Curse flows like a sudden flood, heedless of fence-lines, breaking in froth against the walls of buildings. But it is not nature that turned on that spigot. We did. The weed’s blue seeds crossed the sea originally for use in colonial ornamental gardens.