OTHER WORLDS IN MONO LAKE

    By Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:23am |

    When my knees were younger and the VW camper hadn't yet blown its engine for the 3rd time I made an annual trip up Rt. 395 from the bowels of L.A. to the Mammoth Mtn. area of California. The purpose was to back pack and hike in the Eastern Sierras, but the first stop was at Mono Lake. The lake is, well, other worldly. Alien features like the spikey "tufas" give it a lunar quality. T
    he lake had a calming and spiritual effect on me. I felt o.k. with lifting off our planet from there. I was not surprised to learn that a life form which could make its DNA from Arsenic rather than Phosphorous would be alive and well in Mono Lake.

    I have to laugh at the phrase "new life" discovered there. It's like saying the Conquisadors "discovered" the "new" world. In 1870 Mark Twain described the lake in his book "Roughing it". The alkali water--no fish could live in it.  The odd flies which blanket the shores for a hundred miles--hold em under the water for a while, they pop right back up. He didn't claim to have discovered the lake, only reported his observations and if he was spiritually moved, he didn't say so.

    If Mark Twain thought the salinty bad in 1870 he should have seen it in the 1970's, after the L.A. Dept of Water, beginning in the 1940's, diverted the lake's tributaries. The salinity doubled.

    After a meditation at Mono Lake I would then focus on how to get my camper into one of the few spaces near Red Meadows Pack Station. From the campground one had at least six fabulous day hikes. I ususally took the one to Lake Ediza, about 2000 feet above the campground's 8000 ft elevation. On foot one had to dodge and sneer at the horses and pack mules carrying "tourists" along the trail. At the lake you could have lunch, lay against your pack and look up another 2000 feet at little figures boot skiing on the glaciers of Mt. Ritter. Back at night there were hot springs showers, large enough for two. If you were in the know you could find a hot springs creek, wade into to a mixture of cold early summer runoff while hot streams flowed up around you from the creek bottom

    At the pack station if you're timing was right you could get a cup of joe and a fried egg on white bread--it was a break from smoked cheese and canned beans.
    On the wall were sepia toned newspaper clippings from the time when Reagan proposed building a four lane highway down the top of the Eastern Sierra. The plan was stopped by who else than Nixon--always had that one sweet spot for Nixon.

    I've written a poem for GFAJ-1, may they still be doing their thing in Mono Lake long after higher life forms have nuked themselves into oblivion.

                  Prayer Pristine

    Oh, God,

    In heaven, do rivers reek with holy bathers?

    Do valley's shriek, worshipped dry?

    Do mountains cry, hacked down by praise?

    Do angels plead,

    Oh, God, give us just one place

    Never to be graced by earthly saints.

    Give us mountains in sunlit gold,

    wide rivers tumbling,

    low green valleys,

    for our little arsenic souls,

    in heaven,

    Amen.

     

    Comments

    I was unable to embed the slide show of the lake from a post at Huff Post, address shown here, I think. If someone can do so I would be grateful.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:46am

    Something is wrong with the embed video field. I'll fix it later. In the meantime, I embedded the video directly into the post. Nice piece.


    by Michael Wolraich on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 12:06pm

    That's the poem translated into the arsenic language. Oh, I see. thanks greatly.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 12:08pm

    Lovely. Both the poem, and the slideshow.

    by LisB on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 12:13pm

    Thanks, Lisa.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 8:55pm

    It's nice to hear a first hand account of someone who's been there, Oxy.  (I assume you don't want to wade or swim in it and/or drink the water? )  It looks like a very spiritual place.


    by AmiBlue on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 5:36pm

    Yes, it's a very spiritual place, and you're right, there is no swimming. Lots of brine shrimp but no humans or fish. Twain described it as pure "lye". There's a bit of camping around but it's isolated. The lake was highly saline in Twain's time and after L.A. diverted the incoming streams the lake dropped 25 feet and the salinity doubled.The flies are described by the current scientists as "scuba divers"--fortunately they are not bothersome to humans like Vermont black flies which head right for the corners of your eyes. I thought it was fascinating that NASA scientists compare the lake to a landing site on Mars, the Gusev Crater, and they theorize they might find traces of this arsenic eating microbe there. Thanks for your comment.   


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 9:07pm

    There is an interesting geologic feature of another type a bit south of Mono Lake, to the west of 395 called 'Glass Mountain'. A forest service dirt road cuts off and just south of that road is a huge hill made of obsidian, from a volcanic eruption 1 million years ago. It is the largest obsidian feature I have ever seen. There are obsidian blocks 6-8 feet in diameter, that rolled off the main body, which rises 30-50 feet and must be hundreds of yards in across, and with great care, you can climb up on to the top of it.  I know there are small pieces of obsidian around Mono Lake also, which must have also been a volcanic crater. Glass Mountain is marked on the road, and the feature is just north of Mammoth Lakes to the west, 395, coming north, rises up to the cutoff, and as it sits high on the edge of a volcanic caldera that is about the same age and which extends all the way to Bishop.


    by NCD on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:02pm

    Thanks for that note. Your further description gives me the urge to get back up there. Sounds as if you like it also. If I remember correctly they have traced pieces of that obsidian hundreds of miles away.

    I don't think I'll be doing the kind of hiking and back packing I once did, but since bringing Reds Meadow Pack Station back to mind, I am seriously thinking of going that route--love to see those mountains one more time, although I'm guessing those glaciers are now missing. Sad thought.  


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:33pm

    I'm glad you issued such a directed invitation to stop by, Oxy.  Don't know nuffin' about poetry, but I sure did like your poem; the images, the plea, and especially the 'little arsenic souls in heaven' part.

    It's hard to stop the slideshow, isn't it?  Some photography!  My fave was the time-lapse night one, with the moon phases and all. 

    A friend of ours lived at Mono Lake for a few years, back when it was still pronounced "Mah-no."  ;o)  He got involved in the Save Mono Lake effort, though I forget the particulars.  Was it about not diverting the streams that feed it? 

     


    by we are stardust on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 10:59pm

    Thanks for stopping by. The save Mono Lake effort was to divert some of the water back into the lake and I think the effort was successful.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:24pm

    Science Friday had one of the scientists with project.  Here is the beginning of the interview:

    Ira Flatow: ....And, well, rather than me babbling on, let me bring on Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon. She's the lead author on that Science paper, and she is a NASA astrobiology research fellow in the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Welcome to the program.

    Dr. FELISA WOLFE-SIMON (NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow, NASA Astrobiology Institute, U.S. Geological Survey): Oh, hi, how are you?

    FLATOW: How excited are you?

    Dr. WOLFE-SIMON: I am thrilled.

    FLATOW: Tell us why.

    Dr. WOLFE-SIMON: Well, I've been thinking about some time, and what I like to joke is that I've been known for being an exception to the rule myself. And so I think a lot about just being different and what it means to be different. And if you don't know that you're different, then you're normal to you. And so we discovered a microbe, my team and I, that does something different.

    So all life we know of I'll back for a moment and remind of something we learned in high school all life we know of requires carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur. And it uses those elements to make DNA and RNA, so that's like your information technology of the cell; proteins, those are your molecular machines and some scaffolding; and fats and lipids. So that separates you from everything else. So those six elements are required for the three biological pieces in a cell.

    The microbe we've discovered appears to be able to use arsenic, if not given any phosphorous, and...

    FLATOW: But arsenic kills us. Why doesn't it kill the bacteria?

    Dr. WOLFE-SIMON: That's an interesting question, and in fact, that's one of the things that I was really thinking about when I first came up with this hypothesis I published a few years ago.

    And just thinking as a biochemist, and arsenic is toxic, arsenate in particular, because it looks like phosphate to your cells, my cells and just about everything else that we can think of.

    FLATOW: Ah, so if the cell takes up the arsenic instead of the phosphate, and we say bye-bye.

    Dr. WOLFE-SIMON: Basically, and let me give you another example because toxicity I think is in the eye of the beholder. We breathe oxygen, but we know that a large portion of the microbes on Earth, oxygen is toxic. So I think toxicity is kind of an interesting inkling. You know, what's bad for you and I, may not be bad for something else.

    The part I really like is in the beginning where she relates her own disconnect from the crowd as being different with something based on arsenic rather than phropherous.  Now that is a geek I can relate to.


    by Elusive Trope on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:41pm

    AT, that's a great clip. I really do love geeks.


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:55pm

    But you know the tea-baggers are gonna claim that all those A-bomb tests to the east in Nevada cracked the time continuum allowing some of the space aliens being held at Area-51 to escape and morph themselves into a caustic lifeforms knowing we not only couldn't comprehend such lifeforms much less look for one under our noses that didn't follow our model of carbon-based bags of water.


    by Beetlejuice on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 3:45pm

    But now of course NASA will screw it up so the microbes should be patented and privatized--should be good for clearing out some sludge in land fills. Sounds like a good start-up--what's Neil Bush doing these days? Does the tea bag claim also support the bible belt's geological timeline of 6,000 years?  


    by Oxy Mora on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 3:54pm

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