From stars to swamps, new worlds revealed
So that’s what 4.6 billion years looks like. This week, with the aid of the gold-coated beryllium hexagonal mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope, we looked time in the face.
The first ‘‘Deep Field’’ image shows thousands of galaxies like gems tossed on black velvet – a cluster known as SMACS 0723, which sounds more like a phone number scribbled on a toilet wall.
Deep Field – what an understatement. This is the most penetrating image of the universe yet, a view into the deepest of time as well as space. As Nasa explained in its press release: ‘‘The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying more distant galaxies, including some seen when the universe was less than a billion years old.’’
Twitter lit up with starstruck expressions of wonder and wit. The Onion writer Seth Rubin tweeted: ‘‘Whoever designed the carpet for bowling alleys got deep space exactly right.’’ ‘‘I would just like to say my son has pajamas with this print,’’ remarked Online magazine editor Giovanni Tiso.
Dr Emma Chapman, a British astrophysicist, exulted: ‘‘That tiny, fuzzy red dot [a detail from the first Deep Field image] is a galaxy as it was 13.1 billion years ago. It is now the farthest galaxy where we know what elements are present. #JWST allows [star] scientists like me to understand the chemical evolution of the universe in exquisite detail. Incredible.’’
Even the thought of natural worlds so distant, numerous and impossibly ancient reduces my brain to hot mozzarella. Which is, as astrophysicists love telling us, pretty close to what the event horizon of a black hole will do to the human body, although they prefer to call it ‘‘spaghettification’’.
It’s the second time this week that science has astonished me.
A reviewer once wrote about a science book: ‘‘It feels a bit like being burgled. You’re shocked, your things are gone, but you can’t help thinking about how you’re going to replace them. What [the author] has done is break into our common human home and steal our illusions.’’
Rarely, a book of popular science will have this effect on me. This week, it was a book about bogs, published on Thursday by Massey University Press.
Life in the Shallows: the Wetlands of Aotearoa New Zealand had been gathering dust on my desk, awaiting a review. I grew up on a farm, and I tended to think of swamps as boggy paddocks. ‘‘Only townies park next to rushes,’’ Dad once told me as he pulled an Aucklander’s Ford Escort out of the mud with his tractor.
I also have a tattered copy of that second-hand shop classic, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved (1969), a study of people mummified in European peat bogs. I bought it mainly because the author’s name is P.V. Glob.
After reluctantly cracking open Life in the Shallows, I was sucked in. It turned out to be an unexpectedly lively account of a vital part of the landscape, the animals and plants which live there, and the characters who study them: botanists, experts in soil, drones, natural treatment systems, restoration, collaborative Ma¯ ori research, environmental DNA, citizen science, fish, insects, birds and bats, among other things.
As authors Karen Denyer and Monica Peters explain, our wetlands sequester much more carbon than forests, and we have, rather unfortunately, destroyed 90 per cent of them. While healthy bogs are net carbon sinks, drained peatlands are a carbon source. As the earth heats up, drying peatlands release lots of carbon.
Far from being nuisance ‘‘boggy paddocks’’, wetlands do useful work, like absorbing floodwaters and sediment, and processing pollutants. They are ever-changing and responsive, living entities, and they can be freshwater, saline, coastal, inland, subterranean, alpine, geothermal or frozen.
Much work to preserve the remnants of our wetlands is being done by community groups, and Peters is keen, she says, to ‘‘sweep away desiccated formal language, jargon and tight stylistic conventions to create content that can be understood and then applied’’. The book achieves this spectacularly, conveying lots of information in a digestible format.
The authors describe baby eels that look like a ‘‘see-though shoe insert’’, and the antics of the secretive matuku (bittern), which can be tricked into a trap, for study, by use of a mirror, which fools the bird into advancing on itself. Matuku are the size of a small goose, with a dangerously sharp beak; ‘‘extracting a disgruntled matuku from a cage is a twoperson job’’, they write.
There are maps, instructions on how to walk through wetlands (‘‘Red Bands for bogs, tall gummies for fens, and waders for swamps’’), breakout boxes on rare plants to photograph, ingenious ideas and chance discoveries, a list of wetland plants and animals with their Ma¯ ori names, a travelogue of wetlands to visit (with details on access), and well-chosen quotes from researchers who have spent a lifetime squelching through bogs.
Like Dunedin botanist Dr Peter Johnson, who prefers hardcover notebooks because a ‘‘hard cover allows it to be sat upon and also held between the teeth when standing in a lake or climbing a bank’’.
This instant classic might not feature new galaxies and gold-coated beryllium lenses, but it shines a light on a critically important part of the landscape, and has shown me worlds I never knew existed.