Imagine you are a Janthina snail, living on the surface of the open ocean, clinging to the edge of a raft. Miles of emptiness all around. In the day, rays of sunlight spear through the water, coming to a point so far below you can no longer see where they end. At night everything is black, you can almost feel the emptiness like a pressure, tingling on your skin. You cling to your raft as if your life depended on it, and it does. You don’t know how to swim.

You created the life raft you cling to—a collection of bubbles that keep you afloat. Your thin purple shell is heavy, and your body stout, if you let go you will will sink: first through the warm surface waters, and then the ocean will grow rapidly cold, light will fade and the pressure grow, it will take over two hours for your corps to hit the seafloor with a soft thud and a puff of muddy water. And so you hold on, and you build.

Your snail body is especially equipped to handle this strange world your ancestors somehow found themselves floating into. When you can, and when there’s need, you dip your head and upper body into the air. You curl your slimy underbelly into a ball, trapping a bubble and wrapping it in a layer of thick mucous. Carefully, you uncurl and stick this new bubble to your raft. Your snail slime hardens to a stiff rubbery texture, not easily popped. Sometimes your raft bumps into your prey— blue button jellies or Portuguese man-of-war— but you can’t steer or choose your direction out here in the open ocean, so much of the time, you simply wait. But you did not always live this way.

When you were young you lived below the surface, in the gentle embrace of the sea. You were free to move and hunt as you pleased. Your body was different, tender and round with a miniscule cup-shaped shell that covered your frame, and two small ‘wings’ that you used to swim. But it didn’t last. First, your vision went dim. Then you eyes began to break down, and blindness overtook you. Next, your ability to sense direction faltered, up and down became indistinguishable. No one knows quite how you made it to the surface. Some say you made a parachute of mucous that you used to sail slowly upwards. In the most poetic telling, you built yourself a minute bouquet of bubbles, clustered together at the end of a long string, like a handful of balloons. Blind and disoriented, you floated up into the unknown.

And then you hit something. The first boundary you’d ever felt—the soft rolling surface of the sea. Here you would complete your transformation into a young violet snail. Floating, unable to steer, you would have no need for eyes, no need for a sense of direction. This is where you would spend the rest of your life: at the mercy of the elements, suspended above the abyss.

Reading about the violet snail on that dark winter night, its life felt so precarious, so sad. But my friend Steve Haddock proposed another way of looking at things: one completely flipped around, literally. What if Janthina isn’t hanging over the abyss at all? There’s this scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where the ship flips upside down, and instead of sailing on the ocean, the ship sails on the sky. Perhaps to Janthina, the world is just like this. Instead of clinging to a raft, one mistake away from sinking, Janthina has a different view. Maybe to this snail, so perfectly adapted to life on the water’s surface, it’s not hanging upside down over the abyss, but instead resting right-side up on the top of the sky

Bibliography
Dan Laursen (1953) The Genus Ianthina: A Monograph.

Carol M. Lalli, Ronald W. Gilmer (1989). Pelagic Snails: The Biology of Holoplanktonic Gastropod Mollusks.

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The Bakken Sea was unlike any ecosystem that exists today. Now, instead of the dry plains of North Dakota, imagine floating on the surface of this sea about 380 million years ago. The evening air is moist and musty, the sinking sun is dipping low, the sunset a wash of muted colors gleaming off crumpled black waves. Algae near the surface collect the last rays of sunlight, combining light with water and carbon dioxide to make organic matter. A strange collection of prehistoric animals feed on these algae (and each other) here at the sea’s surface, but to truly understand the Bakken, we must go underneath.

Standing underwater, on the Bakken seabed, there is no visible life. There is almost no oxygen in the water around you, transforming the seabed into a “dead zone.” You are at the bottom of a large basin—a bowl in the ocean floor nearly 400 miles wide . As the struggles of life play out in the waters above, the old, sick and defeated sink to their graves on the seabed. But without oxygen, they do not fully decompose, and nothing ventures this deep to scavenge upon their carcasses. Instead, billions upon billions of bodies–mostly algae but some larger creatures, too–slowly amass on the seafloor, forming a layer of organic matter known as the ‘lower Bakken.’

Fast forward through geologic time several million of years into the future: the sea level rapidly drops, and the basin becomes shallow with quick-moving currents. Sediment tumbles in from the surrounding mountain ranges. A layer of sandy, porous rock that covers and buries the layer of bodies. This sandy layer is knows as the ‘middle Bakken.’ Fast forward one more time: the sea rises again, and the first stage repeats, blanketing the seabed once more in dead remains, this is the ‘upper Bakken.’

These three layers—the lower, middle and upper Bakken—are then covered by sand and rock, compressed, and heated in a perfect combination of conditions that geologists refer to as an ‘Oil Kitchen.’ Slowly, this kitchen converts the Bakken carcasses into a diverse collection of gases and complex molecules called hydrocarbons–the fossils that make our fuel [2].

The lower and upper Bakken layers are sludgy and dense, difficult to drill into. But as the remains in these layers liquify, their old resting places crack open under the extreme weight and pressure . The bodies of these ancient dead sea creatures, long immobilized in their graves, now move again: the liquids of the lower and upper Bakken layers seep into the spongy middle Bakken layer. It is from this middle layer that, millions of years later, that they will be exhumed.

To harvest fossil fuels from the Bakken reserve, we drill wells thousands of feet down into the middle layer, and then extend them an additional two miles horizontally, maximizing the amount of oil we can harvest (Continental Resources, PDF). A high pressure mix of sand and water, called ‘proppant,’ is pumped in, fracturing the rock and opening small pockets of oil, which ooze through the cracks and are captured in the well.

Before the beginning of this month, this ‘crude oil’ was pumped into trucks or trains, destined for refineries. But as of June 1st, it instead enters the Dakota Access Pipeline–traversing multiple states, eventually destined for national or international refineries. At refineries, the ancient ocean remains of the Bakken Sea will be processed into the oil in your car, gas in your tank, and plastic lid on your morning coffee cup. Transporting oil via pipeline will potentially reduce the risks and costs associated with overland transport. But the 1,172  miles of pipeline raise a suite of new humanitarian and environmental concerns, including possible spills at important water sources like Lake Oahe, and destruction of sacred sites associated with the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Protesters tried to stop the pipe’s construction, or have it move it to a new location. Just today, a federal judge ruled that proper environmental procedures were not followed before the pipeline was approved. But for now at least, this long stretch of pipe will be the primary way these remains march across the plains.

Back in in Williston, North Dakota, business is booming; this small community is undergoing an oil-fueled renaissance. After one last look around at the dry grassy expanse, you get back in your car, turn the key–the gas ignites, the combustion moves the oily gears, and drive away.

Additional information

[1] Depositional Facies And Petrophysical Analysis Of The Bakken Formation, Parshall Field, Mountrail County, North Dakota (http://geology.mines.edu/Bakken/NETL_DOE/DOE-Student_theses/Andrea_Simenson_THESIS.pdf)

[2] http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/Terms/o/oil_kitchen.aspx

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Using computer art magic, Armand Dijcks has turned the still photographs of Ray Collins into wonderful kinetic images of waves. Turn on full screen. Press play. Be soothed. Calm out.

The post Morning Zen: The infinite waves of Ray Collins first appeared on Deep Sea News.