Within the salt-encrusted lakes of time,
Are secret bubbles formed by primal cast;
We excavate these drops from faded brine,
To understand the structure of your past.
They ratify and filter our forecast
That Gaia’s breath was once a weakened wheeze,
Devoid of life and luscious chloroplast.
By reading samples from an ancient breeze,
We understand how life might look on cosmic seas.
The Sibley Peninsula in Ontario, Canada where the sample was retrieved from (Photo Credit: P199, via Wikimedia Commons).
This is a Spenserian stanza, inspired by recent research which has used samples from a 1.4-billion-year-old lake deposit to provide evidence of what the Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere were
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