Dust is all-pervasive in our lives. It permeates our atmosphere and even fills the void between stars. Hannah Holmes has breathed life into this dusty topic, in a narrative that is by turns terrifying and fascinating.
Holmes' dust is not the motes you see floating in a beam of sunlight, but invisibly tiny flecks of dead and once-living stuff. The author wraps the dusty path of everything in these well-written essays: Build stars from it. Water earth and entomb dinosaurs with it. Start and end ice ages in its flight. Share it worldwide. Kill each other and ourselves with it. Nourish tiny grazers and predators — and the Amazon Basin, and the entire world of grain eaters — on it. Smoke it, eat it, drink it, breathe it, and wear a thin sheath of it all our lives. Return to it at life's end.
It is fitting that this tale of dust begins with the birth of the universe, our sun and the Earth; and ends with death, our own transition to dust, and that of our solar system and of the universe. Holmes makes a good case for the triumph of dust.
She also accuses it of all sorts of villainy. Dust is implicated in the creation of a field of amazing dinosaur fossils in China's Gobi Desert. The Fighting Dinosaurs were buried so quickly and completely that they retain their battle-stance. Big Mama was interred as she hunkered over her nest of eggs. The best theory is that all these animals were overtaken in the midst of their everyday activities by a massive dry mud-slide as a dune of dusty loess soil suddenly collapsed over them.
Dust is the root cause of plenty of human misery, as well, from black lung and mesothelioma to asthma and heart disease. Airborne dust has been lofting off the Earth's surface long before there were animals, including humans, around to breathe it in. In fact, humans have evolved to be highly efficient at ridding our bodies of most kinds of dust particles. Eventually, however, the "mucus elevator" fails, and we drown in the dust we've inhaled.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Dr. Pat. It is so good to have you back.
Are there people who ate commercial meat after reading The Jungle ?
Here in Mexico (not the cleanest place) one doctor when asked if a flu-like disease was going around, told me that the dust in the air carries it. And this is the country far from the cities. I gather in Mexico City the air carries things like hepatitus regularly.
It is amazing what scientists can concentrate on -- dust, here -- and how fascinating their interests are.
2 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!