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Life’s Ancient Bottleneck
Of the six chemical elements necessary for life, phosphorus is the rarest. It determines what grows and shrinks, who lives and dies. By disrupting the planet’s phosphate cycle, unchecked factory farming could have apocalyptic consequences.In the moments that follow the death of a whale, when the light disappears and is swallowed by dark, the body’s weight draws to the base of the sea and compresses. It settles in mud. It forms an environment known as a whale fall, a world that will last for decades.
The whale fall grows in stages. The larger species come, the eels, the sharks. They rip apart the dead whale’s flesh. The tail, the head, the organs are consumed. The size of predator lessens as the length of time extends. Tiny mouths clean the bones dry. A skeleton remains; bacteria descend upon it. They turn bones into nutrition, consuming the whale in a process that is almost imperceptibly slow. Worms arrive and burrow through the skeleton. Other organisms come and eat the worms. Larger predators reinhabit the space. Within a barren, lightless plain, on the basis of decaying bones, a world is born.
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Life’s Ancient Bottleneck
Of the six chemical elements necessary for life, phosphorus is the rarest. It determines what grows and shrinks, who lives and dies. By disrupting the planet’s phosphate cycle, unchecked factory farming could have apocalyptic consequences.