Measured Contributions

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Measured Contributions

Canada’s own Connie Lovejoy of Montreal may have helped to find the “essential basis for the existence of life in the Arctic”! How exciting! A new algae that has most likely been overlooked for who knows how long, has now been recognized as a new form of life, and an essential one at that.

Picobiliphytes, the name of the newly discovered “wandering” algae, is a phytoplankton; “Phyton” meaning plant and “planktos” meaning wander. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton). The algae seems to be well-named as the picobiliphytes were first discovered in the cold waters of the Arctic and then found to exist as well in the coastal waters off Europe.

This minute organism is not one that could have been discovered by one of our early century surveyors, whether they believed equatorial waters to be at boiling temperatures (found that quite amusing), or they were the first to create a way of keeping track of time at sea for the purpose of measuring longitude (as Harrison did). Only with the “advances” in technology are we now able to make contributions this large about something so small. But who’s to say which contributions are more advanced?

I find myself comparing the old with the new as we learn about the contributions made in the past to what I am learning about today’s discoveries. A stopwatch seems like such a simple, non-complex item today, compared to technologies that allow us to find something not visible to the naked eye, and then identify it as a whole new life form.

I just continue to be amazed at how far “mankind” has come in the pursuit of knowledge.