Darkness and Light

Atmospheric instability is expressed in meteorology by various mathematical formulae and indices. Instability is graded as a function of temperature change over height or time. Instability causes turbulence that in moist atmospheres can whip up thunderstorms and cause cyclogenesis.

Violent storms are used in literature as a metaphor to portend evil.

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"The darker and stormier the weather outside the more diabolical the deeds done. When the clouds roll away, however, the rain has washed away all the blood in the streets and the world is clean and new again, as if all the violence and destruction of the storm served a divine purpose."
― Benjamin R. Smith, Atlas

Writer Cormac McCarthy probes inevitable and inescapable darkness.

"By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world."
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Darkness looms in an approaching storm before breaking loose into sacred mayhem.

Photographer Mitch Dobrowner chases apocalyptic storms that strike the rural landscapes of Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Mammatus, Bolton, Kansas
by Mitch Dobrowner

In Dobrowner's photograph Mammatus, the unworldly and mammary-like mammatocumulus add to the foreboding of the anvil cloud on the horizon.

Vortex, Long Hollow, South Dakota

by Mitch Dobrowner

Dobrowner's images evoke the immediacy and magnificence of atmospheric energy as it roils over the plains.

Darkness and instability invariably give way to clearing skies and calm.

"Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today."
― Edward Abbey

REFERENCES

• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy.
• Mammatus cloud, Wikipedia.
• Ominous Storms Photographed in Black and White by Mitch Dobrownerby, Christopher Jobson, Colossal, 19 September 2016.
• Upside-down clouds grow down and cascade across the Kansas sky, Emily Benson, 14 September 2016.

Cosmic Newcomers

Humans are cosmic newcomers.

It is commonly held that our home planet coalesced from cosmic dust and gas. Carbon-based life is a relatively recent event. Life is a viral outbreak that occurred billions of years ago on Earth.

The profundity of carbon-based life is that chemical organisms replicate and grow in complexity.

Life, and more specifically human life, is a latecomer to the existential table.

Humans are a puff, a wink, or a dream.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

Many geologists think our atmosphere and oceans arrived on the Earth about 4 billion years ago either from a series of volcanic eruptions or from comets colliding with earth that released water and gases.

Evidence of Life

How long before life emerged from the chemical soup of oceans and atmosphere? The first evidence of life, inferred from the chemical record (e.g., Carbon isotope C-12 to C-13 ratio), dates from 3.85 to 3.65 billion years ago. The first undisputed fossils appear in rocks about 3.2 billion years ago. Human footprints appear 1,500,000 years ago. The first humans fossils known to us are from 195,000 years ago.

Artifact Years Ago Atmosphere and Ocean 4,000,000,000 Life 3,850,000,000 Fossil 3,200,000,000 Human Footprint 1,500,000 Human Fossil 195,000

I stand for what I stand on.
― Edward Abbey

REFERENCES

• Carbon-based Life, Wikipedia.
• How did our planet form?, Kate Ravilious for The Guardian, 27 April 2008.
• Oldest Human Footprints With Modern Anatomy Found, John Roach for National Geographic News 26 February 2009.
• Oldest Human Fossils Identified, Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News, 16 February 2005.
• When Did Life on Earth Begin? Ask a Rock., David Tenenbaum for Astrobiology Magazine, 14 October 2002.