The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things
254
The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things
254Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
Some see dust as dull and useless stuff. But in the hands of author Hannah Holmes, it becomes a dazzling and mysterious force; Dust, we discover, built the planet we walk upon. And it tinkers with the weather and spices the air we breathe. Billions of tons of it rise annually into the air—the dust of deserts and forgotten kings mixing with volcanic ash, sea salt, leaf fragments, scales from butterfly wings, shreds of T-shirts, and fireplace soot. Eventually, though, all this dust must settle.
The story of restless dust begins among exploding stars, then treks through the dinosaur beds of the Gobi Desert, drills into Antarctic glaciers, filters living dusts from the wind, and probes the dark underbelly of the living-room couch. Along the way, Holmes introduces a delightful cast of characters—the scientists who study dust. Some investigate its dark side: how it killed off dinosaurs and how its industrial descendents are killing us today. Others sample the shower of Saharan dust that nourishes Caribbean jungles, or venture into the microscopic jungle of the bedroom carpet. Like The Secret Life of Dust, however, all of them unveil the mayhem and magic wrought by little things.
Hannah Holmes (Portland, ME) is a science and natural history writer for the Discovery Channel Online. Her freelance work has been widely published, appearing in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, National Geographic Traveler, and Escape. Her broadcast work has been featured on Living on Earth and the Discovery Channel Online's Science Live.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780471426356 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | TURNER PUB CO |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2003 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 254 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.18(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.Introduction.
The World in a Grain of Dust.
Life and Death among the Stars.
A Light and Intriguing Rain of Space Dust.
The (Deadly) Dust of Deserts.
A Steady Upward Rain of Dust.
Dust on the Wind Heeds No Borders.
Did Dust Do In the Ice Age?
A Steady, Downward Rain of Dust.
A Few Unsavory Characters from the Neighborhood.
Microscopic Monsters and Other Indoor Devils.
Dust to Dust.
Web Sites.
Bibliography.
Index.?
What People are Saying About This
You will never again look disparagingly upon dust. Hannah Holmes has written my favorite kind of book -- one that takes a seemingly mundane subject and trumpets its significance in our lives not only on Earth, but in the Heavens.
Interviews
Exclusive Author Essay
Before I investigated the secret life of dust, I wasn't aware that anyone studied dust for a living. But once I began digging into the subject, I found that dust researchers are on the cutting edge of all sorts of disciplines: They're shaking up the subject of climate change, they're tracking down pollutants that blow from one nation to the next, and they're hot on the heels of an explanation for why hospitals fill up whenever there is extra dust in the air we breathe. Dust scientists are pioneers, peering into a subject so small that its enormous impact on our lives has been long overlooked. They were, for me, like green oases in what would otherwise have been a rather arid expanse of research.
The first dust scientist I met gave me the idea for this book. I was in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, writing about dinosaurs and other fossils. The scientists I was with had brought a geologist on the expedition to explain an enduring mystery: Their favorite fossil trove kept producing dinosaurs that had been killed and buried so quickly that they were caught doing everyday things -- the dinosaur equivalent of Pompeii. Even tiny mammal skeletons were beautifully preserved. This exquisite state of preservation was such a fluke that it begged a scientific explanation.
Dr. David Loope was recruited because he is a recognized authority on sand. I giggled when I saw his resume: Sand? But it was Loope who stood patiently in the blistering, dusty wind of the desert one day and explained that the sky is always spiced with dust -- and that this dust permits water molecules to form cloud droplets and raindrops. As my book goes on to explain, this mechanism proves to be the key to the dinosaurs' sudden demise. More importantly, however, Dr. Loope's description of a sky full of dust piqued my curiosity: How much dust is up there, and where does it all come from? My search for more dust scholars began when I got home from the Gobi.
I quickly learned that my own definition of dust - itty-bitty items that float in the air -- was meaningless to scientists. Each dust discipline addresses a specific sort of dust. So each breed of dust researcher speaks a special language.
To the Doctor of Sand, for instance, dust is a chip of rock that's less than 63 microns in diameter -- about two-thirds of a hair's width. But house-dust scientists divide their dust into two categories: "House dust" includes rather bulky items like dog hairs and paper fibers; while "fine dust" is the powder that's left over when you screen out the sweater lint and bagel crumbs. And space-dust researchers are even less particular. Grad student Henry Throop, who studies the way space dust coalesces to form planets, told me that one of the shortcomings of astronomy is that it can't determine how big space dust is. "Some of the dust could be the size of Volkswagens," he admits.
And the linguistics reflect the fact that these dust scientists don't overlap. At the University of Washington I find a preeminent space-dust researcher, Don Brownlee, who oversees a hyper-clean laboratory for the analysis of microscopic specks of space dust. One piece of this enigmatic stuff falls on each square meter of the planet every day, on average, Brownlee tells me. Space dust is all around us, he says, running a finger down the wall of his office and proffering the faint powder stuck in the ridges of his fingertip. Isolate this dust, analyze it, and you can start to understand the dark dust cloud that birthed our solar system four and a half billion years ago. I am struck dumb by the importance of this thin rain of space dust.
But across the campus, atmospheric scientist Steve Warren possesses only a casual knowledge of Brownlee's endeavors. One of Warren's many interests is how floating dust affects the weather and, more crucially, the climate. When it comes to forming raindrops, he explains, the sulfurous dusts of human industry are powerful cloud-makers. These extra clouds alter the way heat flows between the Sun, the Earth, and space. With an impish grin, he digs into a file cabinet and produces a research article from the 1970s -- not his -- which eagerly outlines the benefits of using airplanes to intentionally spread soot in the sky: A warmer planet is among the theoretical benefits. But space dust? It comprises such a minuscule fraction of the dust in the air that, climate-wise, it's a non-issue.
Innocent of both disciplines is epidemiologist Morton Lippmann of New York University. Lippmann studies the connection between dusty air and human death. In his sunny office, he slaps his pants leg and watches with a wry smile as a faint haze of particles rises. By tracking the amount of dust in the air of a city, along with the number of deaths recorded each day, epidemiologists have learned that dust kills 60,000 people a year in the U.S. But since the air contains everything from diesel soot to pollen to shreds of tire rubber, determining which dust is the killer is a daunting task. Increasingly, Lippmann and his colleagues are investigating the smallest of the dusts that we inhale -- specks that are just one or two percent of a hair's width in diameter and which are often human-made.
And I encounter dozens of other dust sleuths, laboring in dusty isolation. Mary Silver sieves the sea for settling specks, which host a minute world of microbes. John Priscu plucks dust from the icy depths of Antarctic glaciers -- and finds micro-life blooming on the surface of that dust, too. Max Bernstein studies the pregnant and mysterious chemicals that coat dust in deep space -- chemicals that may have founded life on Earth. Gene Shinn contemplates the fungi, bacteria, viruses, and toxic chemicals that catch a flight all the way to Florida on dust that blows off the Sahara each summer. Johanna van Bronswijk has written a field guide to the hundreds of tiny plants and animals that dwell in house dust. And Andy Liu pokes a physician's nose into the dust beneath the sofa and asks, Are today's children so dust-deprived that their immune systems are dangerously underdeveloped?
Dust, in short, is hot. Many of the dust disciplines I discovered are boiling with implications for the health of our bodies, and of our planet. And each dust scientist I found was eager to tell the public about the amazing little world in which he or she is immersed. They have seen that some of the biggest scientific mysteries in our world are wrapped in very, very small packages. (Hannah Holmes)