Xinhua News Agency "Determination" February 19 Essay: On the "Determination" encountered the beautiful foraminifera that lived in the South China Sea 400,000 years ago
Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhang Jiansong
Under the microscope of the Ocean Drill Ship "Determination", the reporter encountered a group of beautiful foraminifera that lived in the South China Sea 400,000 years ago, which is the third south China Sea ocean drilling, drilling scientific samples from the bottom of the South China Sea.
A "bookmark" for studying the history of the earth
Life in the South China Sea at that time must have been happy and prosperous. Because despite 400,000 years, every fossil foraminifera still emits a warm luster like a white pearl. Some of them resemble round ping-pong balls, but the skin is meshed on closer inspection; some are like cotton balls with buds ready to bloom, and the white petals are clearly visible; and some are like scalloped shells, wrapped in a small hole in the middle. Under the illumination of the microscope, it is exquisite and clear, like a smiling face oncoming face.
These beautiful single-celled animals, which are only 1 millimeter in size, have lived on Earth for more than 500 million years since the Cambrian Period. They have lived and died on the ocean for generations. Their families are thriving, diverse, widely distributed, and extremely sensitive to marine environmental factors; some populations evolve rapidly and survive on Earth for a short time, making them important standardized stones for corresponding geological ages and "bookmarks" for scientists to study earth's history.
The third ocean drilling in the South China Sea, led by Chinese scientists, is proceeding smoothly in the northern waters of the South China Sea at 18 degrees north latitude and 115 degrees east longitude. What age did the "Determination" ocean drill ship drill a tube of sedimentary samples from the bottom of the South China Sea at a depth of more than 3700 meters? Beautiful foraminifera have their own "say".
On the 16th, Xiang Rong, a researcher from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found several pink "red coccidiosis" in the third tube sedimentary sample drilled by the "Determination". This foraminifera, which is used as a dating marker in textbooks, lived on Earth about 120,000-400,000 years ago. Therefore, it can be judged that the third tube of South China Sea sedimentary samples drilled by "Determination" was deposited during this time.
"Little Giant in the Sea"
Although to the naked eye, foraminifera are as small as the tip of a needle, they are not microorganisms, but are uncompromising animals belonging to the protozoal kingdom Granulostomycete phylum Foraminifera, with one or more openings in the shell in order to protrude pseudopods, hence the name "foraminifera". Since the Cambrian Period, there are more than 40,000 known fossil species, distributed in the five oceans of different marine environments of modern foraminifera, there are more than 6,000 species, only in China's waters there are more than 1,500 kinds of life.
As a paleographer who has been dealing with foraminifera for more than 20 years, Xiang Rongneng can recognize more than 200 famous foraminifera at a glance and knows their facial characteristics, personality characteristics, birth and death eras. The ping-pong ball worm, the cotton-shaped "bow whip holding ball worm" and the scalloped shell-shaped "round spoke worm" that the reporter first encountered in the "Determination" have long been "old friends" who have known each other for many years.
On the "Determination", Xiang Rong, along with Huang Baoqi from Peking University and Akiaki Furuzawa of Shimane University in Japan, took turns on duty 24 hours a day. Whenever a new tube of deposited sample came out, they took a sample at the drill bit and filtered out the clay and silt with a 63-micron sieve. In the remaining samples in the sieve, many fossils of foraminifera can be found. After drying, in each sample, the iconic foraminifera "face" is carefully searched for with a microscope and a "biological fossil dating" is carried out. Only when the age frame is constructed and the stratigraphic age is established, the tectonic and sedimentary events that occur at different time periods will be "resurrected" and archived to reshape the evolutionary history of the South China Sea at different times.
As the world's oldest protozoa, foraminifera is a "witness" to the changes in the earth's vicissitudes. Studying the species, number and distribution of foraminifera in the ocean today, and summarizing its relationship with the environmental factors in which it is located, scientists can infer the paleocean marine environment and paleoclimate. Foraminifera is a superior "indicator organism" for the comparison of ancient and modern marine environments, which is widely used in many scientific research fields such as biostratigraphy and paleo-oceanography, and is known as "the little giant in the sea".
"A masterpiece of nature's art"
The shell of the foraminifera not only carries the "historical information of the sea", but also has a variety of shapes and exquisite shapes, which can be compared with the Nautilus, which can be called "the artistic masterpiece of nature". Foreign scientists have pointed out through calculations that some foraminifera grow their atrium according to the "golden ratio", and their exquisite internal rotation structure is fully in line with the "golden ratio" law. He referred to certain foraminifera spins as "Gothic life spins."
The beauty of foraminifera has also deeply attracted our scientists. Zheng Shouyi, an academician of the Institute of Oceanography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who has been engaged in foraminifera research for more than half a century, not only created and developed china's modern foraminifera research and won the world's highest award for foraminifera research - the "Kushman Prize", but also hand-drawn more than 10,000 foraminifera diagrams, personally carved hundreds of enlarged prototypes of foraminifera, and developed foraminifera sculptures, scientific research teaching aids, popular science exhibits and tourism souvenirs.
Under her strong promotion, the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Sanxiang Town of Zhongshan City cooperated to build the world's unique foraminifera sculpture garden. The 114 large-scale foraminifera stone sculptures vividly display the "foraminifera culture" integrating science and art in a peculiar way of "macroscopic microorganisms" and "single-cell sculptures", and have been selected as "the world's top ten evolutionary tourism hotspots" by foreign authoritative institutions.
In the future, be sure to check it out there. Nature is so magical, and the beauty of science and art is originally integrated. The beautiful encounter with the foraminifera on the Determination is even more convincing!