This was it, Unearthing the Underworld: A Natural History of Rocks by Ken McNamara. I’m still thinking about it from time to time. It just really blew my mind learning about how profound the effect of life has been on the whole make up of earth, throughout its history. I had it in my head that the earth, geologically maybe, was like a platform upon which life … lived. But now I think of it much more as one big, inseparable thing.
“One of the more intriguing phenomena that occur in oceans are what are termed whiting events. These occur when the sea becomes clouded over a wide area due to the precipitation of extremely minute crystals of aragonite, less than 4 microns in diameter.
Long thought to have been an inorganically induced process, there is mounting evidence that such whiting events may be due to the activity of viruses.
“A dominant component of phytoplankton blooms are cyanobacteria. Like all other organisms, cyanobacteria are periodically susceptible to viral infections. The effect of these intracellular viruses on the single-celled cyanobacteria can be catastrophic as the cells' walls are ruptured.
“This results in the release of intracellular bicarbonate ions which on contact with the seawater induce precipitation of minute aragonite crystals that in tranquil settings ultimately accumulate as carbonate mud.
“Such extremely fine mud, lithified into hard, smooth rock surfaces, provoked one man to exploit them for a singular purpose that was to have a profound effect on printing techniques for more than two hundred years and was to give this type of limestone its own distinctive name - lithographic limestone.”
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