Heavyweight

Week 3, Day Three

Hours more of dirt sifting for eggs, and then I get to the actual project I signed up for!

After lugging 12 kilos of rocks and containers to the lab in three shifts, I get down to unpacking and taking stock. There are big food delivery containers and sealed bags full of brown and black rocks painted in a sea of green, pale yellow and brown. I bet if all that scenic photography on the big and small screen was developed from constructed landscape models, they'd select these rocks. These were picked up from Wadi Al-Khoud, near Muscat city, Oman.

A wadi is the Arabic term for an intermittent stream or a dry riverbed that contains water only during times of heavy rain. Oman's wadis shot to wider fame during the summer of 2007, when Cyclone Gonu struck Omani coasts causing unprecedented- and unpredicted- destruction, as the wadis overflowed immensely causing MASSIVE floods. It was a Category 5 cyclone (read: windspeed >250 kmph, storm surges 18 feet-high), the strongest tropical cyclone on record in the Arabian Sea, and the nation's worst natural disaster. I've lived here since 1991, and the city plan is spectacular! Not strangely, the only thing it didn't account for was drainage. During the very, very brief rains in Muscat, some of the roads get blocked due to these dry land depressions getting filled with water as flash floods are caused by the accumulation of water running downhill and collecting in the depression, sometimes overflowing onto the roads nearby. Over the years, you get to know the susceptible roads and the kind of showers that can result in their getting blocked. Muscat's low-elevation Corniche area saw arched waves hit the famous jutting man-made rocks. The city lost power, and all the regions near major wadis, like Ghubrah, close to where I live, were badly, badly hit.

Wadis have not been studied all too well in this region. Oman itself has no academic record in this arena. It is also a known fact that around 80-90% of the bacterial species are unknown. Tapping into bacterial energy dynamics is environmentally significant. Also, wadis are consistently disturbed habitats. For most of the year, wadis are dry. Come rainfall, and these get filled with water that is lost slowly, and mostly by evaporation. Hence the ecological significance of studying an unexplored ecosystem. They are also sources of sustenance for several local nomadic tribes, and thus economically important.

Back to the rocks I was scraping for samples. Living micro-organisms are generally preserved in large freezers at 20 degrees below zero celcius. My first job was to collect samples representative of all the microbial colonies on these rocks, and store them in little plastic vials in the freezer. Armed with a scalpel, I began cutting chunks of growth off of the rocks, chopping them, and dunking them into 1.5mL vials. It's much like grunge work in the kitchen. There's the tiresome peeling, scraping, chopping, collecting and pouring. And then the mess generated afterward, minuscule particles of gunk hiding under everything fathomable.

Mats of microbial communities are strewn all over the rocks. A few rocks down, and I'm seeing patterns in the morphology of these growth mats. Cuts into the still-frigid surface of the colonies reveal neat horizontal layers in mint, pale yellow and dark green. Some are single layers; brown and green, mostly. There's the odd one looking like clusters of miniature orange-coloured mushroom caps. Some are little finger-like projections, jutting out vertically in hundreds. Pale brown. Rocks with these don't seem to house any other kind of growth. An hour into the prodding and probing, and the rocks get slippery. Some bulbous green growth releases bubbles and water as I attempt to chop. So I tweeze the fibrous material out. A beautiful flat rock from one of the sampled ponds has snail shells scattered within the growth. The thawing releases them from the stronghold, and they scatter all around. I pick up the shells- a maximum of 4-5mm in length and imagine the little creature that lived. I bring the shells closer. And then I try and wrap them back into their green cradles, hoping they won't fall out.