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The Emiliania huxleyi homepage < http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/SOES/STAFF/tt/eh/index.html>
Here’s a question for you: “what links country-sized patches of bright turquoise water in the oceans, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and the white cliffs of Dover?” From the title of the website, the answer’s fairly obvious - it’s Emiliania huxleyi, of course. But more questions: what (or who) on Earth is Emiliania huxleyi? And is there a handy nickname we can use?
Answers: an incredibly small, single-celled, sea-dwelling organism called a coccolithophore; and yes, ‘ehux’. Scientists only really became interested in this bizarre-looking member of the marine phytoplankton after the invention of the electron microscope - before then, with conventional light microscopes, it was impossible to see the tiny structures properly. In large numbers, however, ehux is anything but hard to see - in fact you can clearly see ehux blooms if you look out of the window of the space shuttle. The reason is that each cell manufactures a number of ‘coccoliths’ - microscopic calcium carbonate discs which surround ehux like a suit of armour. With billions of these discs floating around, the sea becomes “optically similar to water if sackloads of glitter or sequins were to be added to it.” You can see the remarkable effect for yourself with the collection of great photos which accompany the rest of the ehux story, from its study in the 1800s by Thomas Huxley (who gave ehux the ‘hux’) to modern theories on coccolith production and the relationship between coccolithophores, the carbon cycle, and the greenhouse effect. The site is divided into sections which look at the different sides of ehux biology, and all in all it makes for a very interesting read.
As for the white cliffs of Dover, well… what happens when you get an incredibly large number of dead coccolithophores, put them all on top of each other and wait a few million years? Exactly.
Richard Northover
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