Engineers
the building kinds, not the train kinds
often have to think in terms of scale. Make something twice as big and they have to
remember that the weight becomes much more than doubled. Scientists also have to keep
the scale of things in mind, but sometimes don't do too good a job of it,
concentrating instead on their special realm.
But to understand the desert, everything from the internal workings of
microbes to the hemispheric level and beyond needs consideration. The difficulty comes
in having to keep in mind that all forms an interconnected web of causation and effect.
Everything affects our desert, from the mostly invisible microbial and fungal recycling
of nutrients to the interplay between herbivore and plant, between carnivore and prey.
But it doesn't stop there. The very landscape affects everything from soil types to
microclimates, and desert conditions are understandable only in terms of land masses
and oceans, of air and water currents, and the rotation of the earth itself. Understand
the desert? Look big and look small, from planet to atom.
Contributor: Arthur H. Harris, Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.
Desert Diary is a joint production of the Centennial Museum and KTEP National Public Radio at the University of Texas at El Paso.