Italian Flamingo Pink

Salt crystals, life on Mars, and road trip to the desert

The Kenya Lake System in the Great Rift Valley. photograph by Martin Harvey

The carotenoid-rich lake of Los Coloradas (Mexico) Walter Rodriguez/Wikimedia Commons

Satellite view of the island of Pantelleria

An island

One night, liquorice-black and dreamy, my friend Marta Abbott stepped out of a rock-walled villa into the wind, sparks from a stollen cigarette like stars, whispering because Oliver her son had just fallen asleep, and because this place was magic and all of this happening inside the little rounded rectangle window of my phone. Marta was telling me about Pantelleria, that tiny island that was once a parenthesis of banditry above a drowned continental rift somewhere in the sea between Italy and Tunisia. That tiny volcanic island where flamingos fish for salty shrimp in the pools that dot a rainbow-metallic landscape. O the flamingos! I said to Marta trying inarticulately to convey the feeling of intensification that they give me. I was thinking of another story and its loop was too long for the in-and-out crackle of Whatsapp and so now here goes:

A letter

Dear Marta:

It was a few years ago and I was on LaBrea Avenue in midtown LA to run an inkmaking workshop at a store that sold decorative axes and other hipster-outdoorsy equipment and I was starting to worry because I was unfamiliar with the terrain, and because the handsome bearded lumberjack sales staff were unable to help me move tables around, and because Los Angeles was having a very rare day of torrential downpour. The faux lumberjacks watched while a small, capable woman and I got the tables and equipment set up. The ink-making participants seemed almost happy to be out in the rare rain in an alley behind the store scrounging for cactus blossoms and pennies, eucalyptus bark, wild vines, and bits of rust, and pretty soon the group had fanned out across the neighbourhood to find their own finds, and I found myself pointing things out mostly just to myself. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could forage for some prehistoric black ink from the LaBrea tarpits? I said, mostly to myself and mostly just because we were on LaBrea Avenue. A clean-cut kind of nerdy-looking guy wearing head-to-toe waterproof gear a few steps behind me cleared his throat and said, “Well, actually…”

One of those the-universe-is-on-my-side moments

The guy behind me turned out to be Aaron Celestian, director of the mineralogy department at the L.A. Natural History Museum, and affiliate research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He said he could easily get me a sample of tar pit tar if I came and visited him, and so the next day, just before I got on the plane back to Canada, I found myself in the early-morning dark of the museum’s incredible collection of desert minerals, salts, and crystals, bonding over the beauty of giant sample of borax glowing in the ghostly vitrine light, and then going into the back lab where Dr. Celestian gave me a paper coffee cup half-filled with a black-brown thickened muck that had been slowly seeping to surface since sabre-toothed tiger times, and that moved slowly enough that it didn’t make a mess of my luggage. I experimented with tar pit goo as a kind of printing ink and ruined a few paintbrushes, and I can still almost smell its thirty-eight-thousand-year-old scent, but what really stuck with me was that little lab behind the display cases, and the mineral salts.

A trip to the desert and into the salt

Which is why, a year later, when the director of the ink documentary, Brian, asked me about a trip to the desert with proof of concept money from the National Film board, I didn’t have to think about it long to say, “Let’s go to Death Valley and search for wild borax, but let’s go the Natural History Museum first.” Aaron Celestian agreed to meet us and asked if he could bring his friend from the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab to talk with us about salts and the origins of life. We looked at an incredible collection of minerals and crystals in box after box of donated collections of every imaginable shape and colour and texture of rock, and then Dr. Celestian fired up an extremely expensive electron microscope and we looked into the chambers within chambers of a grain of pink salt dug from deep under an ancient seabed in Death Valley. The salt was forming a trapped a tiny bubble of water, and in that bubble of water were a few extremophilic bacteria who were just waking up after several million years of sleep which we got to watch bouncing around in their tiny cryogenic crystal palace. The bacteria produced salmon pink carotenoid pigments that protected them from extreme UV radiation and coloured the salt pink. Because I love pigments and salt and the desert and long hibernations, I would have been happy if our whole film had taken place in that little lab, but those little dots floating around had an even more fascinating role to play.

Spacerocks and the origins of life

Which is where Scott Perl came in. Scott is an old friend of Aaron’s, and a Research Scientist of Geobiology & Astrobiology together, and the two friends have linked minerals and outerspace in their shared research on bacteria that live in extreme conditions. Death Valley turns out to be a good place to look for extremes and a good model for what life (or evidence of past life) on other planets and moons might look like. We know that Mars did have water and even if it just had the first inklings of life in the form of the echoes of simple bacteria it would be breakthrough in our understanding the origins of life everywhere in the universe. As co-lead of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Origins and Habitability Lab, Dr. Perl, with the help of the 2020 Perseverance mission to the Jezaro crater, is looking for ancient chemical signs that the water on Mars may have once contained life. Near the crater are the markings of an ancient river delta, and Scott and Aaron are looking closely at the samples and information coming back to earth for the faint pinkish markings of a bacteria that once made colour to save its life….