Rebecca Giggis / Imagining the Jellyfish Apocalypse

Imagining the Jellyfish Apocalypse

The stinging, gelatinous blobs could take over the world’s oceans.

By Rebecca Giggs

January / February 2018

In my mid-20s, I spent three months living in Broome, a coastal township in Western Australia famous for its moonrises, pink beaches, and pearl farms. Each morning during what is known locally as “the buildup” (the hot, muggy weeks heralding the wet season), I would stuff a towel in a bag and trudge out to where the red pindan soil—distinctive to the Kimberley region—marbles powdery dunes, longing to dunk my body in the postcard sea. Often, I could go no farther than the water’s edge. Signs pitched by lifeguards along the beach showed a stick figure lashed by a mass of tentacles: Irukandji jellyfish.

Rebecca Giggs / What Lies Beneath

Hokyoung Kim

What Lies Beneath

Burrow far below the planet’s surface, and even there, humanity has left its imprint.

By Rebecca Giggs

July 2019

On the shores of Kamilo Point, in Hawaii, geologists have identified a new kind of stone. A sediment of recent history, the agglutinated rock displays milky-blue flecks, iotas of dull green, and fibrous orange twists. It is known, because of its unique properties, as “plastiglomerate.” That the name grinds together two familiar-sounding words is a clue to the stone’s qualities as an amalgam. What we are talking about is a rock veined not with metal or quartz, but with plastic. Plastiglomerate forms where polymer flotsam (trash, washed up on the tide line in this instance) is subject to high heat and melts, wrapping together particulate such as shell grit or sand. It then solidifies as it cools. Or, if liquefied plastic drips into hairline fissures in basalt or other porous minerals, what is left behind—a rock crazed with ersatz colors—can also be deemed plastiglomerate. Campfires are one source of that high heat. Plastiglomerate may also emerge along the scorched trail of a wildfire, or it might be cauterized into the ground by lava. It almost certainly appears in places where people burn their rubbish. Call it the birthstone of the age of unintended consequences.

Rebecca Giggs / A Better Way to Look at Trees

A Better Way to Look at Trees

What pioneering new research has revealed about the forest

By Rebecca Giggs

This article was published online on June 17, 2021.

Above all else in the plant kingdom, trees make good trellises for our self-regarding thoughts. Robert Frost knew this when he wrote “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” A woodland is the right spot to yield to reflection. Though the life of a tree has little in common with the life of a person, we are accustomed to approaching trees on personal, even introspective, terms. As trunk is a synonym for torso, as branch can be interchangeable with limb, trees of great variety (especially the old ones) give body to human concerns.

Rebecca Giggs / Giants of the Deep

Illustration by Lily Padula

Giants of the Deep

How technology has changed the way we look at whales—and ourselves

By Rebecca Giggs

Had you been alive in the early 19th century and in want of a sea monster, you might have summoned one via the apparatus of a dead whale. Take a colossal rib, a narwhal’s spiral tusk, a gray whale’s eyeballs, bristles of baleen stripped from a humpback’s jaw or armfuls of its spooling tongue—how disquieting these discards from the whaling industry must have appeared to those who had never seen a whale whole, in the flesh. Scraps retrieved from the decks of harpoon ships, or sold by savvy beachcombers, could be credible props to mobilize a mythical beast. The rest relied on a story. Swindlers in dim backstreets and taverns learned to articulate whale leftovers as parts of stranger animals yet: Here were bits of mermaid, ocean centipede, sea swine, saltwater salamander, and serpent; remnants of turtles as large as houses and of aquatic owls once believed to have ambushed boats in the Northern Hemisphere. Before a spellbound audience, a sperm whale’s penis (as pale and hefty as daikon, but dexterous) readily transformed into a segment of a kraken’s mortifying tentacle.