Lost and Found

On last week's cycle ride, I lost a winter glove - gone for good, despite back-tracking to search. Today - temperature 2-4°C - I tried wearing a nitrile (beekeeping) glove as a wind barrier, over a woven thermal one. It didn't really work; after 6 or 7km, I had made a decision to come home to avoid frostbite! At that very moment, a black shape in the hedgerow caught my eye. Laughing at myself for my foolishness, I stopped and went back to it. You guessed: a cycling glove, fraying and battered, but wearable; my size; the correct hand 

Not a ram caught by its horns, and the bush was not ablaze, but still it felt like the universe was speaking to me, so I felt compelled to continue. I was rewarded by the ethereal experience of swirling, ice-cold mist under milky, shifting light. The effect is to salami-slice the landscape into vertical layers, stacked one behind another, like translucent playing cards - one holding the hedgerow, the next the trees behind it, the next the field, the distant hills, the sky

In this image, all that layering is concentrated in the narrow band between ploughland and clouds. The layered landscape is echoed at a microscopic level in the clay minerals in the soil, which can also be imagined as minute playing cards. In well-structured soil they are in an open structure, like a house-of-cards, permeable to air and water, welcoming to roots. Here, the ploughshare has collapsed the house, leaving the cards in a flat pile, all oriented parallel to the surface, and reflecting the opal light

If you have not yet seen Hunt for the Oldest DNA on iPlayer, I recommend it. Some charismatic characters, clever use of animation, a really good science story, and prize-winning music. One detail is that some of the oldest surviving DNA has clung on, intact, for over 2 million years because it is electrostatically bound to clay minerals in the soil, which has protected it from the rapid decay it usually suffers. As a consequence, we have access to genes and ecology from the last time the earth was as hot as we are now making it again. We can find out how organisms survived, and it might just mean that we can. A helping hand from the universe