Of moss and men who fell to earth

There's something affecting about the story of the Ohio State University biology department's moss experiments that were salvaged from the wreckage of the Columbia Space Shuttle. Some of the moss samples were useable, despite having plummeted 64 kilometers to earth.

In the absence of light and gravity, it seems that common roof moss (Ceratodon purpureus) grows in a clockwise spiral pattern never observed in other space-grown plants.

Link to the Nature story.

This beautiful spiral and its backdrop of untimely death reminded me of Robert Smithson.

Smithson rose to prominence as a minimalist sculptor in the late 1960s but eventually became best known for his astonishing earthworks – large scale sculptural reconfigurations of the landscape. Spirals were a recurring form in Smithsons work; he favoured a counter-clockwise direction for his.

The website maintained by his estate includes an excerpt from Smithson's film documenting the creation of the his best-known work, the Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. The sequence was shot from a helicopter as it traced the path of the jetty from overhead. Smithson is heard reciting the coordinates and composition of the sculpture as we are drawn closer the spiral's centre. The artist's pride in his accomplishment is evident, but the film is also strangely prescient: three years later, Smithson was killed when his plane crashed while he was surveying the site of his Amarillo Ramp

Click on the film's title on this page to see the excerpt.