The Jurassic Botanical Park

Giant mushrooms looming all over the lands, elephant legs with eerie pink flowers growing on top sticking their stems out from rocks, sky-scraping ogres almost bald-headed with creepy hair standing tall in the forest - you would ask, is this a fantasy dream alive in the mind of Guillermo del Toro ?

But no, this is not a fantasy, let alone a dream. It's a real place on Earth, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of the Horn of Africa. It is a small archipelago of four islands and islets in the Indian Ocean, some 350km south of the Arabian peninsula, belonging to the Republic of Yemen. - Wikipedia: Socotra.

The main island of Socotra, spanning over 30 to 35km north to south and 130km east to west, is one of the most isolated landforms on Earth of continental origin. The archipelago was believed to have started its long detachment from main continents since the Miocene, some six or seven million years ago.

This harsh and dry land, which derives its name from Sanscrit word meaning "the island of bliss", is considered as the "jewel" of biodiversity in the Arabian Sea. And people name it that way for a good reason. - Dark Roasted Blend, Wikipedia: Socotra.

For millions of years the island has been isolated, providing a suitable environment to preserve a bizarre botanical paradise, since the time of Gondwana, the massive supercontinent once existed on Earth 180 to 200 millions years ago. The long geological isolation of the Socotra archipelago explains the teeming plants varieties on the island - with 700 extremely rare species of flora and fauna, more than a third of the 800 or so plant species are found no where else. Some varieties have even been preserved for 20 million years, i.e. haven't changed their forms or ways of living for those million of years!

As we have a grip on what and how Socotra island is, we shall look back at our otherwordly landscape we just thought came out from Pan's Labyrinth nightmare.

Looking closer, the giant mushrooms looming all over the lands are not mushrooms after all. They are trees, with such great name - the dragon's blood tree, or dracaena cinnabari. The tree has branches spring upwards forming an umbrella-shaped tree top, and when seen from afar, looks just like a giant mushroom. In spite of its uncanny appearance, its red sap was highly sought after as a medicine and a dye.

Next are the disputable elephant legs sticking out of rocks with odd flower branches, except that they are not elephant legs (obviously), but stems of another rare botanical species, the desert rose, or adenium obesium. Weirdly enough that these rather ugly-looking plants which reminded me of literal meanings of frump, are called as the delicate, fragile and graceful rose of the desert (I would say it doesn't live up to half of its name), they actually have more stoical bearing than roses. They grow their roots without soil and straight through the hard rocks.

Leave the harsh roses aside, and we shall look at the ogre with eerie hair like Medusa's. Of course it is not an ogre, instead it looks more like a papaya tree's stem, except that it is taller, more taller, and fatter. It's the cucumber tree, or dendrosicyos socotranum. It doesn't resemble any forms of cucumbers to me, but maybe those bare leaves dangling over its top like some monster's hair do dangle in a cucumber dangling style.

In addition to the botanical's version of Jurassic park on the island, it also has a fairly rich bird fauna, including a few types of endemic birds, such as the Socotra Starling Onychognathus frater, the Socotra Sunbird Nectarinia balfouri, Socotra Sparrow Passer insularis and Socotra Grosbeak Rhynchostruthus socotranus. - Wikipedia: Socotra.

Socotra was recognised as a world natural heritage site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in July last year. The island has around 40,000 populations, but it has only has it first roads in 2006. It is geared towards sustainable eco-tourism and thus, it seems that you would have to get a camel to walk the lands. - Dark Roasted Blend.

Botanists rank the flora of Socotra among the ten most endangered island flora in the world. The archipelago is a site of global importance for biodiversity conservation and a possible center for eco-tourism. - Wikipedia: Socotra.

If there is any places I would want to visit at least once in my life time, I would tick this island as one of them. It's great to be transported back in time to some ancient era in Earth history to have some otherworldly experience, except for the camel-riding part. But who knows, it might feel better than you thought!

Images and information sources: Dark Roasted Blend, Wikipedia: Socotra.

Tiny, Yet Could Be Big.

The world has always been irony. The smallest of things could cause the biggest of impacts. Virus, the tiniest semi-organism on Earth ever known, could kill hundreds and thousands of people. Bacterias, small as they are, without them decomposing the compost, Earth would be a barren wasteland of mass garbage.

Subsequently, it's not a surprise that 40 years from now, our source of fuels would come from small little water-living organism with the size no bigger than a peanut - the algae.

In the second part of the series Ecopolis, aired on Discovery Channel, the problem of transportation are being addressed. Transportation nowadays poses one of the biggest threats to the future of our cities. Scientists estimated there would be two billion vehicles and a seven-fold aviation increase by 2050. These large numbers of vehicles and aviations could emit 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Los Angeles ranked as the most polluted city in the nation for all categories in the report, even though LA's pollution levels have dropped. (Credit: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

Four new advancements has been introduced as possible solutions : algae biofuel, fuel cell vehicles, blended wing aircraft and the electric jeepney (e-jeepney).

Today, I'll briefly introduce the most appealing advancements to me here - algae biofuel.

The algae transform carbon dioxide under the exposure of sunlight into energy. As part of the process, the algae produce oil. They "can generate 15 times more oil per acre than other plants used for biofuels, such as corn and switchgrass.

Algae can grow in salt water, freshwater or even contaminated water, at sea or in ponds, and on land not suitable for food production."-ScienceDaily (Aug. 19, 2008) .

Environmental engineering professors Andres Clarens (center) and Lisa Colosi (right) have teamed up with commerce professor Mark White to investigate how algae may offer the biofuel of the future. (Credit: Melissa Maki)

Besides, algae feeds on carbon dioxide and organic material such as sewage - using algae as source of fuel would also help to clean up the environment.

The algae produce purer oil in terms of low carbon products than vegetable oil. It could mean less carbon dioxide emission when burned in the engines of vehicles.

However the new technology faces a few challenges too. One of them is the mass financial support in extracting the oil from the algae - it involves a form of complicated technology that costs a lot. Though scientists supporting algae biofuel remain optismistic that there would be better and more cost-efficient algae-oil-extracting technology being introduced in the near future.

In spite of that, it is still in question if the burning of algae biofuel would emit other harmful gases beyond carbon monoxide and green house gases.

It sounds almost the ideal solution to the problem of pollution causes by transportation - using algae biofuel requires less usage of lands than petroleum processing, less time of extracting than oil-palm planting, and they can be grown easily in mass.

However in the second part of the series Ecopolis, the host Dan Kammen examined all four advancements and decided that e-jeepney would be the best choice, considering that people should be encouraged to use public transportation.

Though the idea of algae biofuel still sounds the most interesting to me - imagine our cities fueled up with the oil extracted from these small little algae, we would be literally being lifted up by these small giants.

Although e-jeepney has been chosen by Kammen, but still, the idea of algae biofuel makes a food for thought - how could we have thought that things as small as an algae could be the big hope for our future on Earth?

This world always has its way of surprising us, in ways we least expected. Hope, can be found in the most impossible place.