. .                       Photographs / Text by Darlyne A. Murawski

Hailed as "optical magic" and "aesthetic paradise" by the photographer, enjoy the brilliant effects that prisms and polarized light have on these microscopic shells. Delight in diatoms that assume the forms of "breakfast cereal, flying coffee tables ... gliding smiles and ghostly ladders" and discover how Victorian hobbyists created artworks out of them.

Diatoms are the microscopic algae that inhabit our fresh water and oceans. Comprised of over 70,000 species and accounting for over one quarter of plant life, diatoms serve as an important food source for marine life, they provide over one quarter of the oxygen we breathe, and in death they turn into petroleum on the ocean floor while their skeletons are mined as filters and abrasives.

"Diatoms, Plants with a Touch of Glass" uncovers a kaleidoscopic world boasting unique variations of color, symmetry and grace.

NGM 1999/02                                                                                                                                                                                                          SELECT IMAGES AVAILABLE: 75