March 18
Life As We Know It
This stunning photograph by Keith Chambers*, displayed by permission, gives me pause each time I see it. The cover image used on Adamantine is from the same series. Several people have asked me about where the cover photo was captured, while others have recognized it as Mono Lake, located in California’s Eastern Sierra region.
We selected our cover photo because I felt that the reflective landscape of the tufa columns and still waters echoed the shape of an audio waveform, and more importantly, resonated with the mood I was trying to get across with the record.
In his 1882 book, Roughing It, Mark Twain called Mono Lake “…one of the strangest freaks of Nature to be found in any land.”
Twain continues: Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sail-less sea—this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.
More recently, the unique bio-activity in the lake—actually one of the world’s most productive ecosystems despite its bleak appearance—has led some researchers to theorize that Mono Lake may be host to “weird life” microbes that have adapted to living within great concentrations of arsenic, possibly even life forms of extraterrestrial origin. It is an amazing place worth seeing, understanding, and protecting.
*Please note that this image may not be used or reproduced without the written permission of the photographer.
