Hamelin Pool, Western Australia by Hilke Maunder

About "Hamelin Pool, Western Australia"

by Hilke Maunder

About the artwork

800 kilometres north of Perth, the capital of Western Australia, a man-high brick wall appears in the middle of the endless expanse of low bushland. "Shark Bay - World Heritage Area" welcomes visitors. The uniqueness of this World Heritage Site can be seen at Hamelin Pool, where descendants of the world's first living creatures created these formations 3.5 billion years ago - single-celled, blue-green algae without a cell nucleus. These simple cyanobacteria succeeded in creating complex organic compounds from the primordial soup of the oceans. Their building blocks: the water, the carbohydrates dissolved in it and the light of the sun. Their product: a biomass from which all other life emerged - rock-like towers, black, spongy mats and hump-like layered rocks.
However, the waste product of their intensive activity, which plants continue today as photosynthesis, dealt them the death blow: oxygen. Their two million years of production had changed the Earth's atmosphere: from oxygen-free to oxygen-rich, from reducing to oxidising. A climate change that killed the stromatolites. As fossilised rocks, they are a reminder of the global environmental catastrophe of prehistoric times. They survived the disaster in only two places worldwide: on Greenland, where the oldest stromatolites in the world, dating back 3.7 billion years, were discovered in 2016, and in Shark Bay. There, the salt saved them from extinction. The salt content of the bay is twice as high as in the open ocean - it still protects their biofilm today.