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Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick.

And today we're going to be doing the second part in our series on the single-celled photosynthetic organisms called diatoms.

And also focusing on the silica-based sedimentary material made out of the fossilized remains of diatom shells. This material is diatomaceous

Earth. If you haven't heard part one, I would recommend you go back and listen to that one before

today's episode, but for a brief refresher in the last episode, we talked a bit about diatom biology.

Diatoms are single-celled eukaryotic photosynthetic algae found in

nearly every natural water source on planet Earth, including not just lakes, rivers, and oceans,

but even more out of the way places like damp soil and Arctic sea ice. They are not plants. They are not animals.

They're not fungi. But they do have a cell nucleus and they make their own food using energy from the sunlight.

Diatoms are a major source of both oxygen in Earth's atmosphere and primary organic material in the ocean.

So they're responsible for estimates vary but about one-fifth of the air we breathe,

and they make up a major part of the base of the marine food web.

So if an animal is eating something in the sea,

there's a good chance that either it's a diatom or it's something that ate a diatom or it's something that ate a diatom.

Yeah.

So one of the most important and unique characteristics of diatoms, the thing that really sets them apart from other algal and planktonic organisms

in the water, is that they create a rigid, fortified cell wall out of amorphous silica. So essentially,

...