Warm Cider

thinking about diatoms again

microscopic living stars made of glass that eat the sun. and they're all around us. in every body of water. glass sun-eating stars.

and you know. like oblongs and triangles and some other bullshit

When I saw this photo I was sure it had been altered in some way, because no way you get so many different diatoms so artfully arranged on a slide. It's uncredited so I had to use image search and found out that all those tiny diatom shells were arranged by hand by W. Watson&Sons and photographed by Martin Mach sometime around 2000. One reblogger thinks it's from Contemporary Artistic Arrangements Of Microscopic Diatoms by Klaus Kemp, but it's 14 years too late for that. This photo has been circulating the internet since at least 2008. Klaus Kemp's arrangements are very beautiful though.

thanks for grabbing the source! hand arranging diatoms is such an underappreciated art form to me.....