What Can We Do Today? (+ компакт-кассета) English for Me!

Stromatolites came in various shapes and sizes. Sometimes they looked like enormous cauliflowers, sometimes like fluffy mattresses (stromatolite comes from the Greek for БЂњmattressБЂ«), sometimes they came in the form of columns, rising tens of meters above the surface of the water-sometimes as high as a hundred meters. In all their manifestations, they were a kind of living rock, and they represented the worldБЂ™s first cooperative venture, with some varieties of primitive organism living just at the surface and others living just underneath, each taking advantage of conditions created by the other. The world had its first ecosystem. For many years, scientists knew about stromatolites from fossil formations, but in 1961 they got a real surprise with the discovery of a community of living stromatolites at Shark Bay on the remote northwest coast of Australia. This was most unexpected-so unexpected, in fact, that it was some years before scientists realized quite what they had found. Today, however, Shark Bay is a tourist attraction-or at least as much of a tourist attraction as a place hundreds of miles from anywhere much and dozens of miles from anywhere at all can ever be ...»