Dr. Jood
Al Aswad.

For most of the history of life, the ocean was not one ocean but many. Every sea kept its own creatures living in unique mosaics of communities. It held that way for ages, and the sea sang with many voices.

Then Siberia opened. The ground bled fire, the air thickened, and the heat went down into the water. Warm water holds less oxygen and asks more of the animals in it, and many could not meet those demands.

The dying was enormous, but when the water settled it was not empty.

It was alike.

The same few survivors spread out to every community, in places that had shared nothing before. The ocean did not fall silent. It sang one note, and ages passed before the many voices returned.

Not every catastrophe does this. A meteor fell and took three quarters of all life, faster than anything before or since, and still each community in the seas kept its own character. Emptied, but not made the same.

So it is not the scale of the ruin, but two things arriving in the same hour: warm water and mass death. Only both at once, all around the world in great intensity, makes every place the same place.

So I look at these stories of past lives and think of what comes after humans, and whether we may end up with one oceanic mosaic where we used to have many.

I also draw digitally and with charcoal, and I'm writing a high fantasy novel woven through with biology and geology. I build fantasy worlds out of the same material I study: deep time, ocean life, and what survives!