Matthew Ponsford

@interspecies.agency

3901 Followers 4956 Following

Journalist writing about nature and culture. MIT Technology Review, BBC, The Guardian, and many more

Photographs of a dinosaur-looking bird, the shoebill, and popstar Sabrina Carpenter, overlaid with a height comparison showing both are 152 cm, with visual graphics saying the magazine's name SSWAGGER and some Chinese characters
A orange snail sits on a leaf, with swollen-looking green and white eye stalks with reddish black ends
Book review that begins: Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard’s hat near the northwestern corner of Spain. Today, Pico Sacro is venerated as a holy site and rumored, in the local mythology, to be a portal to hell. But this magic mountain has also become valued in modern times for a very different reason: the quartz deposits that resulted from these geological processes are some of the purest on the planet. Today, it is a rich source of the silicon used to build computer chips. From this dusty ground, the mineral is plucked and transformed into an inscrutable black void of pure inorganic technology, something that an art director could have dreamed up to stand in for aliens or the mirror image of earthly nature.