Figure D1 GLACIAL

As we descend, with clouds of foggy breath

We enter a bleak citadel of ice

Facing a frozen plain. Nothing but death,

It seems, rules here: see the heavy price

Paid by the Earth, locked in a chilly vice.

Yet it was tiny microbes made this pall

(An age, yet in Earth’s ages but a trice)

Whose oxygen made greenhouse gases fall:

Thus see a world transforméd by the very small.