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THE MORE THEY'VE BEEN SHRINKING, the bigger it's been getting, though maybe that's the wrong way to put it. The world's great coral reefs, that is, and in particular Australia's Great Barrier Reef, on the one hand - and, on the other, the Great Hyperbolic Crocheted Reef, brainspawn originally of a pair of Brisbane twins, transplanted to Los Angeles, alarmed at the harrowing fate ofthat beloved natural wonder and national treasure back home. For the Great Barrier Reef has, in fact, been dying off at a near precipitous rate of late - such that almost a third of its once magisterial 133,000 square miles (stretching out along 1,200 miles of the Queensland coast - the world's largest organism, the first living structure visible to any craft approaching from outer space) has over the past couple decades been spiraling into collapse, a direct result, it now appears, of the rising ocean temperatures and sea acidification which are being occasioned (as predicted) by global climatic change. "The canary in the coalmine of global warming," is how Margaret Wertheim, one of the twins, describes the status of all the world's endangered reefs: a catastrophe that can no longer be dismissed as merely putative or hypothetical or looming, but one that is already well upon us, or so the shrinking reefs keep telling us, plain as day.
Which in turn makes the inspired provocation of Margaret and her sister Christine - this Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef - the AIDS Quilt, as it were, of global warming: a vast and growing act of witness; a remarkable amalgam of non-Euclidean mathematics, marine biology, evolutionary dynamics, environmentalist concern, feminine handicrafts, and good old-fashioned community activism; a dazzlingly colorful and ever- expanding marvel in its own right, somehow simultaneously as much an occasion for hushed wonder as a call for urgent action; a creation almost as vivid and pulsatingly alive as the reefs to whose perilous situation it so urgently seeks to draw attention. "I think the Great Barrier Reef represents to Australians what something like Yosemite or Yellowstone represent to Americans," Margaret says. "It's kind of this mythical place that we're very aware we're the custodians of. But in the last decade, reefs all over the world, and certainly the Great Barrier...