"The day came for the tropical trial at the field station in Northern Queensland. A culture of P. eegarii was without ceremony sprayed in diluted form upon a small patch of experimental rice paddy. But here the bacterium forsook its contrived marriage with the cereal plants {40} and formed a more exciting but adulterous union with a tough and self-sufficient blue-green alga growing on the water surface of the paddy field. They grew happily together, doubling in numbers every twenty minutes in the warm tropical environment, the air and soil providing all they needed. Small predatory organisms would normally have ensured a check on such a development, but this combination was not to be stopped. Its capacity to gather phosphorus rendered the environment barren for everything else.
Within hours, the rice paddy and those around it took on the appearance of a ripe duck pond covered with lurid iridescent green scum. It was realized that something had gone badly wrong and the scientists soon uncovered the association of P. eegarii and the alga. Foreseeing the dangers with rare promptness, they arranged that the entire paddy area and the water channels leading from it be treated with a biocide and the growth destroyed.
That night, Dr Eeger and his Australian colleagues went late to bed, tired and worried. The dawn fulfilled their worst fears. The new bloom, like some living verdigris, covered the surface of a small stream a mile away from the paddies and only a few miles from the sea. Again, every agent of destruction was applied wherever the new organism might have travelled. The director of the Queensland station tried desperately but in vain to persuade the government to evacuate the area at once and use a hydrogen bomb to sterilize it before the spread was beyond all possibility of control.
In two days the algal bloom had started to spread into the coastal waters, and by then it was too late. Within a week the green stain was clearly visible to airline passengers flying six miles above the Gulf of Carpentaria. Within six months more than half of the ocean and most of the land surfaces were covered with a thick green slime which fed voraciously on the dead trees and animal life decaying beneath it."
EDIT: Added full title of the book.