Huh
> they have been observed in Alaska, Chile, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Uganda and Venezuela
Well, today I learned, Venezuela has glaciers.
Then I googled that, and…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/...
And so today I learned, Venezuela used to have glaciers.
Always love seeing a link to wikipedia.org on the front page. Pretty much guaranteed to make me go "oh, neat" :)
Agreed. I would follow a bluesky/mastodon/rss thing that shares every time a Wikipedia article hits the front page.
When I used Kagi, my favourite feature was pinning Wikipedia to the top of all results.
Why don't you use it anymore?
I did a bit of searching, and couldn't find a single timelapse of glacier mice movement. Time for a trip to the mountains with some cameras!
Volunteering as a potential random travel buddy here. I’m not sure if I have the time but let’s see if we can figure something out if you are potentially up for it. My email is in profile
I have found a video (under a minute long) of a backpacking group walking through a herd of glacier mice in Alaska: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4fHfDrfoJw. I'd love to see a timelapse of glacier mice moving.
I’m actually surprised there isn’t Timelapse of it already. Seems like a simple enough setup to gather basically all of the information needed for finalizing how they move.
If you put me on that surface I don't think I would have any idea it was a glacier.
Here in Switzerland when children order shrimp at a restaurant I tell them that they come from the shrimp mines in the glaciers.
If they don't know about tapioca pearls, please keep in mind they resemble fish eggs.
Oh the lies we tell our children to protect them! When is the right time to tell them they’ve been dredged en masse from their homes in the ocean and left to die in a crate on the deck of a shrimping vessel? Or that they were possibly bred into existence in a facility of controlled environments intended to mimic their homes in nature where they’re allowed to live until they’re large enough to be eaten by ignorant people, inconsiderate of the miserable, short lives they’ve lived?
It's ok they're just bugs
Aren’t we all.
I use the same argument with dog meat.
You managed to talk with the dog from fallout 1?
I would say they are features.
I think you’ll find that words have definitions that can be changed.
I clicked the picture first without reading any of the article and was wondering "where are the mice? they must be well camouflaged!"
same!
TIL. Life never ceases to amaze.
Wait until you hear about Ice Worms
And sailing stones, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones and toneballs https://luthierblogmartinahawe.wordpress.com/toneballs/
Thanks to your comment TIL that snow algae is a thing
Another fun one is Mima Mounds, mounds found all over and especially in North America that don’t have established causes
Also a reminder that a lot of life is basic physics and a simple state machine.
e.g. even the development of eyeballs started with a slightly photoreceptive skin cell and then evolution hill climbing took care of the rest.
But that's fine too. If the complexity of the natural world is just emergent behaviors, then emergence itself never ceases to amaze. Because one wouldn't normally expect that our "cold" physical laws could lead to the variety of life.
I highly recommend the book "Deep Simplicity" by John Gribbin.^1
It explores precisely this topic: the emergence of unexpectedly rich, complex behaviors from very simple rules given feedback and sensitivity to initial conditions.
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71851/deep-simplici...
Another recommendation, with a biological slant: One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind by Nikolay Kukushkin.
Dunno about you, but I was really hoping to see mice not moss :/
jökla-mýs is a wonderful name, you gotta love icelandic. A swede might also associate it too "jäkla mys" - god damn cozy!
reminds me vaguely of "Sailing Stones"
> This suggests that this water buoyantly lifts the ice floes with embedded rocks until friction with the playa bed is reduced sufficiently for wind to move them and cause the observed tracks.
Wow, that's nuts!
My first thought as well!
Remember seeing these in Iceland
...Poppa was a rolling stone...
Am I the only one who immediately thought of tribbles?
Yes
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Interestingly, the US has ADDED a glacier in the last 30 years, that of Mount St Helens, which was able to form after the explosion in 1980. It is the youngest glacier on earth
It had 13 glaciers pre-eruption, so perhaps "added" is doing a lot of heavy lifting :)
We need to go nuclear with the newer type of plants. Built at scale, they are cost effective. Otherwise we are cooked, perhaps quite literally.
Venus scenario? I wonder if that could happen. Time to explore that rabbit hole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronauts