What interesting about these 'glacier mice' is the moss forms into a ball that somehow roll around which is why the moss on the bottom of the ball doesn't die.

What interesting about these 'glacier mice' is the moss forms into a ball that somehow roll around which is why the moss on the bottom of the ball doesn't die. So far they can't figure out what makes them roll. >The researchers considered several possible explanations. The first, and most obvious one, is that they just rolled downhill. But measurements showed that the moss balls weren't going down a slope. "We next thought maybe the wind is sort of blowing them in consistent directions," says Bartholomaus, "and so we measured the dominant direction of the wind." That didn't explain it either, nor did the pattern of the sunlight. "We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled." "It's always kind of exciting, though, when things don't comply with your hypothesis, with the way you think things work," says Gilbert. The work has charmed other glacier scientists who dote on the adorable moss balls. "I think that probably the explanation is somewhere in the physics of the energy and the heat around the surface of the glacier, but we haven't quite got there yet," says Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.