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'Glacier mice' baffle scientists
- AlbertoGP 3y ago> In 1950, Icelandic researcher Jón Eyþórsson came across a gathering of fuzzy green puff balls, the size of small gerbils, scattered across Hrútárjökull Glacier in the southeast of the country. Curiously, the mossy balls weren’t attached to the ground, and many were green on all sides, indicating they must slowly turn so that the entire exterior sees the sun at some point, theorized Eyþórsson. That fall, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal of Glaciology. “I call these mossy balls Jökla-mýs, literally ‘glacier mice,’” he wrote, “and you will have noted, Sir, that rolling stones can gather moss.” > [...] > Glacier moss balls can grow up to about eight inches long before they fall apart, and can live at least six years. The one on the right was tagged with beads by researchers.
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- JoshTko 3y agoTumblemoss
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoThat's rather nice.
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- nimish 3y agoFrozen marimo?
- bacon_waffle 3y agoYukimarimo are a thing: https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/yukimarimo/ https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/yukimarimo...
- antiquark 3y agoRolling moss gathers no stones.
- vlachen 3y agoEven better, rolling moss removes its stones. Surely there's a life-lesson in there, ready to be ejected like dust from a glacier mouse.
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- MPSimmons 3y agoThis gives Racetrack Playa vibes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_Playa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_Playa They eventually discovered that the playa would occasionally flood, then freeze at night, trapping the rocks in the ice, and wind would then push the ice sheets with the rocks embedded, which would cause the tracks that gave the area its name.
- m463 3y agoI was thinking the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
- abledon 3y agoYou think they'd put a youtube video in the article..... to show.. ya know.. the movement
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- Jensson 3y agoFound this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4fHfDrfoJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4fHfDrfoJw Doesn't show movement but shows how they look in the wild, even has a cracked one that is about to form two new balls. You clearly see they aren't just mossy stones, since there are stones lying around with no moss, it is more like a colony of moss balls. I can easily imagine early life looking like that.
- Sharlin 3y agoToday in nominative determinism: Glaciologist Tim Bartholomaus studies glacier mice.
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- chrisweekly 3y ago"nominative determinism" Thank you! I knew there was a good name for this; my vet's last name is Betsy McStay...
- stavros 3y agoI'm guessing there's some umlaut missing over the a.
- etothepii 3y agoI don't know why but this article felt like a LLM hallucination.
- devmor 3y agoI felt the same. It's the writing style of self-contained sentences that don't lead into the next, for me.
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- nerpderp82 3y agoLike a glacial tumbleweed made of moss. This is wonderful!
- deadbabe 3y agoMoss is one of those things that is tricky to eat, but very rewarding if you find the right species and know what you’re doing! Fluffy goodness
- stavros 3y agoThis is one comment I never thought I'd read.
- yieldcrv 3y agoreminds me of Scavenger’s Reign
- jldugger 3y agoIs this any different than the sailing stones of death valley?
- Jensson 3y agoThese are alive and you can see them moving from day to day.
- prvc 3y ago>The factors that orchestrate their coordinated movements is still a mystery. I'd propose that the path of the sun biases the mice's movements in the same direction, since the ice in their shadows will be colder.
- Jensson 3y agoBut then they would move in the same general direction every day, if it was that easy it would have already been solved.
- prvc 3y agoNo, just over time.
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- Jensson 3y agoThey tracked the balls for two months, if it was easy to see that they always move X direction during a sunny day they would know. That is likely the first thing they checked, we know that plants can turn to face the sun.
- prvc 3y agoBecause the terrain is never perfectly uniform, the pattern might not be evident within a small period of time, like one day.
- stainablesteel 3y ago> “Nobody’s lives depend on this,” says Bartholomaus it would actually be pretty cool to see glaciers covered in greenery rather than have them melt away into nothing, maybe more of these things would be helpful it unironically sounds like a climate initiative cultivate and mutate these to be faster growing, especially given that they seem to shield the ice beneath. what a neat substrate for a plant