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Glacier Mice
- glimshe 19d agoTIL. Life never ceases to amaze.
- alexpotato 19d agoAlso 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.
- glimshe 19d agoBut 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.
- chrisweekly 19d agoI 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-simplicity-by-john-gribbin/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71851/deep-simplici...
- FabHK 19d agoAnother recommendation, with a biological slant: One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind by Nikolay Kukushkin. https://nikolaykukushkin.com/book https://nikolaykukushkin.com/book
- davidjade 19d agoWait until you hear about Ice Worms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_worm
- grvbck 19d agoThanks to your comment TIL that snow algae is a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_algae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_algae
- Aboutplants 19d agoAnother fun one is Mima Mounds, mounds found all over and especially in North America that don’t have established causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mima_mounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mima_mounds
- Rendello 19d agoFrom your article: > "Mima" is a name derived from a Chinook Jargon term meaning "a little further along or "downstream". To keep the random learning going, Chinook Jargon [1] is fascinating in itself. A few years ago someone on this site suggested a book called You Can't Win, an autobiography of a reformed hobo/thief/addict written in the 20s. It's fantastic, especially the audiobook version on Spotify. Googling now, I'm seeing it got a (poorly reviewed) movie adaptation this year [2]. Anyway, when locked in a British Colombia jail around the turn of the century, the thief/author used it to communicate with his Chinese cellmate [3]: > A priest visited the jail one day and gave me a pamphlet on which he had printed the Chinook language. In answer to my question he told me it contained about three hundred words—nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It was created by the Hudson Bay traders, years before, and taught to all the Northwest Indians to simplify trading with the different tribes. […] > One day he came in with a scared-looking China boy about twenty years old. “Yank, here’s a cellmate for you.” He locked the Chinese in, thinking he was punishing me. The China boy later proved the jailer’s undoing and my deliverance. He knew some Chinook, but not one word of English. I learned from the Indian trusty that he was held for trial, charged with stealing a considerable sum of money from his employer, and that his case was about as hopeless as mine. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon 2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402593/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402593/ 3. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69404/pg69404-images.html#:~:text=Chinook%20language https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69404/pg69404-images.ht...
- comrade1234 19d agoHere in Switzerland when children order shrimp at a restaurant I tell them that they come from the shrimp mines in the glaciers.
- nyanmatt 19d ago[flagged]
- sanex 19d agoIt's ok they're just bugs
- nannal 19d agoI use the same argument with dog meat.
- NuclearPM 19d agoDogs are bugs?
- throwaway173738 19d agoI think you’ll find that words have definitions that can be changed.
- the_gipsy 19d ago#define bug dog
- ArekDymalski 19d agoI would say they are features.
- halflife 19d agoYou managed to talk with the dog from fallout 1?
- aaron695 19d ago[dead]
- enjrolas 19d agoI 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!
- ck2 19d agoreminds me vaguely of "Sailing Stones" * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
- jameshart 19d agoHuh > 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/venezuela-loses-its-last-glacier-as-it-shrinks-down-to-an-ice-field https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/... And so today I learned, Venezuela used to have glaciers.
- BenFranklin100 19d agoWe need to go nuclear with the newer type of plants. Built at scale, they are cost effective. Otherwise we are cooked, perhaps quite literally.
- pineaux 19d agoVenus scenario? I wonder if that could happen. Time to explore that rabbit hole
- pmlnr 19d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronauts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronauts
- telchior 18d agoThere are multiple hyper-warming scenarios that have been postulated over the years. Look up the clathrate gun, ocean circulation collapse, arctic albedo flip.. some are now considered unlikely. I don't know if any would be a Venus scenario, probably not. But we don't really need that much warming to kill ourselves off. Average global temps in the Eucene were up to double what they are today, that would do the job :)
- Gravityloss 18d agoAnd while not all the way to Venus, Earth's history has multiple mass extinction catastrophes that have happened. Some have been due to things like asteroids, or volcanism but also just chemical imbalance. An ice age is small beans compared to those...
- noncovalence 19d agoAlways love seeing a link to wikipedia.org on the front page. Pretty much guaranteed to make me go "oh, neat" :)
- hrldcpr 19d agoAgreed. I would follow a bluesky/mastodon/rss thing that shares every time a Wikipedia article hits the front page.
- yorwba 19d agohttps://hnrss.org/frontpage?q=wikipedia.org&search_attrs=url https://hnrss.org/frontpage?q=wikipedia.org&search_attrs=url
- hrldcpr 18d agoDang this looks perfect, but sadly is giving a 502 error at the moment.
- moehm 18d agoAt your service, I'm running this since 2020: https://www.mostdiscussed.com/ https://www.mostdiscussed.com/ (Edit: Here is the direct link to the RSS feed): https://www.mostdiscussed.com/feed/new https://www.mostdiscussed.com/feed/new I also have a automatic bridge to Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@MostDiscussed https://mastodon.social/@MostDiscussed If you have feedback please share it with me. For the Mastodon bridge I use Mastofeed: https://mastofeed.org/ https://mastofeed.org/
- hrldcpr 18d agoAwesome thanks! I can't tell, did Glacier Mice make the cut? On a first pass, I don't see it.
- moehm 18d agoYes, it did: https://www.mostdiscussed.com/article/453137 https://www.mostdiscussed.com/article/453137 The article was originally published on 2026-08-24 (probably tampered by HN for a second chance), so currently it's on position #6 on the news feed.
- sooperT 19d agoDunno about you, but I was really hoping to see mice not moss :/
- dburkland 19d agoRemember seeing these in Iceland
- kaffekaka 19d agojökla-mýs is a wonderful name, you gotta love icelandic. A swede might also associate it too "jäkla mys" - god damn cozy!
- runarberg 18d agoDescribed by legendery meteorologist Jón Eyþórsson who funnily enough has a lyric (well just a little ferskeytla) listed on Ísmús https://ismus.is/einstaklingar/5381 https://ismus.is/einstaklingar/5381
- nephihaha 18d agoIn its sister language of Faroese, they call the wren "músabróðir" meaning "mousebrother". I always found that quite cute.
- emirenesergin 19d ago[flagged]
- trindell4469 19d agoAm I the only one who immediately thought of tribbles?
- jb1991 19d agoYes
- networked 19d agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4fHfDrfoJw. I'd love to see a timelapse of glacier mice moving.
- Aboutplants 19d agoI’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.
- madaxe_again 18d agoWe have something similar where I live - no glaciers involved though, just river rocks. The river dries up rapidly in the summer, leaving the smooth exposed bedrock riverbed peppered with rounded river rocks covered with drying algae. Where the river is partially shaded, the rocks rapidly grow moss and other vegetation on their top surface. They preserve what little precipitation there is, and catch the morning dew. They grow top heavy, and fall over. They then repeat this on the next upwards facing surface. Meanwhile the downwards facing surface dries out from the radiant heat from the bedrock and shrivels into a thin black layer of desiccated biomass, which then partially falls off at the next rotation, further increasing the top-heaviness. Over the course of a summer, the rocks all collect themselves into the local low-points of the river bed. Then comes the flood and the cycle repeats.
- Aboutplants 18d agoI saw a YouTube video of a professor explaining this exact thing as an explanation for these Glacier Mice. There is a whole lot of biomass that is shifting on those balls, driving by access to sunlight which in turn causes the response you explained above. Makes a lot of sense to me!
- andrewflnr 19d agoIf you put me on that surface I don't think I would have any idea it was a glacier.
- joe-esquibel 19d ago...Poppa was a rolling stone...
- Aardwolf 19d agoI clicked the picture first without reading any of the article and was wondering "where are the mice? they must be well camouflaged!"
- jtd_wakeseed 19d agosame!
- asmodeuslucifer 19d agoSlightly related, ice worms https://glaciers.nichols.edu/iceworm/ https://glaciers.nichols.edu/iceworm/
- ta93754829 18d agohuh funny name that. When I hiked a glacier in Norway, dead mice (and other things) were everywhere under the ice. I assumed that's what the title was referring to.
- chuckadams 18d agoTurns out that rolling stones do in fact gather moss.