And so today I learned, Venezuela used to have glaciers.
hammock 1 days ago [-]
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
nsilvestri 1 days ago [-]
It had 13 glaciers pre-eruption, so perhaps "added" is doing a lot of heavy lifting :)
nephihaha 15 hours ago [-]
West Papua still has glaciers, which I was surprised at.
Quarrel 11 hours ago [-]
I was amazed equatorial / tropical glaciers are much of a thing.
A sad search later:
"projected to vanish entirely in late 2026 or 2027"
They've apparently disappeared and returned a few times since the last iceage.
nephihaha 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, there have been a surprising number, and not just in the Andes and Himalayas where you would expect.
There have been a few in Africa in modern times. Some of them have disappeared.
actionfromafar 11 hours ago [-]
TIL Venezuela used to have oil.
BenFranklin100 1 days ago [-]
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.
pineaux 1 days ago [-]
Venus scenario? I wonder if that could happen. Time to explore that rabbit hole
telchior 13 hours ago [-]
There 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 11 hours ago [-]
And 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...
Dang this looks perfect, but sadly is giving a 502 error at the moment.
enjrolas 1 days ago [-]
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!
mettamage 1 days ago [-]
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
enjrolas 20 hours ago [-]
Heck yeah
networked 1 days ago [-]
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.
Aboutplants 1 days ago [-]
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.
madaxe_again 18 hours ago [-]
We 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 12 hours ago [-]
I 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 1 days ago [-]
If you put me on that surface I don't think I would have any idea it was a glacier.
comrade1234 2 days ago [-]
Here in Switzerland when children order shrimp at a restaurant I tell them that they come from the shrimp mines in the glaciers.
soupspaces 1 days ago [-]
If they don't know about tapioca pearls, please keep in mind they resemble fish eggs.
nyanmatt 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sanex 1 days ago [-]
It's ok they're just bugs
nannal 1 days ago [-]
I use the same argument with dog meat.
halflife 1 days ago [-]
You managed to talk with the dog from fallout 1?
NuclearPM 1 days ago [-]
Dogs are bugs?
throwaway173738 1 days ago [-]
I think you’ll find that words have definitions that can be changed.
the_gipsy 1 days ago [-]
#define bug dog
ArekDymalski 1 days ago [-]
I would say they are features.
encomiast 1 days ago [-]
Aren’t we all.
ta93754829 19 hours ago [-]
huh 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 10 hours ago [-]
Turns out that rolling stones do in fact gather moss.
kaffekaka 1 days ago [-]
jökla-mýs is a wonderful name, you gotta love icelandic. A swede might also associate it too "jäkla mys" - god damn cozy!
nephihaha 16 hours ago [-]
In its sister language of Faroese, they call the wren "músabróðir" meaning "mousebrother". I always found that quite cute.
runarberg 18 hours ago [-]
Described by legendery meteorologist Jón Eyþórsson who funnily enough has a lyric (well just a little ferskeytla) listed on Ísmús
But at the right time of a cold winter day (late evening), at the right place (I saw it in a forest) you can see spiders walking all over the snow hunting.
If you see it in person it's a really weird phenomen. Makes you realize how many spiders there actually are too.
Aboutplants 1 days ago [-]
Another fun one is Mima Mounds, mounds found all over and especially in North America that don’t have established causes
> "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.
I like how they installed a GPS module into one of the rocks to track its path.
alexpotato 1 days ago [-]
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.
glimshe 1 days ago [-]
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.
chrisweekly 1 days ago [-]
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.
> 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!
eleventen 1 days ago [-]
My first thought as well!
sooperT 1 days ago [-]
Dunno about you, but I was really hoping to see mice not moss :/
dburkland 1 days ago [-]
Remember seeing these in Iceland
trindell4469 1 days ago [-]
Am I the only one who immediately thought of tribbles?
> 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.
A sad search later:
"projected to vanish entirely in late 2026 or 2027"
They're at 4600m in elevation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carstensz_Glacier
They've apparently disappeared and returned a few times since the last iceage.
There have been a few in Africa in modern times. Some of them have disappeared.
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 :)
The number of US companies I support is usually queried, and I do avoid several of them too.
It's certainly tested my will more than more than I expected - Kagi is an amazing search.
https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
(Edit: Here is the direct link to the RSS feed):
https://www.mostdiscussed.com/feed/new
I also have a automatic bridge to Mastodon:
https://mastodon.social/@MostDiscussed
If you have feedback please share it with me.
For the Mastodon bridge I use Mastofeed:
https://mastofeed.org/
I can't tell, did Glacier Mice make the cut? On a first pass, I don't see it.
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.
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.
https://ismus.is/einstaklingar/5381
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_worm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_algae
But at the right time of a cold winter day (late evening), at the right place (I saw it in a forest) you can see spiders walking all over the snow hunting.
If you see it in person it's a really weird phenomen. Makes you realize how many spiders there actually are too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mima_mounds
> "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
2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402593/
3. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69404/pg69404-images.ht...
e.g. even the development of eyeballs started with a slightly photoreceptive skin cell and then evolution hill climbing took care of the rest.
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...
https://nikolaykukushkin.com/book
https://glaciers.nichols.edu/iceworm/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
Wow, that's nuts!