“Ah. I see. It’s – so it’s really going to – nothing. It’s nothing. Thanks very much for letting me know. Yes, of course. Yes, it’s wonderful news. Yes, I’ll be in touch. Thanks again.”
[Bravely, stiffly, tearfully] Brittney Griner and her fiancé Glory Johnson are going to be featured on an upcoming episode of Say Yes To The Dress. I wish Brittney every happiness.
Glory, if you ever hurt her…
Last night I drove out to San Francisco because I thought I had tickets to a Hannibal Buress show but it turns out his show is next month so we just wandered around and found a place that only sells bread pudding, which is something that seems like it might as well happen. It’s going to be fun to see him soon.
Sundance Diary Exploitation Blues
I’m not sure exactly why but the idea that you can boil, then unboil, then potentially RE-BOIL the selfsame egg is hypnotic to me. I long for this technology to become widely available.
IT’S FISH WHERE THERE AREN’T SUPPOSED TO BE ANY FISH:
This month, a National Science Foundation-funded expedition began drilling through the Whillans Ice Stream, a glacier that flows from the West Antarctic Ice Shelf to the Ross Ice Shelf. The team wanted to see how the ice was faring and responding to climate change, so they drilled to the glacier’s grounding zone — where it leaves bedrock and meets the sea.
At that zone, the sea bottom looks bare and “rocky, like a lunar surface,” glacial geologist Ross Powell told Douglas Fox for Scientific American. They sent a little underwater vehicle called Deep-SCINI down the borehole to investigate. Its cameras would capture images of the rocks and sediment down on the sea floor. The researchers took sediment cores and seawater samples, which betrayed only the presence of a few microbes — no sign of crustaceans or other life normally found at the bottom of the sea.
This wasn’t a surprise: Under 2,428 feet of ice and 528 miles from the edge of the ice shelf, the site is far from any hint of sunlight, the energy source that typically powers marine food webs. So the next thing they found was shocking.
The ROV had paused while technicians adjusted some controls (it was the bot’s maiden voyage) when they saw something through the down-looking camera. Fox writes:
A graceful, undulating shadow glided across its view, tapered front to back like an exclamation point—the shadow cast by a bulb-eyed fish. Then people saw the creature casting that shadow: bluish-brownish-pinkish, as long as a butter knife, its internal organs showing through its translucent body.
It was a fish. About 20 to 30 fish visited the ROV that day, perhaps attracted to light. And that wasn’t all. Two other kinds of fish, shrimp-like crustaceans and few other invertebrates were also spotted.
“I’ve worked in this area for my whole career,” Ross says. “You get the picture of these areas having very little food, being desolate, not supporting much life.”
The food web down there is still unknown. “Food is in short supply and any energy gained is hard-won,” says Brent Christner, a microbiologist from Louisiana State University. “This is a tough place to live.” Without sunlight, the scant microbes there might be relying on chemical energy — minerals delivered by the moving ice above, currents traveling long distances or seeping up from sediments. “The lack of mud dwellers might indicate that animals living this far under the ice shelf must be mobile enough to follow intermittent food sources from place to place,” writes Fox.
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I WILL READ ANYTHING ABOUT THE BODIES LEFT ON EVEREST AND THIS IS NO EXCEPTION
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I saw The Wedding Ringer! It was no good. Watch the Conservative Student Caucus episode of Party Down instead for some good Josh Gad.
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Lindy West’s episode of This American Life (about TROLLS) is up; I’m going to listen to it this afternoon and I invite you to join me.
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Hey, here’s the first episode of David The Gnome if you want something peaceful and gentle to watch:
this is one fluffy chicken ok that’s all
