The kraken wakes

 

Or maybe it never went back to sleep. Is this the new normal now?

Orcas are attacking boats in Europe again

True horror

 

This is very, very bizarre. Viewer discretion is strongly advised here! 

This is us now

 

There is something strangely reassuring about our ultimate evolutionary ancestors being "Asgard Archaea" found inside "Loki´s Castle" in the Atlantic Ocean midway between Iceland and Svalbard. 

The hypothesis is that an archaeum captured a bacterium...and this became the first eukaryotic cell. All (?) extant living creatures which aren´t Archaea or Bacteria are Eukaryota, including humans. The idea that our evolutionary ancestor was a hybrid between two different lineages (presumably combining the best traits of both) is obviously also appealing. Are you listening, Lynn Margulis? 

Note also that we are no longer bacteria "cladistically speaking", but rather archaea. Thank you. Always considered archaea to be more cool somehow!

This is us now.  

The science of reality

 

It seems everyone in the world is impacted by climate change... 

Trump´s Mar-a-Lago is in for a dunking

Let´s take a look at Mar-a-Lago

Ice, ice baby

 

AMOC again...

Sabine Hossenfelder seriously worries about northern Europe (including Sweden) becoming dramatically *colder* due to man-made climate change. Perhaps with as much as 10 degrees Centigrade on average! The reason is the so-called collapse of the Gulf Stream (actually the AMOC).

Weirdly, southern Europe will see heat waves instead, while the fate of Sabine´s native Germany is unclear, being hemmed in between the super-cold north and the super-hot south. At the very least, it won´t be pretty. 

Does this mean we can´t just move to some nice cabin in the Bavarian countryside to escape the apocalypse? 

Well, actually

 

AI´s fantasy picture of a basking shark 

"Sveriges hav - Nordsjöns giganter" is a somewhat peculiar nature documentary, probably German in provenance, but I haven´t been able to locate the original version. The Swedish title means "The Seas of Sweden - Giants of the North Sea".

Ahem, the North Sea is *not* Swedish...

Indeed, most of the docu seems to be taped on or around the Shetland Islands, which are (of course) British?! Not sure who came up with the idea to call this a "Swedish" documentary. Some old Viking romantic? Dude!

But sure, if you like dramatic vistas, this might be for you. Killer whales, basking sharks, grey seals, sea otters, dolphins, skuas attacking and eating puffins, the invasive red king crab...you get the picture. Shetland sure looks pretty dangerous, LOL. 

  

Heinrich event

 

AMOC again. 

Have we reached a tipping point, beyond which the AMOC will slow down and disappear over a period over decades or 100 years, making northern Europe much *colder* than today? Temperatures in western Norway could drop by as much as 20 degrees centigrade! 

There are also estimates that a collapse of AMOC might adversely affect food security globally. Meanwhile, temperature in the rest of the world will continue rising, leading to a truly "global weirding".

Note also the cope at the end about the Paris Agreement blah-blah. Yeah, whatever.   

"We don´t consider it low probability anymore"

The land of desolation

 

So I just watched the nature documentary "Wild Ireland: Kingdom of Stone", about the apparently world famous karst landscape between County Clare and County Galway known as the Burren. I admit I never heard about it before! Or maybe I did, since parts of this docu reminds me of - surprise - other documentaries about western Ireland.

Animals shown include the pine marten, Daubenton´s bat, whooper swans and the butterfly known as the marsh fritillary. In the Atlantic Ocean we also find the finback whale (the world´s second largest animal) and the basking shark (the world´s second largest fish). The basking sharks occasionally gather in one place and swim in a large circle, nobody really knows why. But yes, it does look majestic.

The Burren also has an interesting human history. Here we find Neolithic grave monuments, abandoned churches and monasteries, and a mysterious tower once inhabited by none other than W B Yeats (who apparently saw whooper swans as near-divine). Indeed, the landscape is man-made in the sense that Neolithic farmers cut down all the trees, presumably to give room for agriculture and cattle. 

"The Kingdom of Stone" has a romantic (or Romantic) undertone, and frequently shows ravens (?) flying across the bizarre landscape of karst and ruins. Ahem, Ireland is a modern, globalized territory these days...

Still, could be interesting on a boring Wednesday evening. 

Welcome to the Sargasso Sea

 

- I´m not a plant, dude.
I´m just posing as one to trick the eels!

Eh, so brown algae (including kelp in the Sargasso Sea) are not *really* plants, but some kind of mega-sized protists?! Aaaargh, bring back Boomer science! 

>>>Kelps are large brown algae or seaweeds that make up the order Laminariales. There are about 30 different genera. Despite its appearance, kelp is not a plant but a stramenopile, a group containing many protists.

>>>Seaweed were generally considered homologues of terrestrial plants but are only very distantly related to plants, and have evolved plant-like structures through convergent evolution. Where plants have leaves, stems, and reproductive organs, kelp have independently evolved blades, stipes, and sporangia. 

>>>With radiometric dating vascular plants have been measured as having evolved around 419–454 Ma while the ancestors of Laminariales are much younger at 189 Ma.

Evolution is even crazier than we *can* know, LOL.

Reverse aging

 

A comb jelly
Credit: Steven G Johnson

A kind of weird experiment, would probably have been considered cruelty to animals had it not been a primitive/basal jellyfish-like organism, so the RSPCA and the ALF don´t give shit! Still, I suppose the ability to "reverse aging" is...interesting. What a pity it´s only cnidarians, comb jellies and the dog tapeworm (!) that has this unusual ability. 

This sea creature can age in reverse

The next link goes to a Wiki article about "Ming the Mollusk", a quahog clam and the oldest animal ever recorded. Or rather "the oldest individual (non-colonial) animal ever discovered whose age could be precisely determined". Yes, it was 507 years old when it was captured and killed (!) off the Icelandic coast. So this damn mollusc was older than our industrial civilization?!

Ming (clam)  

And if you absolutely want to read Wikipedia´s confusing list of the oldest organisms ever-ever-forever (many considerably more ancient than poor old Ming), you can find it here. I *think* the absolutely oldest living "things" ever were bacterial spores found in New Mexico which were revived after 250 million years. And then there´s the story about the scientist in California who sold "Amber Ale" produced with a 45 million year old revived yeast!

Somehow, I find that hard to believe. 

List of longest-living organisms

To whom it may concern

 

Reposting this for various reasons... 

Applied metaphysics?

 

So I just tried to read a 48-page paper titled “Ernst Haeckel´s Discovery of Magosphaera planula: A Vestige of Metazoan Origins?”, published in 2008 in “History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences”, apparently a journal. One of the authors, Andrew Reynolds, is a scholar of religion and philosophy. The other, Norbert Hülsmann, is a zoologist. And yes, their paper was quite hard to read! 

It deals with German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel´s discovery of a curious micro-organism off the Norwegian coast in 1869, a creature Haeckel named Magosphaera planula, the generic name meaning “magician´s ball”. The organism was only observed and studied by the German naturalist himself, and only at this one occasion! Despite this, it played an important part in the evolutionary speculations of both Haeckel and others during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It´s still occasionally mentioned in scientific works (and even on Wikipedia), but only with a huge question mark as to its placement on the tree of life.

In Haeckel´s theories, Magosphaera was first given the rank of a protist (Haeckel apparently regarded protists as a somewhat nebulous group transitional between plants and animals), but was later upgraded to a protozoan (a unicellular animal) of the “blastaea” stage in the German naturalist´s “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” scheme. The fact that Magosphaera had only ever been seen by Haeckel himself could easily be misinterpreted as science fraud, especially since Haeckel have posthumously come under fire for his supposedly fake illustrations of embryos. The two authors are therefore at pains to point out that they are *not* accusing Haeckel of hoaxing. However, they do believe that he made an honest mistake.

The magician´s ball doesn´t really exist. With one exception, no other scientist has claimed to observe anything even remotely similar (the equally dubious species Magosphaera maggii). The authors have actually looked for Magosphaera-like organisms in the North Sea on several occasions, but always without success. They also believe that Haeckel´s illustrations and descriptions of Magosphaera are inconsistent. Haeckel had made other mistaken identifications, something he also admitted. The purported missing link in animal evolution was probably two or three different species of marine organisms temporarily hanging together, perhaps even one kind of organism parasitizing another kind. I haven´t kept up to speed on Haeckel-bashing lately, but I wouldn´t be too surprised if both creationists and Woke evolutionists (who regard the German fellow as a proto-fascist) will nevertheless use this unfortunate little episode to further their respective agendas.

The article initially promises to discuss the social construction and “applied metaphysics” of scientific objects, but there is very little of this in the actual text, suggesting it´s just a nod to popular trends in academic research. Obviously, a marine zoologist can´t be a postmodernist!

With that, I end this little conversation. 

Titanic in outer space

 

There must be some kind of law against this...

OceanGate founder wants to go to Venus

Okänd terräng

 

Forskarna vet inte varför det är så varmt. Egentligen. Och om inte temperaturen stabiliseras inom två månader är vi i okänd terräng... 

"Vi är i okänd terräng"

The irony

 

Credit: Mayra Stefanne (Pexlar)

Is this some kind of bizarre evidence that geoengineering might work? Note that the skeptic is also skeptical towards geoengineering! Vested interests?

Cutting pollution increases global warming

Cthulhu´s spawn

 

THEY HAVE CHANGED THEIR TACTICS!!!

Infamous boat-sinking orcas are baffling scientists 

Speculation, speculation...

 

A lot of speculation in this one. Or rather in the list the content-creator is commenting, a list of the ten most likely cryptids to be discovered during the 21st century. 

The list sounds like wish-fulfillment. 

From the top of my head (which is considerable - both the top and the head), the thylacine, the giant eel and the giant octopus seem to be the three most likely candidates. Since the other cryptids might not exist at all, their discovery - this century or the next - is *highly* unlikely...

Here´s a more certain prediction: there will still be enthusiasts in 2100 hunting the Gugu, the Megalenia or whatever cryptids will be on the top ten!

The Laughter of Wolves

 

Well, I´m not sure if I entirely agree, but read it anyway. That is, JMG´s weekly essay. And yes, he noticed the Chernobyl wolves...

The Laughter of Wolves

Collectable demons

 

The Faroe Islands are a Danish territory in the North Sea, where the population speaks its own distinctive language. When not busy slaughtering pilot whales or banning the film "The Da Vinci Code", they apparently put demonic entities on their postage stamps?! 

Which makes me wonder why they banned the Dan Brown movie, but whatever. Karl Shuker has the story below. 

Crypto-Philately in the Faroes 

Goodbye to AMOC?

 

A recent climate model suggests that the AMOC (a system of streams in the Atlantic Ocean) might collapse with catastrophic consequences for humanity. Temperatures in Europe might drop by 30 degrees Celsius within a century, while the tropics will become hotter than today, destroying the Amazon rain forests once and for all.

However, there seem to be many "ifs", "buts" and uncertainties with this report, so I suppose we aren´t entirely deep-freezed just yet...

Critical Atlantic Ocean current system showing signs of collapse, prompting warning from scientists