Glacier Mice
en.wikipedia.orgHuh
> 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.
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
It had 13 glaciers pre-eruption, so perhaps "added" is doing a lot of heavy lifting :)
West Papua still has glaciers, which I was surprised at.
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'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.
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.
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.
Venus scenario? I wonder if that could happen. Time to explore that rabbit hole
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 :)
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...
Always love seeing a link to wikipedia.org on the front page. Pretty much guaranteed to make me go "oh, neat" :)
Related: https://www.orangecrumbs.com (nice weekly summary of top wikipedia posts on HN)
When I used Kagi, my favourite feature was pinning Wikipedia to the top of all results.
Why don't you use it anymore?
I'm not happy to have any of my money go to Russia (Yandex).
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.
Agreed. I would follow a bluesky/mastodon/rss thing that shares every time a Wikipedia article hits the front page.
At your service, I'm running this since 2020:
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:
Awesome thanks!
I can't tell, did Glacier Mice make the cut? On a first pass, I don't see it.
Yes, it did:
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.
Ah nice, thanks!
Dang this looks perfect, but sadly is giving a 502 error at the moment.
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!
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
Heck yeah
Here in Switzerland when children order shrimp at a restaurant I tell them that they come from the shrimp mines in the glaciers.
If they don't know about tapioca pearls, please keep in mind they resemble fish eggs.
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.
> "The use of accelerometers has demonstrated that glacier mice do in fact rotate and roll, rather than simply sliding across the ice
You would think a timelapse video would also demonstrate that, and be much simpler to set up.
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.
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.
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!
If you put me on that surface I don't think I would have any idea it was a glacier.
reminds me vaguely of "Sailing Stones"
> 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!
My first thought as well!
jökla-mýs is a wonderful name, you gotta love icelandic. A swede might also associate it too "jäkla mys" - god damn cozy!
In its sister language of Faroese, they call the wren "músabróðir" meaning "mousebrother". I always found that quite cute.
Described by legendery meteorologist Jón Eyþórsson who funnily enough has a lyric (well just a little ferskeytla) listed on Ísmús
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.
Turns out that rolling stones do in fact gather moss.
TIL. Life never ceases to amaze.
Wait until you hear about Ice Worms
Thanks to your comment TIL that snow algae is a thing
I don't have a Wikipedia link for this.
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.
Another fun one is Mima Mounds, mounds found all over and especially in North America that don’t have established causes
From 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
2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402593/
3. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69404/pg69404-images.ht...
And sailing stones, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones and toneballs https://luthierblogmartinahawe.wordpress.com/toneballs/
I like how they installed a GPS module into one of the rocks to track its path.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71851/deep-simplici...
Another recommendation, with a biological slant: One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind by Nikolay Kukushkin.
I clicked the picture first without reading any of the article and was wondering "where are the mice? they must be well camouflaged!"
same!
Slightly related, ice worms
Dunno about you, but I was really hoping to see mice not moss :/
Remember seeing these in Iceland
Am I the only one who immediately thought of tribbles?
Yes
...Poppa was a rolling stone...