I’m rarin’ to go. Just begging that light to turn green. I can barely stand it. My teeth are vibrating.
At some point, very soon, just a few more days beyond the already (and totally understandably) twice-pushed-back start date, mid-week we’re told, my freelance writing assignment at Tonic News will instantaneously bloat-o-morph from twice a month to twice a day. Shorter, punchier pieces on the science beat.
A significant-feeling step along the path.
Lemme at it.
To my delight, I found this morning among the recommended diaries on Daily Kos an entry discussing recent and surprising findings of some very unusual and unexpected Great Lakes aquatic microenvironments. Given that the site is primarily given to unapologetically partisan political matters, I always am pleased when environmental matters grow legs there.
Anyhow, scientists are learning more about these fairly large sinkholes on the floor of Lake Huron; the extremely dense, mineral-rich, highly-electrically-conductive water that settles into these features would normally be thought hostile to life, but as we have seen in other such seemingly hostile environments–marine and terrestrial alike–life itself as an irrepressible force manages to find a way.
From a pair of articles linked in the DK diary:
The sinkholes are formed by salty groundwater seeping into the lake and dissolving the ancient underlying seabed, said Bopaiah A. Biddanda of Grand Valley State University’s Annis Water Resources Institute. They are similar to deep sea vents on ocean bottoms.
The sinkholes Biddanda found are offshore of Alpena in about 65 feet of water. He co-wrote an article about them in the current edition of Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The sinkholes are home to “bizarre” ecosystems dominated by brilliant purple mats of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae – cousins of microbes found on the bottom of permanently ice-covered lakes in Antarctica according to the journal article.
and from Grand Valley State University’s Annis Water Resources Institute (go check the video clips, too):
Karst sinkholes discharging groundwater onto the Lake Huron floor through Paleozoic bedrock have created unique habitats characterized by steep environmental gradients and conspicuous benthic microbial mats and organic-rich sediments. These ecosystems feature high microbial biomass and intense activity – biogeochemical hot spots.
All the more astonishing, to me anyway, is that within the framework of geologic time, surface water features (rivers, lakes) are fleeting. The Great Lakes are only about 15,000 years old–the blink of an eye in comparison to the 4-plus billion. The capacity for critters to adapt to and capitalize upon conditions that deviate so wildly from normal is truly something to behold.
acclimating to the new toy.
could have sworn that i had a mic preamp kicking around here, but it’s no where to be found, and until it turns up (or i replace it), i’m unable to record horns or bass or voice direct. oh well. monkeying around with loops today has been highly amusing.
wee hours update. one more.
I thought that two current nuggets of happy bee news were worthy of discussion, and so they formed the basis for my most recent contribution to Tonic News.
With the movement to eat more fresh and locally grown foods taking root over recent years within a culture where industrial food production still remains dominant, it felt like a punch to the gut when in late 2006, news reports began trickling, and then streaming in, with tales of the disappearance of bees, of colonies that became decimated or which altogether disappeared. The phenomenon has been simultaneously observed in multiple locations around the world, and the cause for the disappearances has been as baffling as the potential ramifications are dire. The importance of pollinators to the viability and productivity of a stunning variety of crops upon which we depend cannot be understated.
With this as a backdrop, it seemed worthy to note fresh research out of Spain, whose findings are published in the journal Environmental Microbiology Reports, which reports that scientists have targeted a specific parasite detected in local bee populations that have demonstrated what is referred to as colony collapse disorder.
I actually muffed a technical detail in my submission–original should have included a link to the actual article that alerted me to the very encouraging study that suggests strongly at a potential collapse disorder cause and cure. That article may be found here.
Scientific consensus is not yet locked in, and our winged pollinator friends are not yet out of the woods, but I was delighted to learn both of the optimistic field research findings, as well as of the organized volunteer efforts designed to generate current baseline data on local bee population status.
