Schist Happens

duamuteffe:

magicalnaturetour:

Waitomo Glowworm Caves are a famous tourist attraction because of the large population of fireflies that live in caves. Fireflies, or Arachnocampa luminosa - tiny bioluminescent creatures that produce blue and green light live exclusively in New Zealand.
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j

(via sam4books)

commanderspock:

seafarers

Lava Flow at Dawn by Tom Kualii

(via hammerforscale)

dailyotter:

GIF of Eddie the Sea Otter Making a Basket

Someone made a GIF of Eddie the sea otter playing making a basket. Submitted by Pete!

Just another reason why Oregon is the best: our otters are ballin out of control

sherloqe:

if you don’t live in europe i’m sorry

I’m sorry too :(

(via daylewises)

colchrishadfield:

Today’s photo is from the Mongolian highlands. Surreal to see a frozen lake surrounded by sand dunes.

buzzfeedfood:

“Cut Food” is the brainchild of photographer Beth Galton and food stylist Charlotte Omnès. All liquids are suspended with gelatin, making the most mundane snacks into works of art.

(via astrogasmic)

textless:

Spittlebugs are pests, sucking the sap from garden plants and using it to make their protective, slimy froth.  Eventually they grow into froghoppers.  But while they are in their nymph form, if you gently scoop one out of its foam, you’ll find that it’s weirdly adorable and almost invisibly small.

I used to love finding spittlebugs on Mount Pisgah. So cute :3 and so FROTHY.

(Source: textless)

worldinhand:

Lava Flow

Credit: Bruce Omori

I wish my body wouldn’t burn up if I rolled around in lava. It looks so fun :(

scinerds:

Deep Canadian mine yields ancient water

Scientists working 2.4 kilometres below Earth’s surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life.

Micrometre-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals’ formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth’s crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years.

“We were expecting these fluids to be possibly tens, perhaps even hundreds of millions of years of age,” says Chris Ballentine, a geochemist at the University of Manchester, UK. He and his team carefully captured water flowing through fractures in the 2.7-billion-year-old sulphide deposits in a copper and zinc mine near Timmins, Ontario, ensuring that the water did not come into contact with mine air.

To date the water, the team used three lines of evidence, all based on the relative abundances of various isotopes of noble gases present in the water. The authors determined that the fluid could not have contacted Earth’s atmosphere — and so been at the planet’s surface — for at least 1 billion years, and possibly for as long as 2.64 billion years, not long after the rocks it flows through formed. The study appears today in Nature.

‘Extremely strange’

“The isotopic compositions that they see in these samples are extremely strange, and the preferred explanation in the article seems to me the most likely one,” says Pete Burnard, a geochemist at the Centre of Petrographic and Geochemical Research in Vandœuvre-les-Nancy, France. “For the moment, I think we have to conclude that there are 1.5-billion-year-old fluids trapped in the crust.”

The findings are “doubly interesting”, Ballentine says, because the fluid carries the ingredients necessary to support life. The isolated water supply, he says, provides “secluded biomes, ecosystems, in which life, you can speculate, might have even originated”. His colleagues are now working to establish whether the water does harbour life.

The findings may also have implications for life on Mars, Ballentine says, though he acknowledges that the idea is speculative. The surface of Mars once held water and its rocks are chemically no different from those on Earth, he says. “There is no reason to think the same interconnected fluids systems do not exist there.”

Original Article

(via shychemist)

(Source: crazy4rich)