If you haven't seen this video by now, you should watch it!
As sea ice freezes in the Antarctic, it leaves behind a concentrated brine which is trapped in channels within the ice. When this cold, dense brine, which is colder than the freezing point of water, seeps to the underside of the ice layer and sinks into the water beneath, it forms a sheath of frozen water around it, which eventually extends to the sea floor as a 'brinicle'.
For the BBC Nature series Frozen Planet, these brinicles were filmed for the very first time. The film's producer, Kathryn Jeffs, said that when she was preparing to film them, she couldn't find any information about them, even on the Internet.
Now, this video is among the most popular nature video clips online.
Jeff describes the technically demanding and physically difficult process of filming under thick ice in 2ºC water. As she put it, they were tremendously satisfied when they
... knew [they] had captured, for the first time ever, the creation of a rather sinister wonder of nature.
It's been a while since I've written anything new, and the explanation is straightforward: classes just started up again and have hit me like a freight train. Two weeks in, I've just had a chance to catch my breath.
But I've still been keeping an eye out for interesting articles and news on the Web, and here's my selection of cool stuff from the past week (okay, two weeks...):
Green Porno film star and director talks about her work. Isabella Rossellini's short film series, Green Porno and its follow-up Seduce Me ("A potential sponsor called to say they liked the films but that they couldn't support anything that had the word "porno" in it") are short (1-2 mins), award-winning gems about the peculiar sex lives of different animals. She stars in all of them as the animals, dressing up in fantastic paper costumes (see above).
Vladimir Nabokov's biogeographic theory on the origin of the Polyommatus blues butterflies has been confirmed by lepidopterists using molecular techniques. Aside from being a successful author in both his native Russian and his adopted English (in which he wrote his most famous book, Lolita), he was a great butterfly enthusiast and was for a time curator of Lepidoptera in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Woodpecker skulls inspire the design of more effective shock absorbers. Fun fact: woodpecker skulls decelerate by up to 1200 g each time it hammers (more than 20 times a second!), whereas humans would be concussed by an acceleration/deceleration between 80-100 g.
World Wildlife Foundation launches a new document format, similar to Adobe's PDF format, but which doesn't allow the document to be printed, to raise awareness about excessive paper use. As expected, the file extension is .wwf. Good idea, or gimmick?
The Galapagos Islands, biodiversity hotspot and inspiration for Darwin's theory of evolution, have been taken off UNESCO's list of endangered World Heritage Sites. Doesn't mean that they're out of danger, though. Ironically, the effects of tourism are the greatest threats to the islands today, as the booming tourist industry encourages development and immigration to the archipelago.
Director James Cameron has commissioned a deep-diving submersible, being built in Australia, to dive to the deepest point in the world's oceans, the Mariana Trench of the Pacific, in order to film undersea footage for his upcoming sequel to 2009's blockbuster movie Avatar.
The article linked to above has a great summary of the last (and only) successful dive into Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Trench, which was the Trieste dive of 1960. The Trieste was a custom-built submersible, comprising a spherical capsule in which the two crew sat with their instruments, suspended underneath a giant container of gasoline. It functioned like an underwater blimp: the gasoline acted as the buoyant balloon, and they carried ballast to bring them down, which was jettisoned for the ascent. It's a great story of engineering and derring-do, unfortunately not much was learned about the biology of the deep sea from that expedition.
I particularly liked the writer's description of how life can survive at such high pressures in the deep:
One oceanographer described how as follows: a human is like a party balloon – taken down to great depths it will be crushed to nothing; but a deep-sea fish is like an untied balloon – take that down to the bottom of the ocean and the pressure has little effect. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is that intense pressure causes nerves to stop working, a problem that deep-sea life has side-stepped by evolving a more robust physiology at molecular level.
Cameron's quest is not really a scientific expedition, but is still an exciting opportunity for observation of life in the deep sea. The director is also known for his underwater documentary film-making, such as Volcanoes of the Deep Sea featuring the submersible Alvin). Given that the marine realm has inspired many of Cameron's cinematic works (Aliens, The Abyss, Avatar, and of course Titanic) it's only natural that he returns to it for inspiration, like marine enthusiasts all over the world, except with deeper pockets!
HOME is a beautiful one and a half hour documentary by Yanns Arthus-Bertrand. Narrated by Glen Close, the story of how life began and how humans changed the environment as civilisation progress is beautifully told.
