Moss reanimates?
So they did try turning him off and on again.
Moss reanimates after 400 years in DEEP FREEZE
Ancient plants have been brought back to life by boffins, despite having been frozen inside a glacier for over 400 years. Glacier retreat in the Canadian Arctic Researcher Catherine La Farge, director and curator of the Cryptogamic Herbarium at the University of Alberta, snagged moss which carbon-dating estimated was aged …
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Tuesday 28th May 2013 13:01 GMT Ru
Re: Hmmm
The magic words you're looking for are 'cryptogamic crust' and 'cryotoendolith'. Green fluffy stuff like this moss is a bit advanced for early stage terraforming.
Have a read of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, if you're bored. Lots of interesting and plausible stuff regarding terraforming.
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Wednesday 29th May 2013 13:54 GMT Efros
Re: Looks just like the stuff on my lawn
Indeed if enough people populated their lawns with moss we could put the whole lawncare industry out of business. Moss doesn't need mowing ( major plus in my eyes) and doesn't seem to mind anything barring a drought.
Future beer being enjoyed as I peruse my beautifully self maintained mosslawn.
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Tuesday 28th May 2013 13:20 GMT btrower
Re: Dare I go here?
I agree with you. That would be consistent with the Theory of Evolution. Sadly, it is not consistent with the Catastrophic Global Warming due to Anthropogenic increases in CO2 concentration narrative. Ultimately, science will prevail, but meantime what you say conflicts with currently accepted dogma. If you want research funding, you need to steer a little clear of inflammatory references to non climate science science, or as I like to call it 'science'.
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Tuesday 28th May 2013 14:02 GMT Richard Wharram
Re: Dare I go here?
"and that plants have evolved a way to survive the various changes and cycles?"
Be careful how you word that. Evolution through natural selection often leads to short-term gains that are disastrous against long-term environment change. If a species has adapted to survive such long-term pressures it's a happy coincidence not a necessary part of evolution.
(very long topic. regretting mentioning it already...)
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Tuesday 28th May 2013 16:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: We already know global warming isn't cyclical.
Depends - there are climatic variations caused by periodic variations in the earths orbit; it wouldn't be unreasonable to regard the warmer parts of that to be a cyclical global warming. I'm not sure there's evidence for the cyclical occurrence of clever organisms digging up a load of fossil carbon, burning it for fuel and so adding extra CO2 to the atmosphere, thus thus causing attendant cyclical variations in the climate, though.
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Tuesday 28th May 2013 19:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: We already know global warming isn't cyclical.
The moss is 400 years old which isn't enough time for variations in earths orbit to have had a cyclical effect.
What it does demonstrate in that this glacier wasn't there 400 years ago which means the conditions in that region, over 400 years ago, are comparable to the conditions there today.
Vegetation from retreating glaciers in Greenland have been dated to 800 years ago (Medieval Warm Period) and to 1600 years ago (Roman Climate Optimum). The same is true for retreating glaciers in the Alps.
I should make it clear that not all retreating glaciers uncover vegetation of this age, but then there are probably glaciers that haven't retreated that will have vegetation this age under them.
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Tuesday 28th May 2013 16:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Pfft, I'm not impressed.......
Since it was a national holiday, Syfy channel was showing a chimeric geneological nightmare documentary marathon yesterday, and apparently Dinoshark thawed out after millions of years of icy entombment. Last I saw, he was running rampant off of Puerto Vallarta!!
(On a more serious level, I can't watch these crap Syfy channel movies, but I admire their chutzpah in reinventing the schlock horror genre. Apparently all you have to do is come up with two somewhat dangerous animals, and then make an unintentionally funny crap film starring the resulting nightmarish genetic hybrid. Yesterday's titles that I noticed while channel surfing included "Sharktopus", "Piranhaconda" and the afore-mentioned Dinoshark.)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
