Seafood on Ice by Scott LaFee - Eureka! on Creators.com

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Seafood on Ice

Melting Alaskan glaciers provide a veritable buffet of nutrients to organisms living just offshore, scientists report. An unprecedented study of five glaciers near Juneau, Alaska, found that they are surprisingly rich in organic carbon scraped off the glaciated landscape. The amount isn't comparable to levels of organic matter from a forested watershed, but the source is likely the same.

Researchers believe the organic carbon comes from forests that once thrived along the Gulf of Alaska 2,500 to 7,000 years ago. Now, as climate change prompts greater and faster melting of glaciers, these long-gone forests (in the form of organic carbon) are washing out to sea. Some of the carbon has been dated back to more than 4,000 years ago.

Once at sea, the carbon is used by organisms at the base of the marine food chain and may be essential to their survival. But as the glaciers melt ever faster, it's unclear whether all that carbon may prove too much of a good thing.

VERBATIM

Men have become tools of their tools.

— American naturalist and essayist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

BRAIN SWEAT

All of the vowels (A, E, I, O, U, but not Y) have been removed from the following proverb, and the remaining letters broken into groups of three. Replace the vowels to find the proverb: BRD SFF THR FLC KTG THR

QUIRKS OF NATURE

Ornithologists say that interspecies cohabitation among British birds has increased due, in part, to a scarcity of nesting sites. Researchers have found jackdaws and kestrels in barn owl boxes, and blue tits, great tits and pied flycatchers living together. On the ground, meanwhile, things aren't going so happily. The native hedgehog population in England appears to be in decline because more are being eaten by badgers.

BRAIN SWEAT ANSWER

BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER

ANTHROPOLOGY 101

In old England, it was considered unlucky (and perhaps deadly) to pull up a mandrake plant.

(Even older lore said the roots of the mandrake scream when yanked out of the soil, killing anyone who hears them.)

If a mandrake root was required — the tubers contained hallucinogenic alkaloids, which may explain the screaming legend — the end of a dog's leash was tied to the plant's stem and the dog summoned by its owner or a plate of meat just out of reach. The dog would then pull the plant out of the ground while the owner stood far away, safely out of earshot.

PRIME NUMBERS

27 — Number of U.S. states that have banned texting while driving

25 — Number of these states that offer traffic updates via Twitter

Sources: Governors Highway Safety Association; Harper's

JUST ASKING

Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?

POETRY FOR SCIENTISTS

Is space made of strings or of foam?

Is it flat? Does it curve like a dome?

Does time go both ways?

Is the cosmos a phase?

I don't know, but I still call it home

— Author unknown

WHERE IN THE WORLD? ANSWER

The Ounianga Lakes are a series of 10 mostly freshwater lakes in the heart of the Sahara Desert in northeastern Chad. The lakes are remnants of a single large lake, perhaps 100 miles long, which once occupied this remote area 14,800 to 5,500 years ago. As the climate dried out, the lake shrank, and large, wind-driven sand dunes invaded the original depression, dividing it into several smaller basins.

Nine of the 10 lakes contain fresh water, which is constantly recharged from a very large aquifer just below the surface. The aquifer and original lake were created during the African Humid Period when local monsoon rains were stronger and the central Sahara was almost completely covered by savanna vegetation.

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