Valleys and Troughs

Mystery Norway spiral really failed Russian missile test, if you're inclined to believe that sort of thing.

The explaining-away of inexplicable phenomena with euphemistic devices such as weather balloons or in this case a failed Russian Bulava missile launch entered into the realm of tired cliché long ago. Still, we have a pretty hard time swallowing the news that the above enormous, glowing spiral that appeared last night in the sky above Norway (justifiably panicking onlookers who believed it was at the very least a UFO and quite possibly a sign of the apocalypse) was simply the result of said failed Russian missile test. From the NYTimes:

"It has been established ... that the missile's first two stages worked as normal, but there was a technical malfunction at the next, third, stage of the trajectory," a Defense Ministry spokesman said.
Norwegian experts reported sighting of phenomena in the atmosphere near the White Sea, where earlier Bulava rockets were fired, the Kommersant and Vedomosti newspapers reported.

We are hard-pressed to think of a person whose excuse we're less likely to believe in this situation than a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman. Those guys have been lying to us since we invented a way to ask them what the hell was going on over there. And it's not as though news of Russia blasting nuclear-deterrent missiles into the stratosphere is entirely encouraging either. But for us it's about, as always, the possibilities. It's hard to get a sense of the face-melting awe that would accompany stepping into the street and actually seeing something like this, and we often feel that if we did, our lives would never be the same. We leave you to sift through the story as it develops, but for our part we will be keeping an anxious eye on the horizon, as always.

TROUGH

photo via Discovery

UPDATE: killer seals real, more or less.

Last week we brought to your attention a story from Russia involving that nation's attempt to catch up with the U.S. in the pivotally important marine-mammal arms race. Really. Gennady Matishov, director of the Murmansk Marine Biology Institute in northern Russia, explained his country's desire to match America's prowess in the intricate dance that is dropping seals out of helicopters. This story was certain to raise a lot of eyebrows, ours especially, and thanks to some good old-fashioned investigative reporting by the folks at NPR, we have some answers:

"It is true that the U.S. military does employ teams of dolphins and sea lions," Noah Shachtman says. He's an editor for Wired Magazine and runs its military technology blog, "Danger Room."

They take on two roles, Shachtman says. "One is to look for underwater mines, and the other is that marine mammals are used to patrol certain U.S. bases to watch out for the very unlikely event of a terrorist swimmer attack."

Looking for underwater mines? The very unlikely event of a terrorist swimmer attack? Something's not adding up here. The Russians claim they have a seal that can incapacitate or even kill an enemy diver, and we're owning up to having dolphins with cameras strapped to their fins?

Impressive, to be sure. but we're not willing to be duped here. This thing has its roots in the Cold War, and those roots stretch deep into the danger and mystique lurking among the alien depths of the ocean floor. Something tells us it will be a long time before we have any real answers, but that doesn't mean we'll stop searching. Somewhere out there, somebody knows the truth.

And lest you think the convergence of sea animals and helicopters a trifling matter, we present you with maybe the least-thrilling action sequence ever filmed. At least it has inspired us to always be carrying shark-repellant Batspray:

VALLEY

Abysmal bone-worms feed only on whalebone, forever.

The possibilities of what lies in the seemingly infinite blackness of the bottom of the ocean mystifies - and even terrifies - many of us (more than you might think). The above image is of the recently-discovered yellow-collared worm, which feeds solely on the decaying skeletons of dead whales. This may seem pretty trivial, but it turns out that whale carcasses support an entire ecosystem - and can do so for twenty years:

Once flesh-eaters like hagfish and sharks have picked clean a whale's skeleton, the 0.8-inch-long (2-centimeter-long) worms go to work, said zoologist Helena Wiklund, a member of the University of Gothenburg team behind the study.

Generations of worms "could be there for maybe 20 years depending on how big the whale was," Wiklund added. "Bones from a big whale last really long on the seafloor."

Pretty fascinating stuff. The deepest part of the ocean is 35,850 ft. That's a mile more than the height of Everest, which just really boggles the mind. So far researchers have found these worms at depths up to 9,842 ft., which is still pretty staggering, and one can imagine that there's all sorts of other stuff happening down there that we can't even begin to wrap our heads around. Still, there's something sort of peaceful, poetic really we find, about imagining an entire circle of life that revolves around the slow detrital disintegration by miniscule creatures of the largest animals on earth, all on the ghostly stretches of the ocean floor. The wheel truly comes full circle.

VALLEY

via National Geographic here and here.