Interestingly, the US has ADDED a glacier in the last 30 years, that of Mount St Helens, which was able to form after the explosion in 1980. It is the youngest glacier on earth
Volunteering as a potential random travel buddy here. I’m not sure if I have the time but let’s see if we can figure something out if you are potentially up for it. My email is in profile
Oh the lies we tell our children to protect them! When is the right time to tell them they’ve been dredged en masse from their homes in the ocean and left to die in a crate on the deck of a shrimping vessel? Or that they were possibly bred into existence in a facility of controlled environments intended to mimic their homes in nature where they’re allowed to live until they’re large enough to be eaten by ignorant people, inconsiderate of the miserable, short lives they’ve lived?
But that's fine too. If the complexity of the natural world is just emergent behaviors, then emergence itself never ceases to amaze. Because one wouldn't normally expect that our "cold" physical laws could lead to the variety of life.
I highly recommend the book "Deep Simplicity" by John Gribbin.^1
It explores precisely this topic: the emergence of unexpectedly rich, complex behaviors from very simple rules given feedback and sensitivity to initial conditions.
> This suggests that this water buoyantly lifts the ice floes with embedded rocks until friction with the playa bed is reduced sufficiently for wind to move them and cause the observed tracks.
> they have been observed in Alaska, Chile, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Uganda and Venezuela
Well, today I learned, Venezuela has glaciers.
Then I googled that, and…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/...
And so today I learned, Venezuela used to have glaciers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_worm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_algae
e.g. even the development of eyeballs started with a slightly photoreceptive skin cell and then evolution hill climbing took care of the rest.
It explores precisely this topic: the emergence of unexpectedly rich, complex behaviors from very simple rules given feedback and sensitivity to initial conditions.
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71851/deep-simplici...
https://nikolaykukushkin.com/book
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
Wow, that's nuts!