Glacier Mice

I like how they installed a GPS module into one of the rocks to track its path.

From your article:

> "Mima" is a name derived from a Chinook Jargon term meaning "a little further along or "downstream".

To keep the random learning going, Chinook Jargon [1] is fascinating in itself. A few years ago someone on this site suggested a book called You Can't Win, an autobiography of a reformed hobo/thief/addict written in the 20s. It's fantastic, especially the audiobook version on Spotify. Googling now, I'm seeing it got a (poorly reviewed) movie adaptation this year [2].

Anyway, when locked in a British Colombia jail around the turn of the century, the thief/author used it to communicate with his Chinese cellmate [3]:

> A priest visited the jail one day and gave me a pamphlet on which he had printed the Chinook language. In answer to my question he told me it contained about three hundred words—nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It was created by the Hudson Bay traders, years before, and taught to all the Northwest Indians to simplify trading with the different tribes. […]

> One day he came in with a scared-looking China boy about twenty years old. “Yank, here’s a cellmate for you.” He locked the Chinese in, thinking he was punishing me. The China boy later proved the jailer’s undoing and my deliverance. He knew some Chinook, but not one word of English. I learned from the Indian trusty that he was held for trial, charged with stealing a considerable sum of money from his employer, and that his case was about as hopeless as mine.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon

2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402593/

3. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69404/pg69404-images.ht...

Slightly related, ice worms

https://glaciers.nichols.edu/iceworm/

huh funny name that. When I hiked a glacier in Norway, dead mice (and other things) were everywhere under the ice. I assumed that's what the title was referring to.

We have something similar where I live - no glaciers involved though, just river rocks.

The river dries up rapidly in the summer, leaving the smooth exposed bedrock riverbed peppered with rounded river rocks covered with drying algae.

Where the river is partially shaded, the rocks rapidly grow moss and other vegetation on their top surface. They preserve what little precipitation there is, and catch the morning dew. They grow top heavy, and fall over. They then repeat this on the next upwards facing surface. Meanwhile the downwards facing surface dries out from the radiant heat from the bedrock and shrivels into a thin black layer of desiccated biomass, which then partially falls off at the next rotation, further increasing the top-heaviness.

Over the course of a summer, the rocks all collect themselves into the local low-points of the river bed.

Then comes the flood and the cycle repeats.