Fernweh:

Your daily dose of cat memes

Fuck. Ing. Mood.

being a fic writer can be hard because sometimes you’ll get a random scene in your head and be like “oh this is neat! can i get some context?” and the characters go “lol no, figure it out” and so you need to shake your own brain like it’s a piggy bank like come on, there’s gotta be some more quarters in here . . .

Giant Snorlax and Cats Appreciation Post ♡

**For the people asking the Giant Snorlax Plushies is AVAILABE HERE with 50% OFF during the next 24 hours!

Avid Pokémon fan here. All I want to say is yes. 😍

i really AM!

Legend has it my cousin is still trying to find this profile…

the devil works fast but wikipedia editors work faster

It wrinkles my brain that Jupiter’s moon Europa has oceans that are sixty miles deep, while Earth’s oceans only reach seven miles deep at most. I’m willing to bet good money that there’s life in Europa’s oceans. Like five bucks. You hear me, NASA? I bet you five bucks that there’s life on Europa… Now that there’s money and reputation on the line, I bet they send a mission there real quick.

I have no idea when this was originally posted, but NASA is working on their Europa mission RIGHT NOW to look for alien life! But get this, they theorize that because of the depth, gravity, and composition of the oceans, any organisms that lived there would be waaay bigger than aquatic life on Earth. So far everything’s going well with regards to their Europa mission so they should have a spacecraft on its way to look for giant sea monsters in space in only a few years. (The planned date is in the early 2020s.)

Looks like my negotiations worked. You’re welcome, humanity.

I’ve never been gripped with such cold terror and pure delight in my LIFE

explaining to an 18th century sailor that we’re looking for sea monsters in space. 

the 18th century sailor would understand this perfectly well i feel. like honestly ‘there are oceans on celestial bodies and they have giant monsters in them’ feels like the normal assumption we all had to unlearn as space turned out to be mostly kinda boring.

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh

The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.

I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…

They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.

There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.

That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.

The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.

see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?

those are over a billion years old.

that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?

algae.

those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.

so i’m just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.

The earth is unfathomably ancient, and you garner no love from her when you insult her eldest children.

not only that, the Appalachians predate the Atlantic Ocean and were fragmented. they stretch across three continents, as Atlas in Africa and Caledonians in Europe as you can see here:

the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.

show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, it’s the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.

Give me ALL the geology discourse

we respect Gaia and Her children on this blog, regardless of religious beliefs 👏👏👏

Love how this switches between science and poetry.

so what you’re telling me is that life is old there?

older than the trees?

younger than the mountains, though.

is that what you’re telling me?

@vaspider, those roads are paved with the dissected crystalline core of the Allegheny Orogeny.  More than 300 million years old, the time when the great coal forests were growing, insects the size of eagles and modern mammals roamed those forests, and amphibians were learning to operate on land.  When these mountains were eroded to a broad flat hilly low-land, amphibians had developed water impermeable scales and hard shell eggs, the coal forests were gone because scavengers finally evolved the ability to digest the lignin in wood. Geology and poetry go hand in hand.  The understanding and appreciation of deep time.  I could explain about the Grenville basement, the Cambrian carbonate shelves, the subduction and basin dynamics leading into the Taconic orogeny followed by the Acadian and Alleghenian, the contemporary Ouachita, Caledonian, and Hercynian orogenies, and name the various microplates, island arcs, and microcontinents that preceeded the collision with Africa.  All with detailed timelines carefully constructed from the logic puzzle that is geostratigraphy… Or I could talk about a shoreline not unlike the modern Atlantic coast, calm for more time than there is between that moment and today was shattered as that coast became a blender.  While life was going from slimy gelatinous disks to the great reptiles, a dozen landscapes like Japan, Madagascar, and the Philippines were crushed and folded like clay in a child’s hands.  When two supercontinents slammed into each other in a slow motion crash, birthing a mountain range that dwarfed the modern Himalayans.  And then erased into a flat plain. When the dinosaurs took their first steps on Eastern North America, there were no mountains, no hills, nothing to mark what was likely the largest mountain range ever created by this planet.  They would never see them, never know of the colossal roots left behind deep beneath them.  It would not be until chimpanzees and our ancestors parted way that they would rise once more…

I… know?

John Denver was an incredibly well-educated climate activist and activist for conservation. (He also testified before Congress next to Dee Snider against music censorship, but that’s another story.) It isn’t coincidental that he wrote the things he wrote.

i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)

Sometimes, people are really great.

This is also an example of picking One Thing and putting most of your Better The World efforts there. We have so many different important issues to care about and act toward, and it’s tempting to try and do a Little for Many Things - and I’m not saying that little bits of effort don’t add up! They do. But often you’ll make a bigger impact (and possibly have less compassion/activist fatigue) if you direct the majority of your efforts toward one or two things.