With the snow receding, I’ve been doing dog duty in the back yard for the last week. With each few inches, another clean-up can occur. I’m not sure how much of a melt we will get. to complete the clean-up. Likely I will be cleaning up till March. And then a new season starts.
I notice Millie never stepped in her own poop. I would watch her in the yard covered in snow, and she made zigs and zags along her route to avoid things. I am not so lucky. The human foot is attracted to a dog poop like a metal to a magnet.
While dog poop is the normal sort of every-day find after snow and ice melt, there are many more interesting things found as glaciers melt. Poor 5,300-year-old Iceman Otzi, found in the Alps. He received a severe arrow wound causing rapid blood loss, and then a severe, potentially fatal head injury. No accident there. And the remains look too real to show you here. This is breakfast time when I am writing. And likely there’s no time that seems the right time.
Besides finding people under the snow, there’s a history of the mundane. Take mittens. A 1,100-year-old-mitten was found in Norway. I wonder what the history of lost mittens through the ages might be. AI is at the ready: A famous lost mitten dating to 16th-17th century in Sweden had the “two-end” knitting technique. Supposedly that was a lost practice. Seems strange to me - it is just normal to tie two mittens together with a string. There’s no genius involved.
Did you know that scientists left a message in a bottle in 1951 on a glacier under a rock cairn on Ward Hund Island in the Canadian Arctic? It was to document the retreat of the ice between the rock cairn and glacier edge. In 1959 it was 4 feet, and in 2013 when found, the distance was 333 feet. The 2013 team left the note in the bottle, and added their own asking to continue the experiment.
Here are some mittens showcased on a previous year’s Fantasy of Trees wreath.
No comments:
Post a Comment