Marilyn's Photos - Nov 5 2025 - Supercontinents Below

 

It says there are supercontinents - large low-seismic-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) and they are “lurking” below the surface of the Earth.  Way below - 1,200 miles below.  They are hidden islands inside Earth and reach heights of 620 miles.  Can you imagine peaks like that on the surface?  No, because they would collapse under gravity.  But continuing on the idea, the base would have to be a significant portion of a continent and would be visible from any point on Earth’s surface.  I asked this question of AI and got a pleasant answer.  By that I mean it gave a sense of appearance and scale, environmental conditions, and geological implications.  But, alas.  Can I trust AI to tell me fact?  I did enjoy the fantasy sense of it all.  These two “mountains” are below the Earth and are located beneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean.  How to study them?  Seismologists look at oscillations caused by massive earthquakes. These LLSVPs are instrumental in shaping the Earth’s surface processes.  I still can’t grasp that the inside of the Earth is a molten core.  And to find out there are supercontinents down in the mantle.   The Earth’s mantle has 1,800 miles of mostly solid rock.  It was thought to be a consistency of thickened caramel that is uniformly blended.  Now scientists find out there are unmixed regions and it isn’t uniform down there.  Won’t they have to redo all those cross-section drawings?   The article refers to  “sunken worlds.”  Isn’t that so mysterious!  Sometimes it is hard to know the purpose of scientific research.  This seems to me to be about understanding the surface plate tectonics, those things that give us the grief of earthquakes.  In all, this is definitely the stuff of imaginative science fiction ideas. Full scientific description and details HERE.  This is another version of the Echinacea watercolour yesterday.  Today’s version has the Echinaceas in a vase.

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Marilyn's photos - Nov 4 2025 - Things to Never Say

 

It turns out to be more complicated that just listing 15 tactless things you should never say to anyone.  Things like: I told you so You’re wrong You’re being too sensitive  As I just said before Calm down What I enjoyed was finding the alternates/synonyms for these expressions.  That’s because they too are insulting.  Here are a few for “I told you so” - I’ve pasted these in and notice they are all in caps.  That says something in itself: Looks Like You Learned the Hard Way I Had a Feeling This Might Happen I Thought That Might Be the Case Well, That Wasn’t a Surprise I Had a Feeling You’d Come to That Conclusion It Seemed Like That Was the Likely Outcome I Was Wondering When That Would Happen I Knew That Was Going to Happen Next, l took a look at “You’re wrong” - an extraordinarily blunt expression.  Here are some “ouch” phrases to compare it with: I respectfully disagree  I have a different perspective on this Perhaps there’s another way to look at this I may be mistaken, but could it be that I enjoyed the article that compared “You’re being too sensitive” to: Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.  Here are the synonym phrases.  Aren’t synonyms equally insulting.  So many choices to make it you are looking to inslt someone.  You’re overreacting You’re being dramatic You’re blowing things out of proportion You’re making a mountain out of a molehill You’re exaggerating You’re taking it too personally You’re overthinking There is something fascinating here.  These phases have more potential than insulting things to say.  They could be book titles, song titles, and summaries of plots - accusations and judgement from which human drama flows.  Time to give them a new life.  Something like this: Galileo, as I just said before, you’re overthinking the stars. I had a feeling this might happen - you’re now in house arrest. Here’s a piece of whimsy from the watercolour class.  This was a watercolour of Echinacea flowers that was turned into a little fantasy landscape in Flaming Pear’s plugin Flexify.

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Marilyn's Photos - Nov 3 2025 - Big Tires on the Beach

 

The headline says big tires washed up on Campbell River on Vancouver Island in B.C.  They are 11 or 12 feet in diameter.  They are filled with styrofoam. There are at least eleven of them.  The beach cleanup collected the styrofoam the next week.  The first three tires came in and then were followed a week later by eleven more.  It cost $6,000 to remove the first three, so you can imagine the cost of the next set.  They will have to cut them apart on the beach and then they will figure out how and when to move them.  These are tires used on off-road haul trucks and front-end loaders in the mining and heavy construction industries. Quarries, open-pit mines, and oil sands operations are places where they would be seen.   Their next life happens in industrial docks, piers or resort breakwaters as they are typically filled with styrofoam and strapped together to be flotation devices or fenders.  So now we know a bit more about the massive tires. That’s less worrisome than the bodies with burn marks and missing limbs that washed up on Trinidadian beaches after the U.S. has blasted boats in the Caribbean recently. That seems too gruesome, so going back to tires, they are not unknown on beaches.   “In the 1970s, the Osborne Reef off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was created by dumping over two million tires into the ocean, hoping to form an artificial reef. Instead, the bindings eroded, and loose tires drifted, damaging natural coral rather than fostering marine life. For decades, these rogue tires have been washing up on Florida’s beaches and even appearing as far away as the Carolinas and the Gulf of Mexico. Large-scale clean-up efforts began in the 2000s, with divers and military teams working to remove the tires.  Our final wash up story is a giant eyeball.  It showed up in Florida in 2012.  The likely source was a swordfish.  It would have been over 10 feet long.  Why the fisher would have cut out the eye seems to me to be the mystery.  Supposedly a discarded souvenir of the catch.  My own version of discovered items comes from the Lilycrest hybridizing field yesterday.  I noticed the orange and blue paint on a few of the pallets and got some nice abstract images.

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Marilyn's Photos - Nov 2 2025 - Countdown Time

 

This is countdown time.  I know that Christmas is coming because I was in Michaels yesterday and Christmas was on sale.  Lots of Christmas.  Of course I did go into a retail store and that’s the key to Christmas countdowns in North America.  It is a retail experience these days.  In addition to retail, there is a movie countdown - brilliantly created by Hallmark.  It generates one-third of the company’s total advertising revenue - over 4350 million.  One article called it “Hollywood’s turkey factory.”   I can assume Europe offers a more traditional countdown to Christmas. The Advent Calendar started the countdown - and that is December 1st.  That’s a Christian tradition starting the season of Advent. Typically their countdown  starts with Christmas markets in mid to late November and then goes by the Advent calendar.   For those who like to jump into things, the Countdown season is here and the stores are prepared. What do you think of these winter orchards?  It was a few years ago with a severe frost and cold, so the leaves basically froze on the trees and didn’t turn colour.

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