Fernweh:

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 . . .

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

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.

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.

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

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.

@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…