Effervescent Epiphanies

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

Instead of two snakes staring, you now got three.

The interviewer raised speculation of an on-set romance between Piggy and Tim Curry. Kermit flailed, Piggy tried to be coy and Tim frigging Curry gave the most wickedly mischievous look straight into the camera and said “Well I do love a bacon roll”

He was a sk8r boi

so as per various DC social media concepts Clark has a Superman twitter where he posts left-leaning but fairly safe & tame stuff e.g. happy pride from Superman. Clark Kent also has his own twitter account where he posts his actual opinion.

(ʘ‿ʘ✿) “what you say ‘bout me”

Second: Bogleech is absolutely right that logically the carnage of the various epochs before us must have turned places like the Marianas Trench into a necropolis where the assorted detritivores feasted like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

Third: People want to believe that the deep-seas is capable of hosting monsters like megalodons.

Now, I’m no big-city Monterey Bay marine biologist specializing in deep-sea autonomous exploration vessels. But I feel as though the layman focuses heavily on the megalodon, who we actually are 99.9% sure definitely must be extinct because we can track how prey reacts to predator and the math just doesn’t add up to it still being around affecting populations.

But that doesn’t mean there can’t be monsters down there. Think of the style of predator a megalodon was: Viciously active, constantly seeking and hunting down its meals. Powerful muscles built for swimming long distances and speedy on top of it. The ocean is big but we’d definitely have seen evidence of them like, directly, even beyond just “whales don’t act how they would”. That sort of lifestyle lives to be noticed.

You know what I’ve thought for a while? How much deeper the abyss goes beneath the sea floor. Don’t you think it must be impossible for there not to be subterranean species in the abyss? Much of the sea floor is made up of marine snow, tiny flakes of dead bodies and remains. Shouldn’t there be detritivores feasting beneath the skin of the world? Sure, a whalefall is a bounty for decades, but that’s like resting an apple on top of a picnic table where your city is made of meat. And it’s already difficult to try and observe life that far down underwater–to the best of my knowledge we haven’t even tried burrowing down deeper and seeing what we can find.

All this is to say that with all of this combined, a part of me wonders if sea serpents might exist after all down there. Specifically, a part of me wonders how many whalefalls we don’t know about because something got there first. Something perhaps like a horrific burrowing nightmare predator such as a deep sea gigantified Bobbit worm.

The Dinosaurs were indisputably titans on land, but the Jurassic-Cretaceous ocean was relatively anoxic compared to the Holocene seas, and most of the large marine life was confined to relatively warm, shallow seas such as the one that once resided over the current Great Plains of the USA.

Whales include the largest animals ever. Before the Age of Whaling, when whale populations were at their peaks, would have been the period of time when this decaying “skin” of abyssal biomass would have been thickest.

Within written history.

If. If there ever were gigantic abyssal detrivores (like the one’s we’re speculating about) they would have been contemporaneous with the ancient tales of sea serpents.

Ahem

Didja ever wonder where Fossil Fuels actually come from?

So I mentioned that the dinosaur-era ocean was anoxic?

It was so anoxic that the only life in the abyssopelagic seas was sulfur reducing bacteria.

Everything multicellular was near the surface, in those shallow seas I mentioned.

Turns out, with no arctic poles (they were subtropical at the time) you don’t get any arctic storms churning up the water and mixing a fuckton of air into the ocean

These arctic poles also drive long range circulatory currents that help move that oxygen around.

So hundreds of millions of years of marine snow just… sat there. Not decomposing. Not getting eaten. Just slowly compressed under the weight of millions of years.

The absolute feeding frenzy that must have ensued once oxygen rolled through those depths! The scale of the putrefaction! It defies comprehension! It defies imagination!