More on Aliens

From a just published article. "The face of first contact: What aliens look like"
Summary of article:

Note that the lead off phrase is typically Lovecraftian showing how permeated our society has become with the Mythos.

TENTACLED monsters? … nobody knows what features we will behold if and when humans and aliens come face-to-face. Or face to squirmy something. Despite this lack of hard evidence, a blend of astronomy and earthly biology offers some clues to what is out there.

If first contact turns out to be within our solar system, then … we have some prior knowledge about the available habitats. … The subsoil of Mars may be warm enough to host microbes akin to Earth's bacteria, … there could be larger beasts swimming in the watery oceans of some outer moons of the solar system - especially Jupiter's moon Europa. …{a} chance that a deep aquatic ocean lies beneath Europa's ice.


… the energy supplied by … vents could feed a large population of microbes, which in turn could support a pyramid of predators. Europa's top predator, the equivalent of our great white shark, would be a fearsome creature with a mass … about 1 gram. … a shrimp-sized organism … {or a} hypothetical ice worm.

The clouds of Venus … pretty destructive to bags of water like ourselves … could {host} acid-dwellers … formed of … flexible polymers. … On Saturn's moon Titan … chilled hydrocarbon cocktail of ethane and methane … might {harbor} bigger {life} the surface tension in a methane-ethane blend is much lower, so … {maybe} boulder-sized microbes moving over the surface and guzzling up hydrocarbons. At around 93 kelvin, … The lifetime of such an organism may be 10,000 years, or perhaps as much as a million."

{Greater organisms} might even have hands .. maybe it's an antenna, maybe a tentacle …maybe an octopus would look at us and think 'How can you expect this organism to develop technology with its two clumsy front limbs?'"

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527441.400-the-face-of-first-contact-what-aliens-look-like.html?page=2

Octopus jealously guards his Mr Potato Head toy

Octopus jealously guards his Mr Potato Head toy

A six-foot Giant Pacific octopus at Blue Reef Aquarium in Newquay, Cornwall loves his Mr Potato Head toy and "turns aggressive" when anyone tries to take it away from him.

Yes, it does indeed look like a real story. The more we know about the octopus, the more I see alien life on other worlds.

95 Million Year Old Octopus: Cthulhu's Cousin?

Am I ever late to this one. I saw it in my Top 100 science items in Discover Magazine. It was discovered last January. "Scientists have found evidence of 95 million-year-old octopus."

I still imagine Cthulhu coming to Earth back in those days, before we were a glimmer of a Lemur's eye, and saying - hmm, there's a noble interesting creature I can command whilst I sleep. And then seizing the form of the multi-tentacled thing. Who can say, or even drad to consider, the original form of the Eldritch and their minions?

As I recall (the article is not in front of me, and it's getting old for Google) it was found in Lebanon, and it was accidentally buried in some sterile, uninhabited waters that kept predators from sucking away it's succulent flesh.

Microscopic Cthulhu?

This is a microscopic octopus captured while doing plankton research. It was originally a National Geographic image, but the page is apparently taken down.

Life is not only alien, it exists in places nearly inconceivable to us.

150 million year old squid

More Real Life Cthulhu Science

Palaeontologists have drawn with ink extracted from a preserved fossilised squid uncovered during a dig in Trowbridge, Wiltshire.

The fossil, thought to be 150 million years old, was found when a rock was cracked open, revealing the one-inch-long black ink sac.

A picture of the creature and its Latin name was drawn using its ink.

Dr Phil Wilby of the British Geological Survey said it was an ancient creature similar to the modern-day squid.

"The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it," he said.

'Medusa effect'

The find was made at a site which was first excavated in Victorian times where thousands of Jurassic fossils with preserved soft tissues were found.

Dr Wilby, who led the excavation, said: "We think that these creatures were swimming around during the Jurassic period and were turned to stone soon after death. It's called the Medusa effect."

Experts believe one possibility is that thousands of the creatures congregated in the area to mate before being poisoned by algae in the water.

Remains of a different species of squid have also been found, suggesting the carcasses attracted predators to feed on them and they in turn also died.

Dr Wilby said: "They can be dissected as if they are living animals, you can see the muscle fibres and cells.

"It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimension, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old."

The specimen is now in the British Geological Survey collection in Nottingham.

Part of the ink sac has been sent to Yale University in America for more in-depth chemical analysis.

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What dark, secret books could be written with 150 million year old squid ink?
Mwahahaha.

Cthulhuish Embryos?

Loligo pealei (squid embryos), 5 days (80x),

Nikon Small World Photo Micrography Competition: Photographed by Dr. Rachel Fink
Link

From the site: These adorable little creatures look like a trio of dapper dandies stuffed into acorns, but they’re actually mini-squids. The gestation period of squid eggs varies according to the temperature of the water in which they were laid (in warm climes, they can hatch in around 11 days; in colder waters, it can take up to 27). The embryos here are still young, but they’re already differentiated enough to have eyestalks and mouths, and you can just make out the budding tentacles.

Could Cthulhu Have a Companion?

We know that Cthulhu sleepeth.

However, my fantasy imagination has often wondered whether a restless companion, another servant of the Old Ones, exists and sleeps less? If so, the hot iron core of Earth would make a nice cozy bed for a sentient life form made of dark energy.

Why do I ask?

There have been so many deep sea eruptions, and churning of mantle that one wonders what the Old Ones are up to?

Here is one event only 74,000 years ago. What nightmares did this silent and unseen companion cause to humans who lived then?

mwahahaa.

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Did an Ancient Volcano Freeze Earth?
By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
7 July 2009

One fine day about 74,000 years ago, a giant volcano on Sumatra blew its top. The volcano, named Toba, may have ejected 1000 times more rock and other material than Mount St. Helens in Washington state did in 1980. In the process, it cooled the climate by at least 10°C, causing a global famine. But could the aftermath have been even worse? A new study puts to rest questions about whether Toba plunged Earth into a 1000-year deep freeze and whether an equivalent event today could jump-start a new, millennia-long ice age.
Giant volcanic eruptions such as Toba briefly cause the opposite of global warming. Although eruptions do emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, volcanoes also spew sulfur dioxide. Combined with water vapor, sulfur dioxide forms sulfate aerosols, which can spread around the globe, blocking solar radiation and chilling the air before becoming acid rain and snow.

Paleoclimate evidence suggests that the Toba eruption, which occurred during the last ice age, emitted lots of sulfur dioxide--vastly more than Mount St. Helens did. The eruption also seems to have coincided with the start of a 1000-year period of even colder temperatures. Some scientists have suggested that Toba caused the deep freeze and that perhaps such an event happening today could bring on a new ice age. But models developed by NASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, argue otherwise.

Researchers led by climatologist Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, ran scenarios that featured eruptions producing up to several times more sulfur dioxide than Toba. The result, published 27 May in the Journal of Geophysical Research—Atmospheres, was a cooler climate that lasted only a few decades. So the 1000-year cold spell was probably part of the natural cycle that has produced more than a dozen ice ages over the past couple of million years.

"The results virtually eliminate mega volcanic eruptions as one of the key drivers of global-scale glaciation," says climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson of Ohio State University in Columbus, who was not involved in the study. So, paleoclimatologists should focus on more likely climate coolers, she says, such as changes in ocean circulation or cyclical variations in Earth's orbit around the sun.

Still, if Toba erupted today like it did in the past, the results would be catastrophic. Although the volcano isn't expected to blow its top for thousands of years, Robock and colleagues estimate a megaeruption could lower global temperatures by as much as 17°C for several years, followed by a recovery to normal conditions that could take decades. That would hit the human population with the double whammy of dramatically reduced agricultural production and widespread loss of vegetation, leading to widespread food shortages and starvation.

How can the Minions of Cthulhu Survive Volcanic Stresses?

This shows how an octopus can survive volcanic environments.
It's roughly 10 minutes long.
Very dramatic footage.



On a fictional flight of fancy, I suggest that when the Sleeping One arrived on Earth, the mos intelligent and interesting animal was the cephalopod, and that is the immediate form that the Sleeping One assumed - since the sentient servant of the Old Ones was undoubtedly made of a form of dark energy beyond our ken.

Men are so fragile, so puny, so incosequential - the cephalopod is an obvious form to morph into.

:)

Now the Minions of Cthulhu Attack San Diego!

{Thanks to Vampduster on this one!}

Just when you thought it was safe … giant squid terrorise Californian coast
Divers spooked by tales of assaults as swarms of aggressive jumbo flying squid invade the shallows off San Diego
Associated Press in San Diego
Friday 17 July 2009 15.25 BST

Jumbo flying squid have invaded the shallow waters off San Diego, California, spooking scuba divers and beachgoers after washing up dead on the beaches.

The carnivorous cephalopods, which weigh up to 45kg (100lb), came up from the depths last week, with swarms of them roughing up unsuspecting divers. Some reported tentacles enveloping their masks and yanking at their cameras and gear.

Stories of close encounters with the squid have chased many divers out of the water and created a whirlwind of excitement among those torn between their personal safety and the once-in-a-lifetime chance to swim with the deep-sea giants.

The so-called Humboldt squid, named after the current in the eastern Pacific, have been known to attack humans and are nicknamed "red devils" for their rust-red colouring and mean streak. Divers wanting to observe the creatures often bait the water, use a metal viewing cage or wear chainmail to avoid being lashed by the creature's tentacles.

The squid, which is most commonly found in deep water from California to the bottom of south America, hunts in schools of up to 1,200 individuals, can swim up to 15 mph and can skim over the water to escape predators.

"I wouldn't go into the water with them for the same reason I wouldn't walk into a pride of lions on the Serengeti," said Mike Bear, a local diver. "For all I know, I'm missing the experience of a lifetime."

The squid are too deep to bother swimmers and surfers, but many experienced divers say they are staying out of the surf until the sea creatures move on.

Roger Uzun, a veteran scuba diver and amateur underwater videographer, swam with a swarm of the creatures for about 20 minutes and said they appeared more curious than aggressive. The animals taste with their tentacles, he said, and seemed to be touching him and his wet suit to determine if he was edible.

Attack of the Minions of Cthulhu?

Drama comes about 75 sec. in...




Diver recounts close encounter with squid before earthquake
1:58 PM By Dave Schwab - La Jolla Light

By at least one eyewitness account, the jumbo-size Humboldt squid rarely seen in La Jolla waters which have been turning up in large numbers recently are curious and aggressive with divers - but not threatening, at least not life-threatening.

When Cynthia Velazquez and her dive partner Roger Uzun of San Diego heard last week that large squid were being sighted, they decided to pay them a visit Friday night. That was before people spotted the sea creatures on the beach Saturday, shortly after an offshore earthquake. Some speculated the squid might have been disoriented by the quake. Armed with bright floodlights and a video camera, the pair went searching for squid about 8:30 p.m. in 30-foot-deep water off La Jolla Shores on July 10.

It didn't take long for them to find - or be found by - the object of their search.

"They were already there waiting for us," said Velazquez, a veteran diver with extensive experience locally and in Mexico's Sea of Cortez. "

At first there were about four of them, 4- to 5-feet long, and later there were probably like 10. They were very curious. They came right up to us: inches away from our faces."As the half-hour-long encounter between humans and squid continued, Velazquez said the marine animals became bolder. "

One of them tried to grab my light from my hand and take it away," she said, adding they reacted the same way with her dive partner who had the video camera. "They tried to take his strobe. They were actually grabbing it and pulling it away.

They also tried to take off his mask."Velazquez said the squid were definitely not afraid of them. 'They were just swimming around us," she added. "They tried to sneak behind us. They were following us. When I turned, they were right there next to my face."

She warned that new divers be extra careful in approaching the squid if they see them because "they may freak out with an experience like this, causing them to breathe faster and have a potential issue underwater."

Link:
http://www.lajollalight.com/news/258835-diver-recounts-close-encounter-with-squid-before-earthquake

Dazed Giant Squid Wash Up On La Jolla Shores

Thanks, Jim J!

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It was an odd start to the morning in La Jolla. First residents were jolted out of bed at 7.34 a.m. by a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that was centered 19 miles out to sea.

Residents were jolted out of bed by an earthquake, which is not uncommon in San Diego, but what happened just minutes later was a little fishy.

“I was having coffee up on the balcony and I felt it shaking,” Kate Lutkemeier said.

“I heard my doors and windows rattling, thinking that somebody was trying to get in my front door actually,” La Jolla resident Mary Skeen said.

“We just got here about 15 minutes ago and Lilly, what did you see on the beach?” John Feher asked his little daughter. “Squid, squid, squid, squid, squid.” she replied.

Dozens of dazed Humboldt squid that were about three to four feet long and weighed close to 40 pounds were flapping around on La Jolla Shores beach.

“It’s like their equilibrium is all messed up and they don’t know what they’re doing and they can’t back out there,” Bill Baumann said. “It was like they got -- I don’t know -- all shook up.”

It didn’t take long for the seagulls to swoop in and start feeding on the squid, so beachgoers ran to the rescue and tried frantically to save them by throwing them back in the water. That proved to be a difficult task for several reasons -- they were extremely heavy, very slippery, and when the good Samaritans did manage to get them back them in water, the squid didn’t know where to go and kept washing back up.

“Some people were saying it was the earthquake this morning that caused them to get disoriented but who knows? Feher said.

“Why are they here? Why are the squid here? I can’t honestly tell you,” Sgt. Rains said. “I don’t if it’s tied or not to the earthquake.”

“The Humboldt squid can be very big and very powerful and they may be dangerous,” Sgt. Rains said. “It’s just something I wouldn’t mess with until you’re sure that it’s dead. They’ve got a lot of suckers and claws and a parrot like beak and they can inflict some damage.”

A spokesman for Scripps Institution of Oceanography said at this point they do not see a connection between the squid and the earthquake, but plan to look into it. Dozens of squid washing up at the same time is unusual but it has happened before, according to Sgt. Rains. But Mary Skeen said it is a first for her.

“I have never seen squid in the 42 years that I’ve lived here on the shores in La Jolla,” she said.

More Real Life Cthulhu Science

Thanks to several of you who sent this to me via email.
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The cephalopods can hear you
Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News
09:18 GMT, Monday, 15 June 2009 10:18 UK
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Octopus and squid can hear.

The discovery resolves a century-long debate over whether cephalopods, the group of sea creatures that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses, can hear sounds underwater.

Compared to fish, octopus and squid do not appear to hear particularly well.

But the fact they can hear raises the possibility that these intelligent animals may use sound to catch prey, communicate with one another or listen out for predators.

The question of whether cephalopods can perceive sound has been controversial since the early 20th Century. Some experiments suggested that blind octopus seemed able to locate the sounds produced by boats or by tapping on the outside of a tank.

But most cephalopods lack a gas-filled chamber, such as the swim bladders that fish can use to hear. That suggested they could not detect the pressure wave component of sound.

However, sensory physiologist Hong Young Yan of the Taiwan National Academy of Science in Taipei, Taiwan suspected that octopus and squid might use another organ called the statocyst to register sound.

The statocyst is a sac-like structure containing a mineralised mass and sensitive hairs.

Fish also use it to detect sounds, and in previous research, Yan showed that prawns can use their statocysts to hear. "So we extended our work from prawns to cephalopods," says Yan.

Yan's team tested the auditory capabilities of two species, the Common octopus Octopus vulgaris and the squid Sepioteuthis lessoniana, often called the Bigfin reef squid.

They discovered that the octopus can hear sounds between 400Hz and 1000Hz. The squid can hear an wider range of sound from 400Hz to 1500Hz, they report in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part A.

"That indicates that squid have a better hearing capability than the octopus," says Yan. "Interestingly though, both species hear best at a frequency of 600Hz."

Yan's team had to overcome particular technical challenges to investigate the cephalopods' hearing ability. The usual way to prove that an organism can hear is to measure how its nervous system electrically responds to sound. But that can involve directly attaching electrodes to exposed nerves, an invasive procedure that could harm delicate cephalopods.

So Yan invented a non-invasive method, which involves placing electrodes on an animal's body to measure the electrical activity in its brain. In this way, he could measure within just a couple of hours whether the brain of an octopus or squid responds to sound.

Avoiding being eaten

The discovery could open up a new understanding of cephalopod behaviour.

"The key question which I would like to investigate is what kind of sounds are they listening to?" says Yan. "Perhaps they listen to sound to evade predators and can eavesdrop to sounds made by their prey. Or, perhaps they even could make sounds to communicate among themselves."

For example, because octopus or squid do not possess gas-filled chambers within their bodies, they cannot amplify sounds, limiting their hearing ability. But they can hear as well as invertebrates such as prawns, although less well than many species of fish and the toothed whales which often eat them.

"Squid are heavily preyed upon by toothed whales including dolphins. So perhaps their hearing would aid them to avoid the pinging sounds made by dolphins," says Yan.

He says the different abilities of the octopus and squid also reflect the environment they live in.

The common octopus dwells on the seabed, which is covered by large rocks, boulders, coral reef and other features. In water, sounds above 1000Hz have a wavelength greater than 1.5m. Such sound waves cannot in turn pass objects greater than 1.5m in size, and they get deflected, which could explain why the octopus doesn't need to hear them.

Squid live in the open water where there are fewer obstacles, and therefore sounds pass uninterrupted over a greater frequency range.

Did Cthuluesque Crop Circle Prophesy New Sun Spot Activity?

{HPL to Derleth, 25 October 1926] As to the supernatural - there is no harm in each person's believing whatever his appraisal of the evidence before him prompts him to believe; and no lack of dignity in changing opinion when data warrants it.
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Chrispy doubts that there is any true connection to the following, but it makes for great stimulation of the horror imagination.

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Sun Spot of 8 July 2009
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The Infamous Squid Crop Circle
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A sunspot that suddenly appeared on July 3rd, 2009 was thought by some to support the crop circle prediction that there'd be a major solar storm today, July 7th. However, Spaceweather.com is reporting that Sunspot 1024 is decaying and solar flare activity is subsiding, so the prediction doesn't appear to be panning out, even though it's the most activity the quiet sun has had in the last two years.

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It's true, we've had a spectacular minima of sun spot activity, and suddenly they have reappeared. In Lovecraft's day they had little idea, and though we are a century beyond, it still has us at a loss to fully explain the astrophysical mechanism of maxima and minima.

Squid Crop Circle Forebodes Solar Storm

Lovecraft Caveat: HPL would have gagged over pseudoscience, paranormal stuff, and metaphysics. I've been reading his give and take with young Derleth (a believer) and while usually gentle with Derleth stated flatly is was nonsense.

However, sometimes Chrispy is credulous. This one has me scratching my head, but has some interesting touchpoints for gaming and story telling of Mythos.

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Discovered last month in a UK barley field, this crop circle appears to be a jellyfish. But intrepid crop circle analysts have discovered that it predicts a devastating solar storm on July 7. And they have diagrams to prove it.

Whenever a severe solar storm impacts directly on Earth, then our planetary magnetic field or "magnetosphere" changes into the general shape of a "jellyfish". That seems to be what those crop artists were telling us at Wayland's Smithy on May 29, 2009.

A penumbral lunar eclipse will take place on July 7, 2009, the second of four lunar eclipses in 2009. This eclipse will only enter the southern most tip of the penumbral shadow and thus will be very difficult to observe visually. It will be seen rising over Australia after dusk on July 7, and setting over western North and South America in the early predawn hours of July 7.

One recent study suggested the Sun may be on the verge of a decades-long quiet period, during which big outbursts would be less likely (New Scientist, 10 January 2009, p 11). But such predictions are fraught with uncertainty.

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"Dr. Stevens, the squid crop circle checks out. Not only is Pi and Phi encrypted in the geometrical pattern, but our Miskatonic supercomputer indicates that the stars and signs are right - the moon shall eclipse on the 7th, and the para-seismograph shows that the Sleeping One stirs."

"Then the time and times have come," Stevens replied, "and the mother of all solar storms is about to erupt!"

Cthulhu-shaped Lightning Discovered

Beware!


Atmospheric scientist Oscar van der Velde (www.lightningwizard.com) captured this sprite, as it is called, in Barcelona, Spain on the night of June 5th. Sprites are brief flashes of colored light, lasting only 3 to 10 milliseconds, that happen high above powerful thunderstorms. First discovered in 1989, scientists are still unclear as to what causes the eerie phenomenon.

Betelgeuse & Lovecraft (Real Life Lovecraftian Science)

(Above) Constellation containing Betegeuse.
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(Above) Image of the Red Star
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“Good luck with Hastur—but don’t use any word sounding like ‘Betelgeuse’ to represent a primal name of that distant sun (or to represent the name used by the denizens of any of its hypothetical planets) since this name is an Arabic product of the Middle Ages, and signifies ‘the armpit (or shoulder) of the giant (or central one)’—Ibn at Jauzah—Orion having been known as Al Jauzah to the astronomers of the Saracenic Caliphate—who did so much to advance the science.” (to August Derleth, 30 January 1933)
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Chrispy does not typically follow the intricacies of the modern Mythos games, but in this case it's notable to know that: The ancient battleground in which the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones fought their apocalyptic and unfathomable war, the system of Betelgeuse – rendered “Glyu-Uho” in Naacal – contains innumerable worlds pocked with the scabrous remnants of ancient and often non-Euclidean cities scarred with the uncanny wounds of primordial conflict. The principle inhabited world of the Betelgeuse System is Yarnak, a shattered world rebuilt by initially optimistic if perhaps foolhardy settlers. /// August Derleth and Mark Schorer’s “The Lair of the Star-Spawn” (published in the February 1932 issue of Weird Tales) mentions the “Great Old Ones” - but as the beings from Betelgeuse and Rigel who imprisoned Cthulhu and his kindred!

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11 June 2009

Bye-bye, Betelgeuse?

The nearby, well-known and very bright star may soon explode in a supernova, according to data released by U.C. Berkeley researchers Tuesday.

The red giant Betelgeuse, once so large it would reach out to Jupiter's orbit if placed in our own solar system, has shrunk by 15 percent over the past decade in a half, although it's just as bright as it's ever been.

"To see this change is very striking," said retired Berkeley physics professor Charles Townes, who won the 1964 Nobel Prize for inventing the laser. "We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size."

Betelgeuse, whose name derives from Arabic, is easily visible in the constellation Orion. It gave Michael Keaton's character his name in the movie "Beetlejuice" and was the home system of Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

At The Mountains of Madness: Real Life

Origin of Antarctic ice revealed
By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News


Incredible peaks and valleys, buried beneath ice for 14 million years, have revealed evidence of how the East Antarctic ice sheet first formed.

Scientists used radar to map an area of the Gamburtsev mountains - believed to be the point of origin of the ice.

The region would have been cold enough for the first glacier to form.

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers say their findings provide important clues about how the ice sheet will behave as our climate changes.

"This is the largest reservoir of ice on Earth, and the most poorly understood place on our planet," said the British Antarctic Survey's Fausto Ferraccioli, a scientist involved in a separate international project to study the region.

He explained that the elevation and location of the Gamburtsev Mountains - in the centre of the ice sheet - made them an "ideal place" for the formation of the very first ice.

Icy unknown

Sun Bo from the Polar Research Institute of China, who led this study, has now provided further insight into the evolution of the ice sheet.

He and his colleagues travelled 1,235km (767 miles) by tractor train from a research station at the edge of East Antarctica, to the summit of Dome A of the Gamburtsev range, near the centre.

Their radar revealed a landscape that, 14 million years ago, looked similar to the European Alps.

"This is true scientific exploration," said Martin Siegert, head of the school of geosciences at Edinburgh University, who was also involved in the study.

"There's nothing to guide you really. Peering down at the ice sheet beneath your feet, you just don't know what's under there."

And for this type of exploration, the use of radio waves is very powerful.

When the waves reach the interface between ice and rock they bounce back, because of the difference in electrical properties between the two.

"You just measure the two-way travel time as they go down and come back up again," explained Dr Siegert. "Then you can convert that to ice thickness, because you know the velocity at which [the radio waves] are travelling."

Dr Siegert said the research team was "very lucky" to see such a clear image of the underlying landscape. They discovered a whole valley system - with mountains at the edge of the survey region and the valley in the middle.

"That's perfect, because it allows us to work out how the valley would have worked when it was filled with ice, and how the water would have flowed when there was no ice there at all," said Dr Siegert.

Frozen in time

By looking at ancient climate patterns, scientists have previously estimated that the East Antarctic ice sheet formed around 14 million years ago, burying and preserving the Gamburtsev mountain landscape under ice that is now up to 3km thick.

"You need a mean annual temperature of about 3C for the glaciers to form the way they did," Dr Siegert told BBC News.

"The mean annual temperature in this region now is -60 C. So we believe that these mountains are relics of [glacial erosion] in Antarctica before the ice sheet was in place."

He added that the findings provided an insight into the stability of the ice.

Antarctica's landscape was mountainous before the ice formed
"It is a critical part of our Earth's system," said Dr Ferraccioli. "If the whole ice sheet collapsed, sea levels would rise by 60m.

"There's been a lot of climate change over the last 14 million years," Dr Siegert said. "And what we can say about this place in the middle of the Antarctic is that nothing has changed."

But, he warned, if levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continued to rise, in around 1,000 years they will approach the same levels that existed "before there was a persistent ice sheet in Antarctica".

"This puts the ice sheet into the context of global climate and what conditions are needed to grow an ice sheet," explained Dr Siegert. "The worrying thing is that we seem to be going back to carbon dioxide concentrations consistent with there being a lot less ice around."

Link, click

More Real Life Cthulhu Science

Ivan Amato, Newscripts, Chemical and Engineering News, March 30, 2009, p.64

At the HPLblog we bring cutting edge Real-Life Cthulhu science as it happens. Chrispy is of the opinion that while Cthulhu may be a creature of exotic dark energy, upon his arrival to and just before he fell to sleep under the Earth’s surface millions of years ago, he looked about and saw and admired the elegant intelligent cephalopod, and immediately adopted that form. Therefore the more we know of these mysterious creatures, the more we shall understand of the wisdom and madness of dread Cthulhu.

{Just} as kids love candy, … giant squid, octopods, and other deep-sea cephaopodsike to stuff … their beaks ... {but} the only thing that remains … in whale’s stomachs are chitinized beaks. A French research team … with a cache of beaks from nearly 20 cephalod species retrieved from the stomachs of htree sperm whale s that had become stranded in the Bay of Biscay in 2001. The scientists from the National Center for Scientific Research and the Universit of La Rochelle used a high-end mass spectrometer {a device that blasts apart molecules, scans them, and compares the residue to known molecular and ionic structures thus determining what unknown elements are present in a compound}. The measured 13C and 15N indicators of {whether the food in their beaks was of deep sea or surface origin}.

In a recent Biology Letters the scientists indicated that the squids and octopods {had been eating} in deep oceanic beds, not along the continental shelf. The species spanned 1.5 trophic levels similar to dolphins {and whales}. The giant squid, Taningia dinae, is an aggressive top {of the food chain} predator. The giant octopus, Haliphron atlanticus, dwells higher in the water column, and is eaten more often.

Lovecraft's Dreams: Geomagnetically Influenced?

Thanks to T Peter Park for calling attention to this article. I've condensed it for blog use.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16871-sweet-dreams-are-made-of-
geomagnetic-activity.html
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Sweet dreams are made of geomagnetic activity
April 2009 by Ewen Callaway
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{H P Lovecraft was famous for his dreaming. In his fantasies, dreams and madness were critical components of his exposition. Notably, Cthulhu dreams, and its dreams influenced sensitives to frenzy. Perhaps Lovecraft's intuition bordered on genius, since nw it appears that dreams are influenced by geomagnetic fluctuations, precisely the kind that a sleeping god-behemoth might produce nestled in the Earth's magma.}
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Looking for an explanation for recurring nightmares?
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New research suggests you can blame the Earth's magnetic field, rather than a
repressed childhood. Darren Lipnicki, a psychologist formerly at the Center for Space
Medicine in Berlin, Germany, found a correlation between the bizarreness of his dreams, recorded over eight years, and extremes in local geomagnetic activity.
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Other studies have tied low geomagnetic activity to increases in the production of the melatonin, a potent hormone that helps set the body's circadian clock. So, based on anecdotal evidence that melatonin supplements used as a sleeping aid can cause off-kilter
dreams, Lipnicki wondered whether local magnetic fields could induce the same effects.
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Between 1990 and 1997, he kept meticulous records of his nightly reveries, amassing a total 2387 written accounts during his teenage years. "I always wanted to do science with them," he says. For the study, he devised a five-point scoring system to rate the
bizarreness of these dreams.
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Lipnicki looked up daily geomagnetic activity in Perth, Australia – his home at the time. A scale called the k-index quantifies local geomagnetic activity, and he included only days that scored on the extremes of this index. This whittled his dream log down to 66 days of low geomagnetic activity and 70 days of high activity.
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Using these figures, Lipnicki uncovered a statistical correlation between dream bizarreness and geomagnetic activity, with freakier dreams occurring on days with the least geomagnetic activity.
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{While this is real science, and a real study, the fantasy writer inside Chrispy wants to be credulous. However, the scientist part of me has grave doubts about the subconscious triage being done, and then applying statistics to pre-selected data. So, it is what it is, but my imagination soars to consider all those dark energy beings striving for immortality living inside our planet or outside our atmosphere influencing our dreams – and nightmares.}