Good morning.
It’s a breezy day with a high of forty-five for Whitewater; it’s a mostly sunny day with a high of thirty-four ahead for primary-soaked Concord, NH.
There are two public meetings scheduled for Whitewater today: a Planning Commission meeting at 6 PM, and a Library Board meeting at 6:30 PM.
Animal life persists, plentifully, in the most unlikely of places, so much so that one may find in the created order a Bounty of Species in a Single Scoop of Seafloor Mud:
“It’s easy, when you get away from the coast, to think of the oceans as a homogeneous blue. It’s a lot more complex than that,” said biologist Craig McClain of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.
McClain and colleagues collected the mud while surveying distributions of seafloor organisms, the lives of which are shaped by “marine snow” — a slow, steady, shower of organic particles that drift down from high in the water column.
Like terrestrial snow, the deep-sea-life-sustaining version doesn’t collect uniformly but gathers in drifts and eddies. In a paper published last year in Marine Ecology, McClain and others showed that, depending on snowfall, seafloor communities could vary wildly in the space of a few feet. In terrestrial terms, it was a bit like finding deserts and swamps separated by footsteps.
Google’s puzzle-a-day for 1.9.12 comes from Mason, aged 13, of Menlo Park: “Franz Liszt, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Antoine d’Abbadie all shared what perceptual variation that allowed them to see the world differently?”