Worst Wednesdays: Cherry Lightens It Up

Had enough of death, frostbite, and crevasses? Fortunately, halfway through the Worst Journey, Cherry surprises us with a flash-forward to the British Museum of Natural History:
And now the reader will ask what became of the three penguins’ eggs for which three human lives had been risked three hundred times a day, and three human [...]

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Terrible Tuesdays: Cruel Chance

Lt. Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis was also out sledging in Antarctica in 1912, and having a hell of a time of it, too. But he was a thousand miles from Scott’s hut on Cape Evans.
Ninnis was on Sir Douglas Mawson’s expedition to survey Adelieland, a slice of Antarctica south of Australia. Ninnis helped handle [...]

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Pigeons Take Crap for Crapping on Crappy Bridge

A brief article in the UK’s Sun newspaper says officials in Minneapolis may blame the recent bridge tragedy on accumulated pigeon poo. Nothing about the article seems to be kidding. And yet.
Their thesis is logically sound: pigeons, like all birds, excrete uric acid that theoretically could eat away at steel given enough time and, er, [...]

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Worst Wednesdays: Stiff Upper Lip

Down by the Beardmore Glacier, after more than 500 miles hauling across the Ross Ice Shelf, the men came up against the Transantarctic Mountains. This was the route Scott (and Shackleton before him) had selected to climb from basically sea level up to the 10,000-foot-high central Antarctic plateau. The mountains around were several thousand feet [...]

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N.Z. Shearwater Chick Eats U.S. Salmon

More evidence that everything in the universe, or at least the Pacific, really is connected. By odds too remote to be calculated, a New Zealand biologist discovered a rice-sized ID chip in the stomach of a sooty shearwater chick.
The chip traced to a chinook salmon tagged two years ago on the Columbia River, more than [...]

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Tilapia – 1, Malaria – 0

File under win-win: research in Kenya shows that by raising tilapia, locals can reduce the population of a malaria-carrying mosquito (by a whopping 94%), then harvest the fish for the dinner table.
Spurred by the growing incidence of pesticide resistance among mosquitoes, the researchers began looking for nonchemical ways to kill the mosquitoes’ buzz. Mosquitoes spend [...]

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Kind of Like Oprah for the Flip-Flops Crowd

Pat O’Connell has a new talk show. Check Surfline.com for “Going Off with Pat O’Connell” and catch the ex-pro, who last made a Scribble appearance in connection with shifting baselines. He’ll be posting interviews with new guests every two weeks.
This week he sits down with Rob Machado, owner of the gnarliest hair in all [...]

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Worst Wednesdays: Cold

This is Worst Wednesdays for real: a week has gone by, it’s 10:00 at night, and I’m just posting this now. At least it’s warm in Santa Cruz.
This day also (1 July) we were harassed by a nasty little wind which blew in our faces. The temperature was minus 66, and in such temperatures [...]

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Worst Wednesdays: Emperors

The whole point of the Worst Journey that winter of 1911 was to collect a series of emperor penguin eggs so that Wilson could describe their embryological development. At the time, penguins were thought to be the most primitive of birds. Turns out they aren’t – they’re actually so non-primitive that they not only [...]

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PCBs: Particularly Cruel to Baby Seals

Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are perennial bad guys in environmental stories (see previous scribblings about salmon, seabirds and seafood).
Two reason they’re so perennial – despite significant limits on their production and disposal in the last three decades – are because they don’t degrade spontaneously and they become more concentrated as they move up the [...]

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