Photo by Matthias Wietz, by way of NPR
The great Robert Krulwich tells this story over at NPR:
It was three, maybe four o'clock in the morning when he first saw them. Grad student Jeff Bowman was on the deck of a ship; he and a University of Washington biology team were on their way back from the North Pole. It was cold outside, the temperature had just dropped, and as the dawn broke, he could see a few, then more, then even more of these little flowery things, growing on the frozen sea.
"I was absolutely astounded," he says. They were little protrusions of ice, delicate, like snowflakes. They began growing in the dry, cold air "like a meadow spreading off in all directions. Every available surface was covered with them." What are they?
"Frost flowers," he was told. "I'd never heard of them," Jeff says, "but they were everywhere."
The science of frost flowers is beautiful all on its own. Me, I'm wondering what you folks might make of it as a political metaphor.
Leave a Comment:
Well, I suspect a certain flaming
a**holebasketball will tell us that it is evidence of Global Cooling.Perhaps: That the deeper you look into something the more you find. There are always a million little things to surprise you
In their latest denial of global warming, GOP leader point to the recent photograph of frost flowers as a testament to the cooling of the atmosphere. "Ice has never had a better time" said Speaker John Boehner, "clearly the climate is just so incontrovertibly happy that the world is making flowers out of ice to thank us for doing such a great job." In an unrelated story, millions of pacific islanders simultaneously created the twitter hashtag "#FUfrostflower"
Due to global warming, the show will be ending soon, come see this spectacle before it's never seen again.
A frost flower now, an acid flower later. Will it smell as sweet?
When two opposites come together, startling beauty can be formed and we are all made better by the result.
Honestly, it reminds me of the agreement I saw dawning across the social media over the weekend and resolved after the President's determined speech saying, we can't let this (the slaughter of innocent lives) happen any longer. Suddenly there was a change in the discourse on safety and civility and what it means to live in a society where more credence is given to your right to own a gun than to be safe. There was a subtle shift that grew like frost flowers emerging on the Arctic sea, an awareness that the time for change had come.
Alan, that's a lot like what I was thinking, only not nearly so articulately.
"While fiscal cliff discussion breakdowns may have added a chill to the air overnight, hopefully the rising sun over Washington this morning has shed light on the 'frost flowers of change' blooming on a new day of negotiations." Too forced?
"Even in the harshest of conditions, something unexpected can happen. When it does, you stop and take notice. And in that solace, is when real change happens."
So say we all.
Sorry to say this, but I (and especially my wife) can't stand Krulwich. He has no intellectual vigor or courage. He always goes by what makes him feel good / is against what makes him personally uncomfortable. (Radiolab more the NPR)
We understand so little about the forces of nature that we are so utterly dependent on and have so little respect for.
Perhaps Senator McCain's comment concerning global warming says it best:
"Drill Baby Drill"
Potentiality; in the "abstract." We can create reality through Coherent Collective Consciousness. No joke... Oprah, Einstein, and the names go on forever throughout time... So, the metaphor "could" be: Hater's of Life, your exposure in the "light" has opened the pit of ego and threw it into the dumpster of history... Move with the greatest potentiality, Know Thy Self. When the hypocrites "felt" the power of raw, unfiltered "Empathy of Emotion," it not only tore their view of reality open, it gave them "potentiality" to see and view our "Crazy" world through a "different" prism of reality... It scared the "Sh@t" out of them. They viewed Potentiality as a new "Light." We are all made of Light... Welcome Home... This is a experience of Humanity. Welcome to "truth." 16 Billion years worth of history in one drop of DNA... We are our brother's keeper. Potentiality- we lived in their's, now they are living in our's... Potentiality, ain't that a b@tch...!
Perhaps the flowers have arrived for a funeral. The end of the climate as we know it.
This week in my home town of Saessoebene, Washington, the weather is cold. This morning the frost on the lawns was thick, and the ice crystals sparkle from the morning shafts of light that find a path through the forest trees. There is a pleasant crunch as your boots set down on the blades of grass- it was an especially hard frost last night. The world is transformed on these mornings- everything has a sparkle to it and it is only in these forest communities of the mountain valleys that this still happens- when the wet air is suddenly squeezed when a cold Canadian front moves down. Away from the heat of the cities, when there's a heavy dewfall at the same time the air is freezing, a multitude of tiny crystals of ice form on every possible surface- on the surfaces of the ferns, the evergreens, and the immense blackberry bushes. But it is fleeting- in an hour it is all melted away by the sun, so the ones who catch it are the early risers who show up at the Spar Diner on the highway at the center of town.
There's not much work left out in the cold of the country, and that's why there are fewer and fewer workers seeing the daily morning blossoming of the ice flowers in the early twilight hours of Saessoebene. Many are moving out for jobs at the Walmart, the other box stores and the Starbucks type anonymous social places in town. It's not much money but there is less bother with the power outages, getting stuck in the snow or frostbitten fingers from putting on chains in the early morning cold.
It's not as warm in the Spar diner as at the Starbucks down in Monroe, but the cup of coffee warms your frozen hands just as well. And the frosty personalities of dwindling inhabitants are really just thin coverings of crystals hiding an inner warmth. They chatter and gossip freely among themselves as it has always been as far back as anyone can remember- each individual is a fixture- there every workday morning, year after- and it was that way before the diner, when the town was just a logging work camp and the workers huddled around a morning campfire. It's funny what happens when these folks leave for the city. Outwardly they become seeming more warm, but on the inside they grow more cold and indifferent to others in the anonymity of the masses where no one knows even their neighbor.
They melt on the outside but freeze on the inside. It's a strange changing climate.
My pop would load us up in the mightly LTD station wagon almost every weekend to go on a picnic at Mustang Canyon, Graneros Gorge, or Owl Canyon. I guess he was inspired by Thoreau,, at any rate we would go picnicing regardless of the weather. I'll never forget them, I think there is something about being outside that stimulates memory (and makes hot dogs/hamburgers taste much better). So there was this one time, at picnic camp, it was soo cold, somone had brought and we started blowing soap bubbles. It was soo cold the bubbles would freeze after drifting a few seconds, freeze and continue drifting or break into pieces. DEElightful. Making memories..
Beauty blooms even in the coldest of places, like a liberal at a gun show, or Nancy Pelosi when the house is in session. :)
Bain Capital: "Yes, they are pretty but don't worry. We can relocate them to China before the drilling starts."
Thanks for the giggle, Rachel!
Wow, these are beautiful! And if I have to liken the scene to politics then it would be - kind of representative of the GOTP in Congress; you know that they are there for a reason, yet they seem frozen in time.....
Since Karl Rove has been banished from Fox, et al., this is simply nature's manifestation of this development: "Turd Blossoms in Siberia."
The GOP, in complete defiance of scientific evidence, once again came together en mass, like frost flowers, to raise their nasty little, corporate-sponsored, cold-hearted objections; this time to be met with the harsh glare of fact and public opinion, which will decide the issue.
Hopefully this beauty transcends politics.. There are however a bunch of Frosted Flakes in the House of Reprehensibles.
BREAKING NEWS FROM FOX: In retaliation to global warming small crystalline flower entities started to attack the ocean, Blame is squarely placed on the Obama Administration......film at 11:00
Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exsist...
Logic tells me that no one has/would leave god's presence without her promise that they'd reunite. I don't think she excludes anyone.
Judgement happens when you reunite with those you traveled with.
The voice of democracy will not be silenced by power-hungry demagogues. It will rise out of nowhere, like frost flowers in the morning. First one, then another, until at last the voice reaches out as far as you can see.