:: BLOG NATION aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 7.22.2005 ::

:: "Collapsed Ice Shelf Exposes Life" ::

From Wired News
Researchers investigating the breakup of a massive ice shelf in Antarctica discover a mystery ecosystem deep below the sea surface, including mud volcanoes and large clams.

An expansive ecosystem of knee-high mud volcanoes, snowy microbial mats and flourishing clam communities lies beneath the collapsed Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica, say researchers.

The discovery made in February in a deep glacial trough in the northwestern Weddell Sea was detailed this week in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

Such sunless, cold-vent ecosystems have been found elsewhere -- near Monterey, California, in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Sea of Japan -- but never in Antarctica, the report said.

"Seeing those organisms on the ocean bottom, it's like lifting the carpet off the floor and finding a layer that you never knew was there," said Eugene Domack, the report's lead author and a professor of geosciences at Hamilton College, an upstate New York school located 30 miles east of Syracuse.

Domack hopes scientists find new species as they study the site and that the discovery will open the door to future Antarctic expeditions, including more exploration of Lake Vostok, a freshwater lake that sits locked in the ice two miles below the surface.

The discovery will certainly help scientists better understand the dynamics of life in such an inhospitable setting 2,800 feet below the sea surface, he said. The ice shelves cover nearly 580,000 square miles of sea floor -- an area equivalent in size to the Sahara Desert or the Amazon River basin.

Read more here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 12:03 PM [+] ::
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:: "Beethoven's rarest works re-created online" ::

From CNET News.com
By John Borland

In a little-trafficked corner of the Web, a pair of classical music enthusiasts has spent half a decade obsessively re-creating hundreds of obscure pieces by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Mark Zimmer, a tax attorney in Madison, Wis., and Dutch composer Willem Holsbergen are the creators of the Unheard Beethoven Web site, a sprawling digital archive of unfinished, unrecorded and often unpublished work by one of classical music's towering figures. With painstaking care, they're systematically turning Beethoven's most illegible scrawls into digital scores that can be downloaded and played by any computer, with the ultimate goal of bringing to life virtually every note the composer put to paper.

Their passion may be little different than that of the obsessive Beatles fan who haunts record store basements looking for even the most marginal bootleg recordings. But they're also more ambitious, hoping--as did the creators of last month's hugely successful British Broadcasting Corp. series on Beethoven--to rekindle interest in a cultural giant.

"My hope is to kick-start a (classical music) revival through new masterpieces," Holsbergen said. "Isn't it amazing that this may be possible through the sketches left by Beethoven?"

Perhaps it's a quixotic dream in the era of Britney Spears and Eminem. But Zimmer and Holsbergen are part of a growing community of amateurs and semiprofessionals who are using the Net and other digital tools to bring classical music out of concert halls and academies, hoping to popularize it with the democratizing force of the Internet.

Read more here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 12:23 PM [+] ::
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