Earth alone is a pretty marvelous and mysterious planet, no doubt about that. I hear about people who have visited more countries than they can count on one hand, and I can’t help but get a little envious! There’s so much of our planet that many of us have yet to explore and many species that we have yet to discover or even understand.
One species that scientists are currently perplexed about are glacier mice. No, they’re not tiny, whiskered rodents that enjoy nibbling on cheese; they’re basically balls of moss that can be found in arctic climates. These unusual balls contain worms, bacteria, and other organisms. Not too out of the ordinary, right? But the crazy thing is, scientists have observed them moving.
Just recently, Scientist Tim Bartholomaus released a paper on glacier mice after spotting them in Root Glacier in Alaska. He’s just as shocked about the species as the rest of everyone else.
“They’re not attached to anything and they’re just resting there on ice,” he explained. “They’re bright green in a world of white.”
During his observation, Bartholomaus noticed that this green, rock-like species tends to move around slowly in sync with one another. How and why this happens is a mystery.
“They really do look like little mammals, little mice or chipmunks or rats or something running around on the glacier, although they run in obviously very slow motion,” the scientist shared. “The whole colony of moss balls, this whole grouping, moves at about the same speeds and in the same directions. Those speeds and directions can change over the course of weeks.”
Although there is still plenty of uncertainty surrounding glacier mice, Bartholomaus did have some interesting hypotheses, which were later proven to be false.
Bartholomaus and his team also speculated that maybe the balls were rolling down a hill due to gravity. This was found to be untrue.
“We next thought maybe the wind is sort of blowing them in consistent directions, and so we measured the dominant direction of the wind.”
But, later, it was discovered that wind played no role in the species’ movement.
As another great but incorrect hypothesis, the team figured that the balls were blocking the sun from melting the ice from beneath them, but as the sun would melt the ice around them, it would cause them to become unstable and start moving around.
But a scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute named Ruth Mottram has another good hypothesis.
“I think that probably the explanation is somewhere in the physics of the energy and the heat around the surface of the glacier, but we haven’t quite got there yet,” she said.
Apart from there being no evidence to prove why the balls move, Bartholomaus is also curious where the balls even came from. For now, he and his team believe the species of moss balls likely developed around a small piece of detritus and then remultiplied into several separate balls.
Whether or not these hypotheses are true can only be revealed through time.
You can check out the unusual species below! Just for fun, let us know your hypothesis in the comments section.
