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Kevin Parry took a year to complete this stop-motion animation at Sheridan College. Filmmaker Tim Burton called it “a cross between 2001 and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” And then he said it was “really cool.” -via reddit
A beautiful and trippy time-lapse video of the midnight sun in Iceland, filmed in June of 2011. From the vimeo description:
Iceland is a landscape photographers paradise and playground, and should be number 1 on every photographers must visit list. Iceland during the Midnight Sun is in sort of a permanent state of sunset. The sun never full sets and travels horizontally across the horizon throughout the night, as can be seen in the opening shot and at the :51 second mark in the video.
During the Arctic summer, sunset was at midnight and sunrise was at 3am. The Arctic summer sun provided 24 hours a day of light, with as much as 6 hours daily of “Golden light”. Once the sun had set it wouldn’t even get dark enough for the stars to come out, and they don’t start to reappear until August.
-via Metafilter
Ed Wozniak, who brought us lists of Norse and Hawaiian dieties, has a list of gods in the pantheon of the Inuits, whose homelands stretch all around the northernmost regions of the world. Some have downright scary stories, like the sea goddess Sedna.
She was the daughter of the god and goddess Anguta and Isarrataitsoq and, like countless female figures in Inuit myths, she refused all prospective husbands. Sedna instead had sexual relations with dogs and the “freakish” offspring of these unions were said to be white people and Native American tribes that the Inuit were often at war with. A ghoulish twist to the story is how Sedna took to using her parents as food (a recurring theme in Inuit myths because of the scarcity of food in the frozen north at times and how instances of cannibalism during such famines were much-discussed). Sedna devoured both of her mother Isarrataitsoq’s arms and had finished eating one of her father’s arms before he was able to subdue her and take her out to sea in his canoe, intent on banishing her to the sea. Continuing to struggle, Sedna clutched the sides of the canoe as her father tried to submerge her, prompting him to take his long knife and cut off her fingers. Since, to the Inuit, loss or mutilation of the hands was often seen as a horrific transformation into something new, the myth states that Sedna now embraced her fate, transforming her now-fingerless hands into flippers and transforming her severed digits into the various species of sea animals.
Read more about Sedna and eleven other Inuit deities at Balladeer’s Blog. Link
Narwhal Mini Squishable – $19.00
Have you always wanted your very own Narwhal? Of course you have! Who doesn’t want their own adorable arctic sea creature?
Now with the Narwhal Mini Squishable from the NeatoShop your dream of cuddling up with this amazing unicorn of the sea can finally come true!
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more lovable Plush Toys!
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In 1850, the HMS Investigator sailed into the Canadian Arctic in search for the fabled Northwest Passage. Captain Robert McClure and his crew, after getting trapped in ice in 1853, abandoned the ship. But a team of archaeologists recently found the ship, which is in remarkably good condition. Canadian parks official Marc-Andre Bernier said:
“The ship had not moved too much from where it was abandoned,” said Bernier.
The masts and rigging have long been sheared off by ice and weather. But the icy waters of the McClure Strait has preserved the vessel in remarkably good condition.
“It’s incredible,” said Prentice from Mercy Bay. “You’re actually able to peer down into the water and see not only the outline of the ship but actually the individual timbers.
Link | Image: University of Delaware
Gorgeous women in bikinis do not usually bring to mind the image of the arctic, but that’s exactly what Canadian magazine Up Here wanted you to think about when it released its first ever swimsuit edition:
The 26-year-old northern Canadian magazine, Up Here, has published its first swimsuit issue to draw attention to climate change.
Its latest edition, out this week, features 10 swimsuit-clad women posing in threatened northern landscapes such as burnt-out forests and melting icescapes.
Why swimsuits?
"When you want to get attention in a room full of people talking, you tend to yell," writes Tim Querengesser on Up Here’s blog. "So, when we decided to dedicate an entire issue to climate change in the North…we knew we’d have to yell to be heard above the already deafening howl."
Link | Up Here magazine post, where sadly there’s no more details on the swimsuit edition
Filmmaker Yassine Ouhilal took four top professional surfers to the northern Norwegian and Russian coast to film them surfing in the extreme winter conditions of the Arctic Ocean:
While planning the trip, charts showed that waves would be better in the winter, but it was deemed suicide to try surfing during the coldest and darkest part of the year. Even the spring temperatures hovered between 20 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit; not exactly the most ideal surfing weather. As they traveled around they often found beautiful, calm beaches that taunted them with signs of large waves that came just days before.
At the link, you can view more photos of their expedition.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal
As Arctic ice fields retreat, more and more artifacts that were frozen and buried are coming to light. In 1997, hunters found a dart that turned out to be over 4,000 years old. Since then, scientists are searching for history that was preserved under ice for thousands of years. Biologists are finding specimens of well-preserved plants and animals. Archaeologists are collecting evidence of human habitation. Pictured is a bone arrow with a copper tip, believed to be about 1600 years old. TYWKIWDBI has a roundup of stories of newly-found glacial artifacts. Link
Well I’m a polar bear and my name is Bjorn
and I’ve been a polar bear since the day I was born.
Welcome to my kingdom and the world that I roam
the circumpolar arctic, the place that I call home.
Written by science teacher Tom Rugg. Complete lyrics are available at the YouTube link. This video is part of the BBC Wales’ series Green Season. Link -via Arbroath
Photo: Kevin Raskoff
The 2005 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratin (NOAA) research expedition to the Canada Basin, the deepest and least explored part of the Arctic waters revealed many new and fantastic species of jellyfish.
National Geographic has a neat gallery of these jellyfish, courtesy of Kevin Raskoff of the Monterey Peninsula College. This one above is the aptly named narcomedusa, which kind of look like it has benefited from British dentistry (kidding! No hate mail, please!): Link
A mysterious mass of black goo has been observed oozing through the Chucki sea off the coast of Alaska. It was first observed neat Wainwright and moved toward Barrow, where samples were collected for testing.
Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not.
“It’s certainly biological,” Hasenauer said. “It’s definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.
“It’s definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it’s some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism.”
No one in the area remembers ever seeing anything like the sea blob before. Link -via reddit
Update: The tests are back. The blob has been identified as algae.
