The world is a mask that hides the real world.
Thatâs what everybody suspects, though the world we see wonât let us dwell on it long.
The world has ways - more masks - of getting our attention.
The suspicion sneaks in now and again, between the cracks of everyday existenceâ¦the bird song dips, rises, dips, trails off into blue sky silence before the note that would reveal the shape of a melody that, somehow, would tie everything together, on the verge of unmasking the hidden armature that frames this sky, this tree, this bird, this quivering green leaf, jewels in a crown.â¦
As the song dies, the secret withdraws.
The tree is a mask.
The sky is a mask.
The quivering green leaf is a mask.
The song is a mask.
The singing bird is a mask.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
why did ancient Antarctic seals commit suicide?
Seal suicide site found in Antarctica, 15 July 2005
The Press, Christchurch: New Zealand researchers have found a bizarre seal suicide site in Antarctica, where dozens of seals have inexplicably left the ocean, travelled 30km inland and gone over a bluff to their deaths.
Antarctica New Zealand (AntNZ) chief executive Lou Sanson named the seal cemetery in the snow-free Dry Valleys near Scott Base as one of the highlights of the discoveries made by the science teams sponsored by AntNZ last summer.
"There are 50 mummified seals that appeared to have committed suicide by heading over a bluff in the Dry Valleys area," he said. University of Waikato professor Craig Cary said Captain Robert Scott had been the first to discover the inexplicable fate of seals that have headed inland to their deaths in the Dry Valleys.
A century later, Cary had been with a team researching seal carcasses in the area when he heard there were "a couple of seals" in Miers Valley. "We found one, then another and another and another. "That year we found a dozen seal corpses," he said. "As soon as we got funding again from AntNZ to go back into the area, we came back and thoroughly mapped the slope. We found 53 in total.
"The trouble is sometimes mummified seals look like rocks and you don't always see them until you're a metre away."
Others stand out like sore thumbs. "It's the huge concentration that's so amazing. It would have taken them weeks to crawl there. "We called the site Boot Hill, after the American West, where the bodies of unnamed villains were taken and buried without too much ceremony."
The slope is near Penance Pass and Purgatory Lake, which seems appropriate.
"The cause of the seals' suicidal journeys away from the sea remains a mystery, but almost all are juvenile crabeater seals. "I don't think they're too smart. They probably got disoriented in a storm," Cary said.
The focus of the University of Waikato team was not on the cause of the seals' journeys but on the impact of the nutrients in their corpses on the otherwise incredibly barren Dry Valleys eco-system. Using a series of hi-tech microbial forensics he jokingly dubbed "CSI Antarctica", the team found each seal created a localised boost in the microbe life but also that each one had a genetic fingerpint seemingly unrelated to others in the same general area. The team was helped by the extremely cold and dry environments because the DNA was preserved very well. However, carbon-dating techniques made it difficult to identify how long the seals had been there. Some may have died as long as 4600 years ago.
