Gumdrop Moon

Different cultures have different names for the full moons of the year, and January’s is called anything from Wolf Moon to Snow Moon to Winter Moon to Moon of the Terrible.

But the moon that rose over Lake Geneva last night, caught here as we drove across Mont Blanc Bridge, was nothing so fearsome as to warrant its usual names.

This was a soft Gumdrop Moon, one day before it waxes full, shining above in pastel skies and reflected in the lake below.

Moonrise over Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Photo: PKR

Moonrise over Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
Photo: PKR

Spawn Skimming

Coral spawning, Great Barrier Reef. Photo: Tusa Dive / Australian Geographic

Coral spawning, Great Barrier Reef.
Photo: Tusa Dive / Australian Geographic

Coral reefs spawn beneath a springtime full moon, sending up a synchronized release of countless coral eggs and sperm to mingle in the sea, sometimes across great distances. These form planulae, coral larvae, which first float to the water’s surface, then swim back down to the reef or seabed, and form new coral.

And yet, what if they don’t? What if some coral reefs are too damaged to effectively reproduce?

Spawning mountainous star coral off Grand Cayman Island. Photo: Alex Mustard

Spawning mountainous star coral off Grand Cayman Island.
Photo: Alex Mustard

A project was launched last year in Australia to apply the knowledge gained from human fertilization to coral reproduction. Researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science retrieved reproductive material during the spawning season of the Great Barrier Reef in order to cryogenically freeze it far from the ocean’s shores in the Western Plains Zoo, in the New South Wales outback.

The goal is to be able to seed out endangered coral reefs in the future, perhaps even hundreds of years from now.

The project reminds me a bit of the Svalbard global seed vault, a human undertaking to harvest as much of the world’s valuable genetic material as possible, even as genetic diversity is rapidly dwindling.

Will it work? No one knows yet. Is it worth trying? I think the answer has to be yes, absolutely, even as we need to work harder against the various human-caused factors that are destroying the world’s largest single structure made by living beings in the first place.

A lovely video, Coral Sea Dreaming, shows the coral reef spawning process:

Skyward Run

The day started like this.

Sunrise over the Alps & Lake Geneva Photo: PK Read

Sunrise over the Alps & Lake Geneva
Photo: PK Read

By evening, the clouds had cleared, so at one point the run looked like this in one direction.

Sunset over the Jura range. Photo: PK Read

Sunset over the Jura range.
Photo: PK Read

Like this in the other.

Sunset and Mont Blanc. Photo: PK Read

Sunset and Mont Blanc.
Photo: PK Read

And like this straight ahead.

Sunset and the Jura/Rhône Valley Photo: PK Read

Sunset and the Jura/Rhône Valley
Photo: PK Read

Then I looked over my shoulder, and this fine fellow popped up over a cloud.

Moonrise over a cloud. Photo: PK Read

Moonrise over a cloud.
Photo: PK Read

It was a pretty good day, sky-wise.

 

A Pulled Thread

Moon_phases_small-310x465Today dawned a thin pale sky against a white landscape, the kind of winter day which is hard to tell from any other, and where the hours from dawn to dusk look much the same. I was thinking that if I didn’t have a clock and a calendar, I wouldn’t have any idea where I was between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, except that it’s still winter. If I didn’t have a clock, I wouldn’t be able to mark how short the days are. If I didn’t have a calendar, instead of being panicked at how quickly February is passing in relation to how slowly my work is done, I might be curled in a limbo of quiet hope that spring will come again, preferably soon.

And that got me thinking about calendars and time-keeping in oral cultures and other places. And that’s how I came across one kind of calendar that crossed many cultures, each with different names. The lunar calendar, of course. Now, it’s a few days past the most recent new moon, but then, I’m chronically late, so that’s just about right. So today I am dedicating a post to the moon and the names we use for it when it is fat, full and bright in February. This particular year, the February moon will shine at its fattest on February 25, at 21:26 Greenwich Mean Time.

It’s been said that writing was invented to make lists, and to me the names of this month’s moons says quite a bit about what other cultures think (or thought) about February. Here is my (incomplete and non-academic) list of February moon names across various cultures:

Trapper’s Moon – Colonial America
Bony Moon – Cherokee
Little Hunger Moon – Choctaw
Snow Moon  – Algonquin tribes
Moon of the Raccoon / Moon When Trees Pop – Dakotah Sioux
Moon of Ice – Gaelic
Storm Moon – English Medieval
Budding Moon – Chinese
Magh Purnima – Hindu (an auspicious day for a sacred and purifying bath, if I understand correctly)

I would certainly welcome the addition of any Full Moon names from other languages/times/cultures, especially those from the Southern Hemisphere.