Lovin’ Spoonful

October 13, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

We had a thick storm that made itself known at our elevation with pounding rain and a swirling stewpot of black clouds. When the grey haze lifted, the Jura mountains were dusted in season’s first snow and the temperature had plunged.

I thought I’d escaped the bug that was bothering me all last week, but yesterday it came back with a vengeance and an epic sneezing fit. So I hobbled through the day and then decided to use a little home remedy to make sure I got some sleep. It’s cold enough now for hot evening drinks.

The ever-reliable Hot Toddy, friend of stuffy heads and cranky moods. According to whisky expert Charlie MacLean, the hot toddy was invented in the 18th century, a workaround solution to sell raw Scotch. Sugared fruits, honey or spices were added to raw whisky to disguise the taste, with hot water to dissolve them.

Many cultures have their own forms of heated alchoholic remedies. Most seem to involve simply mixing a favorite spirit with hot water and something sugary. One Japanese version is the tamagozake – heated sake with a raw egg mixed in until just cooked, and honey or sugar. I haven’t tried it, but as long as it doesn’t just turn into sake-flavored scrambled eggs, why not?

It’s always been clear to me that the main benefit of drinking my kind of hot toddy – hot water, whisky, honey and lemon juice – was the hot water and lemon juice. Probably most of the alcohol in the whisky evaporates in the boiling water, anyway. But enough remains that I think it helps me get just a bit more of a restful sleep than I might otherwise achieve.

All the necessary ingredients – including fresh ginger for the non-whisky version.
Source: Gourmet Traveller

So, with the soothing effects of my first hot toddy of the season, I managed an excellent night’s rest, and woke this morning to find that my cold was all but gone. Miraculous effects of the hot toddy? Probably whatever I had has simply run its course. The average cold lasts 7-10 days, whatever bug I caught first made itself known over a week ago, so that’s a distinct possibility.

But I definitely feel better post-toddy than I did pre-toddy.

I don’t make my hot toddies very strong – just a one short shot of whisky with a lot of water goes a long way when I’m sick. I made the mistake a couple of years ago of adding a shot of very smoky, peaty whisky, which is one I won’t repeat.

My very basic Hot Toddy consists of a shot of smooth whisky (last night I used Singleton), a mug of hot water, mixed with a sweet heaping spoonful of mild honey and juice from half a lemon. Easy. I found a few interesting, fancier versions here, but I’ll be sticking with my tried-and-true version.

After all, it worked last night, right?

And here’s a musical Lovin’ Spoonful to push back those autumn chills.

Teardrop Revival

June 4, 2013 / PK Read / 1 Comment

A moss (Aulacomnium turgidum), one of seven plants frozen under Teardrop Glacier roughly 400 years ago and induced to grow new stems and shoots in a lab.
Image: Catherine La Farge via Smithsonian Magazine

Last year I pulled from our garage a small, disused windowbox containing only black soil and decaying plant bits. Intending to clean and replant the box, I left it on a ledge under the open sky. It rained, and a few days later, I found the tiniest tinge of green where none had been before. Within a couple of weeks, I had a windowbox of expanding and aptly named ‘liveforever’ plants (Sempervivum), which thrive to this day.

I was surprised by the re-emergence of small plants that had been dormant for over two years. Imagine the surprise of the researchers who found plants emerging and spreading from underneath a 400-year-old glacier.

Ellesmere Island’s Teardrop Glacier, which formed during the Little Ice Age of the mid-16th century, covered the island’s vegetation until very recently. The retreat of the glacier exposed the remains of that vegetation, blackened clumps of frozen mosses, liverworts and lichens, non-vascular plants generally known as bryophytes.

When researchers discovered green sprouts shooting up from some of the clumps, they had the plants tested. The results showed that the plants were not related to the existing, surrounding vegetation, and radiocarbon dating of the blackened, frozen parts of the plants put their age at between 400 and 615 years old.

Discolored mosses and lichens revealed by the melting of Teardrop Glacier.
Image: Catherine La Farge via Smithsonian Magazine

From a Smithsonian Magazine article: “The discovery could substantially change our understanding of the way ecosystems regenerate after glacial retreat—a pretty important topic, given what’s currently happening to wide swaths of the Arctic given current melting trends.

If glaciers serve as reservoirs of plant species that can potentially regenerate, it means that the ecosystems that sprout in the glaciers’ wake are more likely to be made up of these original plant types rather than the quickly-growing, newly arrived colonizing species scientists had previously assumed would dominate such environments.”

As climate change gets underway in earnest, and retreating glaciers expose life which has been in frozen suspension for hundreds or thousands of years, I wonder what other life is still waiting to burst forth and how our own expectations will be tested.

Teardrop Glacier, Sverdrup Pass, central Ellesmere Island, Nunavut. Note: Little Ice Age trimline ~ 200 m beyond the ice margin. Measured ice retreat has rapidly accelerated since 2004 exposing pristine LIA plant communities composed of bryophytes and vascular plants
From: Arctic Workshop 2013 Abstract

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) study –Regeneration of Little Ice Age bryophytes emerging from a polar glacier with implications of totipotency in extreme environments by C. La Farge, K.H. Williams, J.H. England

Smithsonian Magazine article –Plants Frozen Under a Glacier for 400 Years Can Come Back to Life

Ancient Flow

June 3, 2013June 3, 2013 / PK Read / 2 Comments

Rouffignac Cave Mammoth drawing (copper etching)
Via: Elfshot Gallery

Revive & Restore, the de-extinction project of the Long Now Foundation, has proposed the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) as the initial animal to be brought back from the evolutionary beyond.

Some might think that the recent discovery of a fossilised woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) in Siberia could be an alternate choice. After all, its blood is still liquid after an possible 10,000 – 15,000 years spent in the permafrost, permanently frozen soil.

There is speculation that woolly mammoth blood might have cryoprotective features that helped the animal survive long winters by protecting cells or tissues from freezing. The blood samples have remained liquid at temperatures as low as -17 °C (1.4 °F).

Most animal blood, including that of humans, freezes at around -0.5 to -3 °C (31.1 – 26.6 °F). There are fish species in the Arctic that have been studied for the proteins that prevent their blood from freezing down to temperatures of -6 °C (23.1 °F).*

Woolly mammoths, then, would have exceeded these lower limits by a wide margin.

It’s one thing to find a fossil of unexpected extinct life (the giant Arctic camel, for example), it’s quite another to find blood and tissue of a long-extinct animal. Other samples of woolly mammoth tissue have been found before – this latest is the most intact thus far.

Still, this discovery means that cloning a mammoth is only a slightly less remote impossibility than before because of the likely degradation of the blood cells and DNA.

Another revelation with receding glaciers and permafrost: the revival of plant ecosystems that were dormant under centuries of ice. I’ll write about this tomorrow.

Broken Ice
Photo: Seagirl via Photobucket

*According a Wired.com article: “The research was funded by Volkswagen, who no doubt want to find better ways of anti-freezing their cars. The natural proteins found in the fish perform far better than man-made antifreezes, which bond directly with water molecules to lower the freezing point. The proteins don’t need to bond. Their mere presence is enough to slow freezing.”

LiveScience article – Despite Mammoth Blood Discovery, Cloning Still Unlikely by Tia Ghose

A bigger snowflake

March 12, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Art & Photo: Simon Beck

It’s raining here, the snow at our altitude is all but gone, the first flowers have already pushed up through the recently thawed earth. But just a little more than an hour’s drive from my doorstep, up in Val d’Isère of the French Alps, it’s still winter. So I thought I’d post a picture of what one guy is doing up there besides skiing.

Simon Beck is snowshoeing instead. But in very specific patterns.

One week until vernal equinox.

Simon Beck’s Facebook pages here and here.

Simon Beck at work

Lush Life

March 3, 2013March 3, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Photo: PK Read

I planted two witchhazel bushes in the garden last year so there would be spots of color against the snow.

It’s been nothing but grey, yet the red of the bushes stands out.

Another standout against the grey of this late winter weekend was my wonderful neighbor, a fourth generation gardener whose ancestors tended the gardens of the local château until that was sold. I saw him working in his garden – he was getting ready to prune his grape vines. He offered to come by afterwards and trim our single muscadet vine to save it from my clumsy clippers. Of course, there’s something in it for him, too – every year, he gets several kilos of some of finest grapes around from our garden. It’s a mystery, but our one rather old vine seems to be a very happy single dweller, producing around 30 kilos of grapes every year. Much of which goes to our neighbor. A nice gardening cycle.

Photo: PK Read

So even with gloomy skies above, it’s a lush life this weekend.

Half-way up snow

January 12, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Jura ridge

It was a cool day for a walk – I brought home a touch of the flu, a personal souvenir courtesy of my visit Stateside, and today was my first day out again after a self-imposed quarantine. The past week has been rainy, this afternoon was glorious and bright. The snow line on the Jura is high for this time of year, around 700 meters (2100 feet), the top of the ridge at 1000 meters was thick with a blanket of fluffy clouds and fog.

For the local ski resorts – one of the cableways is visible as the vertical lines on the mountain – this means that there has been some recent snowfall due to the rain, but they are probably supplementing this with snow cannons. And that the ski lift area is socked in with low clouds and low visibility. Not great conditions, although I’m sure the dedicated snowboarders and the parents who want their kids to learn to ski are up there anyway. Local public schools all offer twice-weekly ski lessons throughout winter as a part of the regular school sports program. From age 4 through 10, kids learn to ski.

As for me, it was back home and back to bed with a cup of tea.

champagnewhisky

Never cry over spilt milk. It could've been champagne. Or whisky.

#snow