How These Sea Shells Know the Weather in Greenland
Foraminifera – tiny, single-celled marine life forms – build gorgeous houses that record how much ice there is on the planet. This video was supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation....
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Each of these sea-shells is in fact really, really tiny, because each was once home to a tiny single-celled marine lifeform called a foram. Though they don’t have eyes or brains or limbs, forams somehow manage to pull ingredients from seawater and stack them together into houses made out of the mineral calcium carbonate. Even cooler, each little house ends up with a number written into it that tells us how much ice and snow there is on Earth. That's right – a single-celled sea creature knows how much combined snow and ice there is on all the mountaintops and ice sheets and glaciers on our entire planet! Crazy, but it’s true: Here’s how it happens. The number in the forams’ shells comes from the two types of oxygen they pull from seawater – th...
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Each of these sea-shells is in fact really, really tiny, because each was once home to a tiny single-celled marine lifeform called a foram. Though they don’t have eyes or brains or limbs, forams somehow manage to pull ingredients from seawater and stack them together into houses made out of the mineral calcium carbonate. Even cooler, each little house ends up with a number written into it that tells us how much ice and snow there is on Earth. That's right – a single-celled sea creature knows how much combined snow and ice there is on all the mountaintops and ice sheets and glaciers on our entire planet! Crazy, but it’s true: Here’s how it happens. The number in the forams’ shells comes from the two types of oxygen they pull from seawater – th...
