After thousands of years of admiring it shining in the night sky, we can now see that if the planet Jupiter were not where it is, and were not as mind-boggling large as it is, our own planet would be uninhabitable–a shooting gallery for comets and meteors that get routinely deflected from Earth by Jupiter being in the way. Chalk one up for God’s providence.
But now… what about Neptune? Many times the size of Earth, billions of miles from the sun, apparently locked in perpetually violent storms–what’s with that? Which of God’s purposes does that world serve? As yet we have no idea at all.
Someday we may be able to study other solar systems as closely as we study our own (which is nowhere near as closely as we’d like!). Maybe then we’ll begin to develop understanding.
God’s Creation is more than rich enough to keep us busy.
“How the dickens should I know?” growls an irritable Mr. Nature. He’s been working on this blog, too, and it has made him cranky. In a few minutes he calms down.
The answer to the question is, “Well, they sort of sleep, but not like we do.” That is, they rest. They might find a cranny in a coral reef, or an old tin can, and hole up there for a while–where they can breathe more slowly and not have to exert themselves. The hard part of being a fish is there’s always something or someone trying to eat you. So just floating around or lying on the bottom fast asleep is a pretty sure way to wind up out of the saga.
Watch your goldfish carefully and see if they have down time. That’s them sleeping. Sort of.
Some of us have heard “lake guns” and some of us haven’t. You might not know you’ve heard them: they might easily be mistaken for thunder or something else.
You don’t hear them at every body of water and you don’t hear them all the time. We simply don’t know what makes these sounds. Patty and I used to hear them occasionally on Barnegat Bay–always on extremely calm days.
A lot of you weren’t here in 2013 when I posted “The Mystery of the Ringing Rocks,” and now seems as good a time as any to revisit. Besides, by now I’ve learned how to post a video to go along with it, so you can hear the rocks ring.
Yes, they ring: when tapped with a hammer, some of the rocks in the boulder field produce a musical tone. But not all of them! Which is hard to understand. And if you put in the time, you could probably find a way to play a tune on the rocks. “Happy Birthday,” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It’s been done by others.
What makes them ring? After studying them for going on 200 years, nobody knows.
Ringing rocks are found, as far as we know, in only seven places, world-wide: in England, Scotland, Australia, Mexico, Montana, and at two sites in Pennsylvania. Why are they so rare? No one knows. I’ve visited Ringing Rocks Park in Upper Black Eddy, PA, and heard the rocks ring. Back then you were allowed to climb around the boulder field and play with the rocks; I don’t know if you still can.
Just as puzzling as the rarity of this phenomenon, if you break a rock into two or more pieces, the pieces won’t ring anymore. It’s as if something spilled out and was lost. Even more puzzling, if you remove ringing rocks from one of the two boulder fields in Pennsylvania, they won’t ring anymore! Well, they will, sort of–but the sound is too low-frequency to be detected by the human ear. But if you remove a ringing rock from the other field, only a few miles away from the first one, it will still ring.
Something Biblical about it all, isn’t there?
Meanwhile, if you think you’ve got God’s creation all figured out, the ringing rocks should make you reconsider your position. And this is Mr. Nature, signing off for now.
