I love it when Icelandic sagas attribute every microscopic inconvenience that befalls a hero on his journeys to “witchcraft”. It makes me picture a really bored witch just micromanaging the hell out of this one particular guy’s daily travails.
My favorite bit of Icelandic saga is when one dude’s house is invaded by not one, but two bands of zombies (because he pissed off a witch, obviously), which did such terrible zombie things as taking the best spots by the fire and throwing clods of dirt at each other.
The homeowner, being a fine upstanding Icelandic farmer/warrior type, did what you’d expect a Viking warrior to do when faced with invading zombies.
He sued them. In court. With lawyers. As one does.
I have this book about “what it means to be jewish” or whatever and a previous library patron has scribbled disagreements with the author in the margins
Norse mythology fails to convey the sense of terror that must have hung over Asgard every time Loki was gone for longer than eight months and three weeks
Also you know that Loki regularly just…brings back random baby animals. That he found in the woods. Claims he gave birth to them. And people believe him every time.
One of my favourite geology facts is this: These diagrams are a lie.
The mantle isn’t yellow. Nor is it orange, or red, or brown, or gray, or black.
The earth’s mantle is made up largely of peridotite.
The earth’s mantle is lime green.
Here’s where it gets even more counterintuitive. It’s not molten!
Just going based on temperature, the mantle SHOULD by rights be molten. It’s hot enough to melt the rock. But because it’s so deep, there’s enough pressure to push it down into a solid!
Water is strange in that its solid form takes up more space than its liquid form. You know this, even if you don’t think you do – it’s why ice floats. This also means that when you put pressure on ice, it turns into water to try and become smaller. That’s why ice is slippery.
Pretty much every other material is the opposite of that – the solid form takes up less space than the liquid. So, even at a temperature where it should be a liquid, enough pressure can make it become as small as possible – and that requires it becoming a solid.
It still “wants” to melt, though. In areas where tectonic plates are moving apart, the mantle is exposed, which decreases the pressure on it dramatically. As it comes to the surface it actually cools slightly, but despite this, the drop in pressure is enough to make it turn into a liquid!
So, no, there isn’t magma under you (unless you happen to live on a volcano). There is liquid, though, but way deeper down – the outer core of the earth is made of liquid iron.
A long time ago I made the infinite glasses gif above. Then the other night I was trying to fall asleep and my brain kept telling me to do the same thing to confused white guy so… Here it is in 2 varieties!
DarkestElemental616 