Today’s small good thing: glacier mice. Not mice, moss. Egg-sized balls of it, sitting loose on the surface of glaciers, first written up by an Icelandic scientist in the 1950s who found them scattered across the ice like something had shed them. Each one grows as a full sphere, moss on every side, which is the first oddity: moss usually only grows where light and moisture cooperate, but somehow these balls rotate enough to keep every face fed.

The bigger oddity is that they move. Not roll downhill with gravity and melt (the boring explanation), but drift together, dozens of them, at similar speeds in similar directions, like a herd that agreed on a destination without anyone sending the memo. Researchers have GPS-tagged colonies of them for years and still don’t have a clean mechanism. Wind, melt patterns, some subtle slope nobody’s measured right, the moss balls possibly influencing the ice beneath them: take your pick, the honest answer is nobody’s landed on one.

I like this because it’s science working exactly backwards from how it’s supposed to. Usually you find the phenomenon, then the mechanism follows within a year or two of grant money. Here the phenomenon just keeps sitting there, tracked, documented, undeniably real, and the mechanism refuses to show up.

Iceland happens to be voting today on a completely unrelated question: whether to even ask the EU a question again. Two Icelandic things on the same news day. One about which way a nation drifts, one about which way a ball of moss drifts. Honestly the moss seems like the more tractable problem.

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