The world will not end with a bang...

But several bangs as the Siberian permafrost melts and methane bubbles explode.

The formation of a mysterious and massive crater in a remote Siberian peninsula triggered an explosion that was heard more than 100km (62 miles) away and caused the sky to glow. First discovered in 2013 by reindeer herders, its formation has become one of the biggest enigmas in the region. When it first formed, locals dubbed it the "end of the world" crater.

Fear of blow holes, the educated, jellyfish and bees.

Being afraid of education, of the educated is a sign that what you are comfortable with is wrong.

Mysterious Siberian blow holes.

How about shopping for a new body when yours wears out?

Pork production, and the need of another book like The Jungle.

No word for blue until the modern times.

The warming of the oceans means more jellyfish.

Viking burial site has Islamic coins.

Recycling all types of plastic just became harder because China has cut back.

Chicago black site.

Bees in danger world wide.  (Thanks for the article link, Steve!)

Discussion on a college campus about the 'problem of whiteness' exposes the very problem as a white freakout occurs.

When good people see police brutality in action and respond accordingly.

What does the collapse of Libya mean to the rest of the world?

A source of innocent merriment!

For those whose lives are too busy... A Book A Minute.

A town that plans to grow all its own veggies.

Exploring England.

Panda cub.

32,000-Year-Old Plant Reborn From Ancient Fruit Found In Siberian Ice

Celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

Cold enuff fer ya? Hyuk hyuk.....

Rapid thaw of permafrost concerns climate experts

Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane - a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide - at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

"Here, total carbon storage is like all the rain forests of our planet put together," says the scientist, Sergey Zimov - "here" being the endless sweep of snow and ice stretching toward Siberia's gray horizon, as seen from Zimov's research facility nearly 350 kilometers (220 miles) above the Arctic Circle.

We'll not know what we had until it's gone.....

On the other hand

Global warming will make boat travel much faster!:

Kiel, Germany - After studying ice formation on the Siberian coast, German scientists forecast Monday that regular ships would be able to sail through the entire North-East Passage between Europe and Asia in summer in 10 to 15 years. Heidemarie Kassens of the Leibniz Oceanography Institute in Kiel said earlier estimates this would happen by 2050 were out of date because of the rapid pace of climate change. The passage through Arctic waters north of Russia would link the Atlantic and Pacific.

Speaking after a six-week expedition to the Laptev Sea off Siberia, she called the development alarming. The region was a major source of new ice, but this year it had produced very little, she said.

It was noticeable that many Atlantic species of plankton were invading the Arctic and displacing Arctic species.

"The ice cover on the sea is melting faster than our models forecast," Kassens said, adding that Siberia's permafrost was thawing too. The expedition saw buildings on the permafrost cracked and in danger of collapse.

Obviously mammoths are coming out with a book or a movie

Why else would their publicists be making them hit the headlines right now?

In southwestern Germany, an American archaeologist and his German colleagues have found the oldest mammoth-ivory carving known to modern science. And even at 35,000 years old, it's still intact.

Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. "You can be sure," Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years."

(photo from article)

And in Siberia:

A baby mammoth unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia could be the best preserved specimen of its type, scientists have said.

The frozen carcass is to be sent to Japan for detailed study.

The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago.

Maybe this is the reason (from the same article):

Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth lineage.

Despite the inherent difficulties, Dr Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning.

"When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: 'if you can get us good DNA, we'll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months'," he told BBC News.

Ohhhkaaay... Have we thought about what it would mean to bring back wooly mammoths? Into zoos? For fun? For scientific purposes? Because we can?

Sheesh! Didn't anybody watch Jurassic Park?

Update 7/17: Cloning mammoths will not happen:

SPIEGEL: Researchers are falling all over themselves to examine the intact baby mammoth found in the permafrost of Siberia. Will scientists be able to clone it?

Hofreiter: Cloning a mammoth isn't possible: Anyone who says otherwise shouldn't be taken seriously. For a successful cloning, you would need intact cells complete with organelles and DNA in chromosome form. What we have is the genome in millions of pieces -- they are just fragmentary. At the most, one could replace single genes, as is done with mice. But to transform an Asian elephant into a mammoth would require millions of substitutions.