Mrs. Sippi’s Blog

He’s having deep-sea diving jet planes designed and built. See this article in the Telegraph and this one in The Sun.

You may have heard about islands made up entirely of plastic trash. It’s not quite like that, in reality. If you’re interested, you may want to watch a long video my boss posted about on her blog, of an expedition to the Pacific garbage patch.

The Mariana Trench consists of two tectonic plates. It’s like two slices of cake or two slices of bread on a plate, one partly overlapping the other.

Go on, get two slices of bread, or even easier, grab two books.

See that point where they start overlapping? Where one goes under the other?

That’s where you have things like the Mariana Trench in some places, namely where the lower book or the lower slice sinks into the earth. (What a shame your book won’t sink into the table and the slice of bread into your plate! LOL)

At other locations, where that tectonic plate is not sinking into the planet… Yes, you guessed it: That’s where you get mountains.

That’s the story in a nutshell. (Lots of earth scientists will come after me with axes now.)

PS
That blue thing at the center of the image at the top? That’s a graph, a computer image, of (part of) the Mariana Trench. If you did the experiment with the books, you may be able to see the similarity.

My boss says that the recent earthquake off New Zealand gave her a great idea for a new page. I heard her and I agree! I want to have it online within a week. Stay tuned!

This Yahoo page has an interesting answer regarding what is really at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Recently, the number of visitors to this site rose sharply, by several hundreds per day. What might be the cause of that?

Turns out that the exiting President of the United States, G.W. Bush, has declared the Mariana Trench area a monument.

A minute ago, information about the current issue of the journal Science dropped into my boss’s inbox. As expected, Science does comment on this new development, but you need to pay in order to access the article. I’ll ask my boss to buy it for me. I am kinda curious what it says.

I think it was mid November when I discovered that Bombay Sapphire gin is the favorite Christmas beverage of some English people. (My boss told me about it.)

The name - Bombay Sapphire gin - sounds fairytale-like to me and hints at a certain richness, conjures up images of treasure troves filled with oriental jewelry and an Aladdin’s lamp or two all placed on marvelous oriental carpets with deep burgundy colors and a touch of purple here and there.

It also raises questions. What is it made of? And do Bombay sapphires exist? I decided to investigate.

Want to know what I found? Follow me.

I just uploaded a new page. It is about a scientific paper published in 2003. From a scientific viewpoint, papers more than 5 years old are getting a bit “bearded”, so I am still just in time.

Here is the link to the new page about the Challenger Deep.

Please, do keep in mind that this is very likely to be only a temporary version. My boss was helping me today, but she really is not feeling that awake at the moment and her muscles are hurting a little bit too. Yep, she’s got the flu!

She is also lousy at drawing and that is why this all took so long. Then she suddenly had an idea: if you can’t draw, see if you can make a model and photograph that model. So last week, on her way back from an emergency vet visit, she purchased 4 slices of cake. A few days later, she bought a big chunk of Cheddar cheese.

Piece of cake!

My boss just created the illustrations for it. Finally! And they’re great.

My boss had a great idea this morning! There’ll be more here within about two weeks.