Trudy Myers's Blog, page 26

Man Made Islands

If you think man has only recently decided to build their own islands, think again. In Scotland, Wales and Ireland, they started doing it nearly 6,000 years ago. They are called crannogs and while some of them are partially natural,  quite a few were entirely artificial, built in lakes and estuarine waters. Crannogs are not like the prehistoric pile dwellings of the Alps, which were built on the shores and became inundated later. Crannogs were actually built in the water, forming artificial islands.
These new islands were used as dwellings for over five millennia, possibly to the early 18th century. Some were free-standing wooden structures, although they more commonly existed as brush, stone or timber mounds. However, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, timber was unavailable, so their crannogs consisted of stone, with drystone architecture sitting atop the base stones. Today, crannogs typically appear as small, circular islets, 30 to 100 feet in diameter, covered in dense vegetation because they are inaccessible to grazing livestock.
Crannogs are wide-spread in Ireland, but are frequently undercounted in Scotland, as they can be called various things, depending on who you talk to. Mainland Scotland and the Scottish isles also refer to them in various ways. Previously unknown crannogs are still being found, as underwater surveys find completely submerged examples.
Crannogs were built with whatever material was most available in the immediate area. Several feet above the water’s surface, an ‘Atlantic roundhouse’ was built on the new island, connected to the shore by a causeway. At the time, most communication and travel was achieved by waterways. They may have served as simple farmsteads or as boltholes in times of danger. Their limited access may have served as a status symbol, and their inherited location would have implied legitimacy towards ownership of the surrounding landscape.
The earliest known crannog in Scotland appears to date from 3650 BC. It is interesting to note that crannogs were often reused after a period of non-use. Defense does not appear to be the major reason for building and living on a crannog, as there is little evidence of weapons or of destruction in the excavation of prehistoric crannogs.
I have to admit, I was unaware of any such method of building a home until I googled this word for information. My first thought is that it would be a wonderful home for a water spirit or for a child of a water spirit.
My second thought was that it could be useful as a toll bridge across a river, with a causeway or bridge going from the home to both banks. Why break your back every day for the rest of your life to ferry people from one side of the river to the other when you can work hard as a youngster to build a home and 2 causeways, and still collect tolls as you totter into old age?
The article also mentioned kings and lords living on crannogs, of crannog islets being enlarged repeatedly and therefore being home to an extended family. What about a city growing up on an ever-enlarging crannog? Lots of ideas from this one word.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crannog

Y Dwarf Stars

What do you call a body in space that is bigger than a planet but not hot enough to be a star? Apparently, they are being called Y-dwarf stars.
These bodies are not undergoing fusion, so they aren’t what we usually think of when we think of stars. But they are bigger than a planet, and their gravity is so strong, the interior is heated - to some extent. If one was in orbit around a ‘normal’ star of any size, it would probably be called a planet. If it is wandering through space alone, or has anything orbiting it, it’s a failed star, a type of brown dwarf.
Brown dwarves come in 3 types, depending on their surface temperature. The hottest are the L-type, the cooler ones are T-type, and the coolest are this Y-type that we are discussing. Scientists know of at least 24 Y-type brown dwarves.
Brown dwarves can be as much as 80 times the mass of Jupiter, but a Y-type is only 5 to 20 times Jupiter’s mass. At that size, their surface temperature appears to be from 250 to 350 degrees Farenheit. They are hard to spot, not only because of their low temperature but because the energy they emit (weakly) is mostly in the infrared spectrum.
If I read the articles correctly, most Y-dwarves have an atmosphere, which I imagine is even more chaotic than that of Jupiter. And don’t be thinking that atmosphere might be breathable. Instead, think of alkali elements and noxious clouds.
I am left wondering how I could work a Y-type brown dwarf into a story. I don’t think you could ‘land’ on it. The articles didn’t specifically say it, but I don’t think they have any rocky core to them. How about if you had to dip into the atmosphere and ‘suck up’ some of that atmosphere as a type of fuel? Maybe you’d had a fuel leak that you finally got patched, but now you didn’t have enough fuel to get to any regular re-fueling station. Considering the gravity involved and the turbulence of that atmosphere, would your ship hold together?
Maybe you tried to stay on the very edge of the atmosphere, sipping up the fuel slowly, instead of going lower and gulping. But a sudden storm pulled you lower, to the point where the ship’s joints are creaking and complaining, so you have to open your vents wide and let the atmosphere flood your tanks, then take a chance and use that raw, unrefined fuel to blast your way out of the atmosphere and to a safe distance. That could be a bumpy ride, as your engines try to cope with pockets of impurities!
Well, that’s one thought. I’m sure others will come to me.

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-y-class-brown-dwarfs-01368.htmlhttps://phys.org/news/2017-07-y-type-stars.html

Conspiracy?

Heard any good conspiracy theories lately? Let me share one with you that has nothing to do with today’s political scene. It’s one that’s dawned on me little by little, over the past few weeks.
Disney World’s Hollywood Studios has had a new ride for the past... I’m not sure, 6 weeks? 2 months? We didn’t pay close attention to it when it finally opened, because we figured it would be super-freaking popular (being new), and there was no chance we could get on it for a while. So basically, we ignored it for several weeks to let some of the hullabaloo die down.
After about a month, we ventured to Hollywood Studios and since we were there, we wandered over to sign up for a ‘boarding group’. See, they had started a ‘virtual cue’ for this ride, where once you are in the park, you can sign up for a boarding group. I think we were in Boarding Group #105 on that day. They had also put up information signs around the park that - among other things - would tell which group(s) were being boarded at that time. So we wandered around the park, riding all the other rides, seeking out a lunch reservation, eating lunch, riding more rides again. They still weren’t even up to Group #50, and we were flagging badly. So we gave up and went home. Just wasn’t our day, we figured.
J did some research after that. The official line was that once your entire party is in the park, you can use the disney app on your phone to sign up for the ride and get your boarding pass number. J had an account for that app, he used it on his home computer to get fast passes for us when we are planning to go to one of the Disney World parks. But he didn’t have the app on his phone, because 1) he seldom carries his phone, and 2) he doesn’t want to load up a bunch of apps, so he’s not adept at using them.
About a week later, we tried again, getting up early enough to get there by 7am (we arrived at the entrance about 6:50am, only to find they were already letting people in). Once inside, J took off for the ride (located in the back of the park) to get us signed up, sure he did not need my wristband to get us both signed up. Meanwhile, I had halfway listened to the announcements, and went to the closest ‘Guest Experience’ umbrella, where staff members were helping people get signed up for this fantastic new ride. I was placed in Boarding Group #115. I was sure they would never get that far, but the staff person said they had gotten through #130 the day before. I assumed that meant they hadn’t had any delays, but I went off to the place where J and I were supposed to meet. He was impatiently waiting for me so I could go back with him and get myself signed up, because he couldn’t do it without my armband. But he was in Group #115, too. Good enough, we figured, and tried to pace ourselves, to get through the day.
It didn’t happen. We aren’t spring chickens anymore. Once again we gave up and went home long before they got anywhere near our group number.
This time, I got my own account, AND downloaded it onto my phone, but when I tried to tie his membership to my account, I couldn’t do it, not even on my at-home computer. So, the next time we tried, we got up at 4 am to leave by 5am to get to the park by 6am. Yes, we live that far from the park. And we made it, and only had to stand in line at the gate about 20 minutes before we got in the park, they started letting people about 6:15. We high-tailed it to the neared ‘Guest Experience to get signed up... only to find nobody there to help us because it wasn’t 7 am yet. Yes, we had to stand in line until 7am to get assigned to a Boarding Group. At 7:02, they assigned us to Group #94. 94! In 2 minutes, the computer filled up 93 groups? Yes, they said, those people using their phones can be awfully quick.
We had a melt-down. If we’d gotten any angrier, we probably would have been expelled from the park for the day. But the staff lady kept her cool, kept working with her pad, and finally told us she’d gotten us into Group 50, but that was the best she could do. We took it and were grateful. So, maybe we were looking at getting on the ride in early afternoon, rather than late evening. Providing the ride did not experience too many glitches to shut it down during the day.
We wandered around the park, riding rides, standing in lots of long lines, and finally had a funnel cake, because breakfast at 4:30 did not last until lunchtime. We consulted with another staff lady about the difficulty with my account, and she called their IT department, who got it fixed.
At long last, about 1pm, about the time I was beginning to feel my blood sugar was getting low, we saw a sign that said they were now accepting Groups 40-60. That included us. No chance to get another snack, we reported for duty! They checked our wristbands and told us we were good to go! Except they didn’t tell us where to go to get on the ride. I finally noticed another staffer lazily waving people onto a particular path, so I asked. Their answer? “Yes, if you just have a regular Boarding Group and nothing else, that is where you go now.”
So we beat feet down that path. But as we stood in the line for about an hour (so much for virtual cues eliminating long lines), we wondered about the ‘something else’ that might have gotten us onto the ride. We also wondered about 93 Boarding Groups filling up in 2 minutes or less. A Boarding Group appears to be 16 people, based on what we observed during the ride, so that would be 1,488 people (or more) managed to get into a Boarding Group in 2 minutes or less. Remember, these people supposedly all had to be in the park at 7am in order to do that.
I don’t buy that explanation. Yes, I did see people standing just inside the gate, focused solely on their phones, but I didn’t see 1000 of them.
I think the first several Groups are reserved for ‘special people’. I don’t know who those people are, or how they manage to get into one of those early groups. Maybe when you are signing up for a Boarding Group, the computer checks to see if you are staying at a Disney hotel or resort. If you are, you get an earlier group. If you’re a ‘local’, like us, you get shunted to a later group.
I don’t know how they are doing it, but I think Disney is pulling a fast one. Supposedly, there are no fast passes for this ride, but evidently, there aremethods of getting on it besides the virtual cue that we worked so hard to get into.

Tepary Beans

When I was researching for my blog post on the Tohono O'odham people, one of the foods they relied on was the ‘white tepary bean’. With my New Year’s Resolutions in mind (#3. Eat more wisely), I thought I would research these beans to see how they compare to the more traditional beans I grew up eating. Not because I plan to add these to my diet (although I could... at least one of my sources will gladly sell me a pound or more, complete with cooking instructions), but because if I’m going to think of food between meals, I should probably make it healthy types of food and not left-over Christmas candy. Or any kind of candy.
The information on the O’odham people specified white tepary beans, but there are many varieties of tepary beans. One source even listed several wild varieties, which they will sell me a packet of 50 to grow in my own garden. Alas, Florida is not the same climate as the Sonora Desert, so I don’t think they would grow here very well. Especially with me being the unskilled gardener than I am.
Tepary beans - including the white varieties - are native to the Sonoran Desert. They were first domesticated in Northwest Mexico some 4,000 years ago. The ‘secrets’ of growing and using them were passed down from generation to generation, particularly among the O’odham people. Being a desert plant, they are tolerant of heat, drought and alkaline soil. In the last 30 years, tepary beans have spread to other arid regions worldwide.
Beans are already super foods, but tepary beans are even higher in protein (21 grams in 1/2 cup!) and fiber. Their fiber helps control cholesterol and diabetes. These small beans have a meaty, dense texture and are savory in taste. White versions are slightly sweet, while the browner versions have a more earthy taste. And even with all this fiber, tepary beans produce less gassiness than other beans like navy, pinto or kidney beans.
During the 1920’s, Tohono O’odham farmers grew 1.5 million pounds of tepary beans per year. However, during the 1930’s, increased mechanization and irrigation led to less tepary beans being grown, and by the 1950’s, teparay beans were extremely rare.
Native Seeds/SEARCH began to promote the use of tepary seeds in the 1970’s and 80’s, and today they conserve nearly 100 versions of domesticated and wild tepary beans, adapted to low and high desert environments.
Their website had pictures of different varieties, so I compared the ‘domesticated’ to the ‘wild’ types. The domesticated beans seemed very much like navy or pinto beans in shape, and each bean looked pretty much the same as all the others of that type. But the wild varieties were much more angular and looked more like pebbles, all the same color. I imagine the angular edges are from more seeds being crowded into one pod, and they squish each other trying to get as big as they can.
We can call Florida many things, but ‘desert’ is not one of them. Maybe I could try to grow them in pots in the house, but they like temperatures as high or higher than 100°F, and we have the air conditioning on long before the house gets that hot. I am NOT heat tolerant, and if the house ever got to temperatures teparies like, I would not just wilt, I would try to melt.
Guess I’ll just have to order a pound and see what they’re like.

https://www.ranchogordo.com/products/white-teparyhttp://store.ramonafarms.com/White-Tepary-Beans-STOTOAH-BAVI/productinfo/BTEPWH1/https://www.nativeseeds.org/collections/tepary-beanshttps://www.nativeseeds.org/pages/tohono-oodham-white-tepary-bean

Ancient Crime

Archaeologists have discovered that crime - particularly fraud and counterfeiting - are not new types of human activity. They can now prove that these underhanded dealings have been happening for millennium.
The evidence comes from 2 archeological sites in Spain; La Molina cave and the Cova del Gegant cave. At La Molina, 10 people were buried with goods that included pottery, bone awls, objects carved from ivory and amber beads. This site dates back to the 3rd millennium BC.
At the Cova del Gegant, an estimated 19 people were buried, dating from the 2nd millennium BC. These people were accompanied by pottery and ornamental beads made of lignite, coral, amber, shell and gold.
The amber beads tricked many archaeologists, but tests revealed that not all of them were real amber. Some of the ‘amber’ beads found at Cova del Gegant were found to be pieces of mollusk shell core coated with pine resin, and these were mixed in with real amber beads. The fake amber beads from La Molina were seeds coated with resin. Apparently this type of surface coating effectively emulated the translucence, shine and color of amber. In fact, similar methods of imitating turquoise in the Levant have been identified from the 6th millennium BC.
People started to trade commodities thousands of years ago in Europe. Amber was highly valuable and was used by leaders to cultivate an image of power and wealth. Some amber was brought to Spain from the Baltic Sea, but another trade route was through Sicily, which also supplied ivory, Alpine jade and cinnabar.
So why create fake amber beads? Perhaps there wasn’t enough real amber to fill the demand for it. Perhaps the traders - or their suppliers - saw a way to make ‘a fast buck’. And although the exotic goods buried with these people showed that they could afford the real thing, perhaps their survivors saw no reason to waste all the real, expensive stuff by burying it forever.
I heard it said once that ‘counterfeiting’ was the oldest profession, save one. At the time, I thought that was an overstatement. Maybe I was wrong.


https://www.newsweek.com/5000-year-old-fake-amber-beads-found-spanish-burial-sites-first-example-1406723

Closing 2019

As 2019 draws to a close, I’ve been looking back over my daily journals to see what I’ve been doing. Let me explain that a little. I have my daily ‘To Do’ list, where I list all the things I’d like to work on that day. And things I don’t really want to do, but need to, like take my pills and brush my teeth. Fact is, if it isn’t on my list, I probably won’t remember to do it.
At the end of the day, I transfer everything I’ve crossed off to my journal and add some comments. Depending on my mood, those comments might be brief (‘I got some stuff done today’), or they could be long and rambling, touching on all sorts of things that happened during the day and how I feel about them. It’s just a method of proving to myself what I’ve done, a way of reflecting on what I’ve accomplished and how I feel about things.
In looking back over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing, writing, re-writing, editing and writing. Oh, yes, and writing.
What does that mean? I’ve been working on a lot of different writing projects. I write 2 blogs and try to post those weekly. Now, that usually means research for one of them, writing and re-writing for both of them, before I can post them. About an hour a day for each blog serves the purpose for that. Maybe a little less.
I’m also trying to write some shorts in order to produce an anthology of Atlan shorts in 2020. I keep running into walls where I’m not sure exactly how the next section of the scene goes, but I give myself an hour a day to work on that. Sometimes that only produces 500 words, others I’ll get 1000 words done. I haven’t gotten to the re-writing stage on that, because I have 3 or 4 more shorts to rough draft to get the number of words I need for a book.
I’m editing John’s next book for a spring release. This is a 2nd edit, so it goes faster, since I’m mostly looking for grammar and punctuation. Hopefully, I found all the places that didn’t quite make sense in the first edit, and John fixed them. On the other hand, I’ve read this book before (during the first edit), and I tend now to start losing my focus after a time, so I only work on it an hour a day.
I’m also writing a novel (a romance). This is a straight rough draft at this point, and I usually give it an hour a day, more or less. If I don’t feel like working on that one, I have 2 other novels (a near-future sf and a paranormal detective) that I can move over and work on for a day or two.
That’s a lot of writing projects. Could I get more done if I concentrated on one? I don’t know. I seem to be able to focus for an hour or slightly more at a time, and then I’m ready to move on to the next project. By splitting up my day in such small chunks, it looks like I’ve accomplished a lot, because I can say I’ve worked on a bunch of projects. And I have ‘naturally occurring’ breaks when I can get up and do other things, like let the dog out or throw supper in the crock pot or even go outside and work on the yard. Except for letting the dog out, those things are on my to do list and can be crossed off.
I don’t know if any other writers work on so many projects at the same time. Yes, it takes time to get anything ‘done’ done. It will be a month or three before I get the romance rough draft done. It could be another week before I get this short rough draft done and can start on the next. But in a year or two, I hope to be churning out books regularly.
Wish me luck! And perseverance.

Kenorland

Not to be confused with Kennerland, a theme park (based on a toy company) I just made up when I stumbled across the name of this supercontinent.
Kenorland was one of the earliest supercontinents, having formed about 2.72 billion years ago. It accreted some cratons that already existed, but also found some new continental crust to merge with. Pieces of it would later become Laurentia (most of North America and Greenland), Baltica (todays’ Scandinavia and Baltic regions), Yilgarn (Western Australia), and Kalaharia (large portions of South America and Africa).
It is known that Kenorland sat in low latitudes until great underground magma surges started to cause tearing of the crust about 2.48 billion years ago. At about that time, Baltica straddled the equator and was connected to Laurentia (Canadian Shield), Kola and Karelia (2 pieces that have since rejoined with Baltica).
It is thought that the breakup of Kenorland may have been when the Earth shifted from tearing caused by magma plumes to the modern plate tectonics we know today. However, the discovery of an earlier continent and a supercontinent may indicate this transition occurred even earlier.
By 2.45 billion years ago, Yilgarn (Western Australia) was no longer connected to the other cratons, and Kola and Karelia cratons were also drifting away. Therefore, there was longer a supercontinent, and this was about the same time as the Huronian glaciation, which lasted up to 60 million years. Indications are that atmospheric oxygen rose from 0.1% to 1%. This increase in oxygen caused the virtual disappearance of the gas methane, which was oxidized into carbon dioxide and water.
Furthermore, the breakup of Kenorland generally increased continental rainfall, reducing the other greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. Also, the solar output at that time was less than 85% of its current power, and all these circumstances together produced a runaway “Snowball Earth”, where average temperatures planet-wide fell to below freezing.
Wow, that’s a pretty drastic response to a supercontinent not being able to hold itself together.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenorland

Everybody’s Heard of Gondwana

Gondwana existed from about 550 million years ago until 180 million years ago. It is one of the most well known super-continents, in the sense that more people have at least heard of it, rather than individual cratons like Avalonia or Baltica.
If I’m reading the information correctly, Gondwana existed both before and after Pangaea. Before Pangaea, it came into being when several cratons stuck together, beginning about 800 million years ago with the formation of the East African Orogeny, which involved the collision of India and Madagascar with East Africa. Between 600 to 530 million years ago, this group added South America, Australia and Antarctica, in that order. Thus Gondwana was born.
Eventually, it merged with Laurasia and became Pangaea, sometime around 335 million years ago. But it wasn’t an easy relationship, you might say. Pieces of what had formerly been Gondwana kept breaking off, drifting north to join the former Laurasia section, such as bits of China and Indo-China. The western edge of Pangaea was beginning to break up while the eastern edge was trying to collect itself together.
Meanwhile, the formation of Pangaea and its mountains greatly impacted sea levels and global climate, producing glaciers and continent-wide sedimentation.
But what about Gondwana? About 175 million years ago, it had had enough and broke away. But it didn’t come out of it unscathed. Besides the bits that had already drifted to ‘the other side’, Florida, southern Georgia and Alabama stayed attached to North America.
Once it separated from its partner, Gondwana just kept falling apart. About 132 million years ago, Antarctica, Australia, India and Madagascar broke off and then broke up, going their separate ways. South America slowly broke away from Africa, starting in the south and going north, but the exact timing is uncertain. It could have started as early as 190 million years, and finally finished around 85 million years ago.
So, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize that most of the cratons that formed Gondwana now inhabit the southern hemisphere. Its remnants account for about 2/3 of today’s continental area, including Africa, Antarctica, Arabia, Australia, Indian Subcontinent and South America.
If I were a paleo-geologist, I might have made more sense out of the wiki articles I consulted on this subject. The writer of these articles - particularly the one on Gondwana - seemed to think that anybody who was looking up this subject must be a student, for he/she/it kept using names and terms that I - as a lay person - did not know, leading to much confusion on my part. It seemed far more detailed than I felt I could fit into a blog, anyway, so I skipped lightly through most of it, looking for the important details without bogging down the blog.
Paleo-geology was going to be an elective of mine in college, but I didn’t get that far. Hmm, anybody got a good used textbook on the subject?



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwanahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

A Brief Study of EuramericaSometimes it’s called Eurameri...

A Brief Study of Euramerica
Sometimes it’s called Euramerica, sometimes it’s known as Laurussia (not to be confused with Laurasia). It’s called a minor supercontinent because it consisted of several (3) cratons, which are pieces of crust that include land.
About 410 million years ago, the Laurentian (most of North America), the Baltica (Baltic states) and Avalonia cratons all slammed together to form Euramerica. Avalonia was the smallest of the 3; a microcontinent that was long and skinny and sat along the southern border. Euramerica appears to have sat pretty squarely on the equator and was mostly covered with tropical rainforests.
Around 300 million years ago, the climate changed rather abruptly. Many of the lycopsids - such as clubmosses - were replaced by ferns. There was a great loss of diversity in amphibians while the reptiles diversified.
Later, Euramerica became part of the major supercontinent Pangaea. When Pangaea broke into two continents - Gondwana and Laurasia - Euramerica was a part of Laurasia.
Eventually, Laurasia split into the continents of North America and Eurasia. The Laurentian craton became a big portion of North America. Baltica became part of Eurasia. Avalonia ceased to be a long skinny microcontinent as bits of it became some of the east coast of North America, and bits became parts of Ireland, England and other areas of southern Europe.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euramericahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalonia

Poor Science or Poor Writing

The other day, my husband and I watched a movie we’d never heard of. The setting of the story was that Earth had been in winter for the past 300 years, and it would continue for thousands of years. The only humans that still existed lived 10 kilometers under the surface, where they used geothermal energy as their power source. They had created a race of ‘humans’ to do their work for them, including sex workers, but nobody ever indicated what type of work this ‘inferior’ race did, except for the one sex worker.
Hubby had difficulty with Arizona being covered in snow and ice, with daytime temperatures of -60° F. In the latest ice age, the glaciers never reached the sw states. To me, that said the the earth was not just in an ice age, but had entered a ‘snowball earth’ ice age, where the entire globe is frozen.
How did the ice age winter begin? The characters gave 2 theories, but didn’t know which was right. The first theory was that an asteroid had struck the earth, throwing up so much dust and debris into the atmosphere that most of the sunlight couldn’t get to the ground. The second theory was that it was a bomb that threw up all that dust and debris.
Okay, yes, a lot of dust and debris in the atmosphere can reflect enough sunlight to produce some very chilly results. Large volcanos can produce enough dust to chill the entire globe as the dust rides through the atmosphere. BUT, such dust doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.
What about the asteroid that ‘killed the dinosaurs’? you may ask. Yes, that threw up a lot of dust and debris. But what killed so much of the flora and fauna was the firestorm produced by the heat released when the asteroid hit. Think of it as a huge explosion, so hot the heat wave raced around the globe, burning almost everything it touched. There may have been a long winter afterwards, but all that dust and stuff did settle out in a fairly short amount of time.
The plot was that a squad of ‘normal’ military-type humans had to go out into the world to track down a renegade ‘inferior’ made human. The squad's DNA was changed to allow them to survive in the far-below-zero temperatures, but that would only last for 48 hours. I had a little trouble accepting that, but... okay, let’s see what they do with it.
The scene that got me was right after they arrived on the surface. It had been stated that ‘all the animals’ were gone. But what they see right after they arrive on the surface was a man fishing. He had chopped a hole in the top of a small rivulet of water racing over the snow/ice, and had actually caught a fish, but seeing that he was going to be interrupted, he put the fish back.
I really couldn’t accept that. If all the animals had died, where did this fish come from? Okay, maybe they were mistaken. But at the temperatures they were talking about, I would expect that little rivulet to be frozen solid, and the fish with it.
It didn’t help that long after the main character had been on the surface for 48 hours, the main character was still chasing the renegade, with his head bare and no gloves. Frostbite was completely ignored.
It was not a good movie. If you are going to change the rules of life (daytime temperatures of -60F), then you (the writer) have to follow those new rules. And it is easy to have characters who don’t know what happened to end the civilization we (the audience) are familiar with. It’s easy for the writer, but it’s not satisfying to the audience.