Saturday, May 20, 2017

Tibet is Magical if Anything Is

Earth's crust is made up of two kinds of rock: Seafloor rock and land rock. The land rock floats around like Styrofoam on the mantle's magma, while the seafloor rock is dense and rigid.

Tibet is the name of a large plateau of land rock that's been shoved up into the air by the collision of two tectonic plates. One of the natural boundaries of the plateau are the Himalayas, the highest mountain range on earth, and created by the same action that's created Tibet.

Alastair Fothergill has produced some extraordinary natural world documentaries, a segment of which highlights a predator and prey animal pairing that looks too fantastical to actually exist.

This pairing is truthfully the Platonic ideal of hunter and prey. The ultra-cool, ultra-suave, I'm-better-than-you Tibetan fox:


Versus the created-by-Studio-Ghibli plateau pika:


What else can be said? Can a canine look like that? Do pikas have limbs? Does it even matter?