"These things must actually roll around or else that moss on the bottom would die," says Gilbert. She notes that the entire surface of the ball must periodically get exposed to the sun. "Tumbleweeds come to mind, which are obviously totally different, but also round and roll around." "Most people who would look at them would immediately wonder, 'Well, I wonder if they roll around out here in some way,' " says Gilbert. Their motion is what interested Gilbert and Bartholomaus, as well as their Washington State University colleague Scott Hotaling. They've been seen in Alaska, Iceland, Svalbard and South America, although they won't grow on just any glacier - it seems that conditions have to be just right. The balls can be composed of different moss species and are thought to form around some kind of impurity, like a bit of dust. "They really do look like little mammals, little mice or chipmunks or rats or something running around on the glacier, although they run in obviously very slow motion," says wildlife biologist Sophie Gilbert, also at the University of Idaho.Įach ball is like a soft, wet, squishy pillow of moss. Glacier mice can be composed of different moss species. In the 1950s, an Icelandic researcher described them in the Journal of Glaciology, noting that "rolling stones can gather moss." He called them "jökla-mýs" or "glacier mice." "Those speeds and directions can change over the course of weeks." "The whole colony of moss balls, this whole grouping, moves at about the same speeds and in the same directions," Bartholomaus says. In the journal Polar Biology, they report that the balls can persist for years and move around in a coordinated, herdlike fashion that the researchers can not yet explain. Intrigued, he and two colleagues set out to study these strange moss balls. "They're bright green in a world of white." "They're not attached to anything and they're just resting there on ice," he says. Scattered across the glacier were balls of moss. He's a glaciologist at the University of Idaho. "What the heck is this!" Bartholomaus recalls thinking.
In 2006, while hiking around the Root Glacier in Alaska to set up scientific instruments, researcher Tim Bartholomaus encountered something unexpected.
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