Month: October 2024
Joshua the Goat crashes half marathon in Newfoundland
Joshua, a goat who lives at Taylor’s Pumpkin Patch in Conception Bay South, N.L., in a Sept. 29 handout photo.
He may not have logged the fastest time or even gone the full distance, but residents of a Newfoundland town agree the goat who unexpectedly joined the local weekend half marathon was the event’s undisputed champion.
Partway through Sunday’s T’Railway Trek half marathon in Conception Bay South, N.L., an eager 68-kilogram (150 pound) goat named Joshua broke free from his collar and joined the runners on the route.
He kept pace for nearly a quarter of the race before being rounded up by his owners and now even has a medal to show for his efforts.
Joshua’s half-marathon debut surprised no one more than Heidi Taylor, who woke up Sunday morning to find social media awash in photos of her goat mingling with fellow runners.
“We take Joshua for walks, he listens very well and will follow you,” she said in an interview Sunday.
“So when he’s seeing all the people running, he must have thought: ’I’m going to go too.’ ”
Joshua lives at Taylor’s Pumpkin Patch, the business Ms. Taylor co-owns. Ms. Taylor doesn’t know what time he managed to ditch his collar but estimates he ran about five kilometres of the 21-kilometre race.
She got wind of his unexpected participation at around 9:30 p.m. when she opened her Facebook and recognized him from the photos filling her feed.
Ms. Taylor and her fiancé used the Facebook posts to figure out Joshua’s whereabouts along the race route, and they “took another collar and leash along with a bag of cheezies” – his favourite snack – and went off to find him.
Mystery ‘skyquakes’ are ripping through the world. And nobody knows why.
Skyquakes are very real. What causes them, however, is shrouded in mystery.
Image credit: Getty
BBC
If you’ve ever heard a loud, distant booming noise with no obvious explanation like a thunderstorm or a car backfiring, then you might have experienced a skyquake.
Skyquakes have been reported around the world and locals have different names for them in different regions.
Near Seneca Lake in New York State, they’re known as ‘Seneca guns’; in Belgium they’re called ‘mistpoeffers’; and the Japanese refer to them as ‘uminari’, which literally means ‘cries from the sea.’
Many explanations have been put forward, including solar flares, shallow earthquakes, offshore tsunamis, collapsing underwater caves and avalanches.
Others believe they’re sonic booms from military aircraft. But this can’t explain historical reports of skyquakes.
Some scientists have suggested that a type of meteor, called a bolide, could be the cause. These space rocks explode when they hit Earth’s atmosphere.
If this happened above thick cloud, the sound could be amplified across a wide area, but no physical evidence would reach the ground.
An alternative explanation is gas escaping from lake sediments. Several hotspots for skyquake activity are close to large, deep lakes, such as Seneca. But skyquakes have also been reported away from such water bodies.
In 2020, researchers at the University of North Carolina cross-referenced local news articles with data collected by a network of atmospheric sensors and seismographs. They were unable to identify any earthquake activity that coincided with the events, so they concluded the sounds must be coming from the atmosphere.
Given the diversity of locations and explanations, it’s possible that skyquakes in different parts of the world have different causes. But for now, their true cause, or causes, remains mysterious.
The MarkoZen Blog 