The mystery of green glacier mice

This has to be the most interesting story I've come across in a while. Actually I came across two articles, one from NPR, "Mysterious Glacier Mice Moss Balls Move in Herd Formation", and the other from IFLScience, "Herd of Fuzzy Green Glacier Mice Baffles Scientists". In our current absurd reality of conspiracy theories, twitter bots, and the like, how could one not be drawn to a true story that is every bit as mysterious as it is real?

Glacier mice are small balls of green moss found on some, but not all, glaciers. They've been spotted in Alaska, Iceland, Svalbard, and South America, and were first written about by an Icelandic researcher in the 1950's, who said, "rolling stones can gather moss."

Today scientists think the moss balls form around some kind of impurity, like a bit of dust. They've also found that the entire surface of the ball must be periodically exposed to the sun or else the moss on the bottom would die. And while there is still much to be discovered about these little guys, scientists now know their movements are not entirely random. Once thought to roll around from wind or topography, it's apparent that these colonies of moss balls move an average of an inch a day in a kind of choreographed formation - somewhat like a flock of birds.

A research team from the University of Idaho spent three years monitoring 30 glacier mice. As one of the researchers said, "When we visited them, they were all just sort of moving relatively slowly and initially toward the south. Then they all started to speed up and kind of start to deviate toward the west. And then they slowed down again and progressed even farther to the west. The whole colony of moss balls, this whole grouping, moves at about the same speeds and in the same directions."

We need to learn more about these bizarre moss ball herds, so watch this space.

Now, in order to turn this post back to something about art, let's explore the problem of green in landscape painting. In an actual scene with a fair amount of green in it, there will also be warmer colors (red, orange, yellow). As light bounces around and off of surfaces, there is a mixture of these warmer and cooler colors. Think of this as a sliding scale of information depending on the variables of full sun, partial sun, time of day, atmosphere, distance, etc., etc.. The easiest way to simplify some of this information is to identify the light source as warmer or cooler. This doesn't solve the problem of green, however, and we know that if we mix too much red with the green, we will rapidly lose the integrity of the color, and if we ignore the warmer colors of red and orange, our paintings can turn into garish yellow and tube green landscapes. What's a painter to do?

Well, if you want suggestions for palette colors and mixtures, just Google search for something like "mixing greens in a landscape painting." But if you want some general guidelines, let's look at some of the ways artists have problem solved green in the landscape.

Use a red or orange underpainting. This warmer tone tempers greens, and the effect can be even more apparent if you allow some of the underpainting to show through. When done well, this can be interesting, but the downside, unfortunately, is that it can also look predictable and repetitive.
Nix the whole bright green thing, and gray all your colors. This is probably one of the more common solutions.
Keep a suggestion of brighter green, probably in the foreground, and temper colors as they recede.
Darken values. Another solution simply because darker green is not nearly as garish as lighter yellow-green.
Pay attention to your blues and violets, but too much cooler color is . . . too much cooler color.
Change the color pattern. Just because you are seeing bright green doesn't mean you have to paint it.

And, if you want to paint green glacier mice, remember . . . they are moving!