Whenever I think about the slot largest things in the world, I start with Australia's Big Pineapple, but then come back to the "absolute unit" meme. I might be terminally online, sure, but there's nothing quite like the absolute unit for immediately conveying the scale and size of an object. And when it comes to plants, Australian scientists have found the absolute unit to end all absolute units: a seagrass that has stretched itself over 111 miles, lying a few feet underwater in a meadow in Shark Bay, Western Australia. That's a distance akin to driving across the Golden Gate Bridge... 65 times. The researchers were studying a meadow of seagrass, sampling various clippings across a wide area to understand how genetically diverse the meadow was -- a fact that could help protect the seagrass from the looming threat of climate change. They wanted to know exactly how many different plants were growing in the meadow. But they were shocked.
06:24
Whenever I think about the slot largest things in the world, I start with Australia's Big Pineapple, but then come back to the "absolute unit" meme. I might be terminally online, sure, but there's nothing quite like the absolute unit for immediately conveying the scale and size of an object.
And when it comes to plants, Australian scientists have found the absolute unit to end all absolute units: a seagrass that has stretched itself over 111 miles, lying a few feet underwater in a meadow in Shark Bay, Western Australia. That's a distance akin to driving across the Golden Gate Bridge... 65 times.
The researchers were studying a meadow of seagrass, sampling various clippings across a wide area to understand how genetically diverse the meadow was -- a fact that could help protect the seagrass from the looming threat of climate change. They wanted to know exactly how many different plants were growing in the meadow. But they were shocked.