Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2022 August 13

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August 13

Why doesn't Britain grow berries that are well known in Finland?

Hi Wikipedia. I'm a Brit. Earlier today I went picking some blackberries: free delicious food. In the past I've spent some time in Finland, where they are familiar with berries like the cloudberry, lingonberry, and sea buckthorn berry. But I've never encountered any of those three berries in Britain, not on a bush, not in a restaurant, not even mentioned or named by anybody ever. Why is this? I would imagine that Finn berries could grow in Britain (fairly similar climate; not like trying to grow a banana). Equinox ◑ 02:38, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Sea buckthorn grows in parts of southern Britain, but isn't common and certainly isn't commonly eaten; cloudberry is even rarer, and lingonberry is not native as far as I can discover. There are two aspects to the question: why aren't these plants more common in Britain, and why aren't they eaten (since importation of foreign fruits is commonplace)?

One factor is that during the last ice age (and, yeah, we're really still in it, this is just an interglacial) most of future Britain (and NW Europe) was ice-covered, and after the ice melted plants and animals had to (re)colonise the land from continental refuges. This was not a speedy process, and Britain was cut off by the formation of the English channel quite early on, before some species could get that far at all, or in numbers that could compete well with rivals.

Another factor is that in Britain agriculture and forest (etc.) clearance to accommodate it began a few thousand years ago (and the neolithic/copper/bronze/iron age populations were, we are beginning to realise, much bigger than we once thought), eliminating much of the habitats that such plants require: by contrast Finland (which I've all-too-briefly visited) has remained mostly forested (etc.) right up to the present, so these plants have always been and continue to be more readily available from the wild, and are now cultivated.

This in turn means that the consumption of such berries has persisted in Finnish culture (and others), whereas it never became part of (or was long-ago dropped from) traditional British cuisine. It could be promoted (if anyone wanted to do so) and might or might not catch on, but this borders on the vagaries of fashion, for which there are no easy explanations or predictions. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.196.45.159 (talk) 05:43, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for this thoughtful answer! (Admins please ban this user, it's not allowed to be an IP and have an opinion.) Could you elaborate a little on British agriculture doing clearance "a few thousand years ago": who did this and why? Not the post-mediaeval "enclosure" we usually complain about. Equinox ◑ 05:57, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

I assume that's a reference to the Neolithic Revolution? Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:04, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

This article quotes Oliver Rackham who dates the main clearances in England to the Bronze Age;

Much of England had been cleared as early as 1000 BCE... The Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that we are only just beginning to appreciate... Rackham describes the immense clearance undertaken during the Bronze Age, boldly claiming that ‘to convert millions of acres of wildwood into farmland was unquestionably the greatest achievement of any of our ancestors’. He reminds us how difficult it was to clear the woodland, as most British species are difficult to kill: they will not burn and they grow again after felling.

Alansplodge (talk) 10:36, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Here's a preview of Rackham's book quoted above: The History of the Countryside (2020). Alansplodge (talk) 11:03, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Also note that bilberries, picked by hand from the hills, are still sold in supermarkets in the North of England, [1] but are unheard of in the South, where we consume many tons of its close relative, the blueberry, which has to be flown in from America. Alansplodge (talk) 10:45, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

We used to go blueberry picking on Kit Hill when I was a boy. The blueberries we picked were urts, not the nasty American things most supermarkets sell as blueberries. DuncanHill (talk) 20:03, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

I knew the name Cloudberry from The Little Grey Men. The name seemed appropriate for a nature-associated character who flew with the geese; it never occurred to me that it might be a real fruit. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 10:55, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm in Canada, and the one place I remember seeing the word "lingonberry" used was in an Ikea store: for example, this product. I'd guess that Ikea stores in Britain would also have such things. --174.95.81.219 (talk) 10:19, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Ah yes, you can get lingonberry jam from Ikea here in the UK. Alansplodge (talk) 10:47, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

I live in the United States, and when I think lingonberry, I think Ikea. Cullen328 (talk) 18:57, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Not something you'd find with your average cream tea. Alansplodge (talk) 12:07, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I've had whortleberry cream tea in Somerset, and that first link is a disambiguation page that suggests it could mean either bilberry or lingonberry. AlmostReadytoFly (talk) 13:41, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Cloudberries certainly do grow in Britain, well at least in Scotland (see here). Mikenorton (talk) 21:28, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

It is a true sub-Arctic species, more often found in Scandinavia than Scotland. Possibly because of this we rarely see its snowy flowers or ruddy orange fruit in our Scottish hills. Cloudberry - Friends of Loch Lomond & The Trossachs. Alansplodge (talk) 12:06, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Why is Hawaii so lumpy?

Would even slight crustal anisotropies cause a positive feedback loop of crust weakening that ends with the magma only coming out in some places? I would've expected less deep gaps like the 16,000 to 20,000 foot deep one between Maui top and Big Island top (16,000 feet below Maui's top and half the average depth of the ocean). Kauai and Oahu also have a very wide "col" in between about 14,000 to 15,000 feet below the peaks, the saddle between the two Mauna volcanos that form much of the Big Island is much less deep and wide. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:54, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

From where do you get the expectation that it shouldn't be? --Jayron32 14:37, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Continental drift is so slow I would expect a main island hundreds of miles long. Maybe the plate isn't anywhere near isotropic? The magma seems to only want to come out in a small amount of weak zones per island. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:19, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

It's not the absolute speed of plate tectonics, it is the relative speed of the movement of the plate in question (which is not constant) and the rate of lava flow (which is also not constant) of the hotspot under Hawaii. The lava forming the islands may stop flowing for millenia at a time, flow rapidly and continuously at other times, etc. etc. It's a complex process. --Jayron32 17:49, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

A simple volcano built up on oceanic crust causes lithospheric flexure due to the load caused by the volcanic build up itself, so that gives you one kind of topography - a central low surrounded by a less-marked marginal high. In reality many volcanoes are the result of the coalescence of more than one volcanic centre, each with there own individual topography. The load caused by the individual volcanic centres within a single island will not normally be expressed at the top of the oceanic crust, so you just get the shape of the volcanoes themselves, making them pretty lumpy. Oceanic crust is pretty homogeneous, although it sometimes contains old fracture zones, which remain zones of weakness that may affect later volcanic development - those near Hawaii are nearly west-east trending. The hotspot beneath Hawaii remains plumbed into the volcanoes even as they drift away, until the main location of active vulcanism jumps to form a new volcano (and island eventually), forming the chain that we see. Mikenorton (talk) 21:18, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

That makes sense. Maybe Molokai is an old fracture zone? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:32, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Molokai sits close to a major fracture zone, in fact the "Molokai fracture zone", although I can't find any sources to support a direct link between the fracture zone and the island/volcano, although there is a marked change in crustal/lithospheric thickness across the Molokai F.Z. Mikenorton (talk) 12:52, 16 August 2022 (UTC)