I caught the movie “Black Sea” with Jude Law. It also had Ben Mendelsohn in it, and it was pretty good and claustrophobic tale. I learned something interesting though, and that was that the bottom of the Black Sea is anoxic. That means that the bottom has no oxygen, which also means that metal doesn’t rust or decay, a key fact in the movie. That’s a really interesting fact; the main character says that sunken Roman ships are practically untouched under the sea, also a cool factoid.
Which reminds me of the fact that trees used to fall or die, and there wasn’t a bacteria evolved yet to eat them away, so there was no decay of trees. This was millions of years ago, of course, and since then all sorts of bacteria now eat trees, even living ones. But it is a weird factoid to think about, that a tree could fall over and then just lay there untouched for as long as it wants. Not even petrifying, I believe. Imagine the wood working projects you could do just picking through the stock lying on the ground and it’s not decaying.
Just goes to show that learning can come from just about anywhere, and paying attention to obscure facts is also pretty cool.
Ben and Jude did a good job, I think this was before his Star Wars role (Ben), which was really where I started to pay attention to him.