— Warrington Guardian (@warringtonnews) July 11, 2016
It's in all the old folk tunes: there's nothing like walking along Britain's River Mersey, enjoying the fresh breeze and tossing a few rocks at the Warrington Seal.
Seals are common along the British coast, and occasionally, one makes her way upstream into the mainland. Since the Warrington Guardian first reported this one's presence in mid-July, she has become a community fixture, charming residents and earning her extremely creative nickname. According to her fans, she spends much of her time sunning, basking, and attacking river carp.
But despite her knack for posing, the seal has made some enemies. "There are reports of youngsters throwing stones," the Manchester Evening News wrote Monday. The outlet also surfaced a complaint from resident John Moore, who said that although he is fond of the seal, "she has become a local attraction for drunken fools who think they can entice [her] out of the water with Tesco tinned mackerel in sunflower oil." (The RSPCA has since advised people to keep their distance.)
According to the Evening News, the seal may have tired of this mayhem, as she hasn't been seen since Monday. The paper predicts she might be headed back upstream to seal country, where things are more civilized.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Dead Horse Bay is a sloshing soup of forgotten ephemera. Old shoe soles, broken bottles, fractured horse bones from 19th-century rendering factories and landfills are some of the odd objects that momentarily surface before being swallowed back into the tide. To most people, this beach on the outskirts of southern Brooklyn, New York looks like a swamp of garbage, but for writer, curator, and historian Nicki Pombier Berger, Dead Horse Bay is a playground for the imagination.
“It’s not contemporary trash like tampon applicators and Coke bottles—it’s visibly distant-in-time trash,” Berger says, who wrote a short story titled “Cold” after discovering a green teacup washed up at Dead Horse Bay. “If you just look closely when you’re there, you’ll wonder what was here before? Where is all this coming from?”
New York City waterways, like Dead Horse Bay, and their unexpected treasures serve as inspiration for artists, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, and storytellers who contribute to the digital journal, Underwater New York. Berger and two fellow editors, Helen Georgas and Nicole Haroutunian, curate a list of waterfront objects (lost and found, submerged or surfaced). The project prompts people to use one or multiple objects as a stepping off point to create a new piece of art.
At last count, there are 150 objects on the list ranging from a bag of lottery tickets, to a robot hand, and toppled decaying ships. The map above highlights 10 fascinating objects from Underwater New York’s list—some that you can go out and see in-person.
Underwater New York started off as a kind of writer’s workshop. Berger came across an article in New York magazine published in May 2009 that revealed 28 of bizarre and fascinating things beneath the surface of New York Harbor, including a piano and a dead giraffe. She used the items in the article as a writing exercise with friends, but when more people became interested the idea quickly grew into a project. After teaming with developers and designers, Underwater New York launched at the end of the summer.
Underwater New York editor Nicole Haroutunian illustrated this rendering of a grand piano for a series of sketches called "Beside," which features her favorite objects on the list. [Photo: Nicole Haroutunian/Underwater New York]
“We had this concept and we continued adding objects to the list as we found them through articles that came our way or through anecdotes that people shared with us,” Berger says, explaining that it’s quite easy to get an interesting underwater object on the list. “Someone tells me they saw it, and we usually add it.”
Underwater New York has grown tremendously since Berger founded the journal in 2009. Now, the website is home to an extensive body of original fiction, music, and artwork from over 100 contributors, and the editors have collaborated on larger projects with museums and magazines. Underwater New York has encouraged artists to explore the city in a new way, even leading excursions out to secluded waterfronts.
What other mysteries lie beneath New York's waters? [Photo: NASA/Public Domain]
Even though she trembles at the thought of scuba diving, Berger is fascinated by what remains unseen underwater.
The waterfront defines a city, she says. Working on Underwater New York and venturing out to different beaches and bays has changed her spatial sense of New York City.
Imagining what’s underwater “helps expand the edges of the city beyond land, beyond the hard vertical and horizontal lines that we move through in the city," she says. "It’s just a reminder of how the city is actually fluid, and change is constant.”
Here’s a closer look at some of the historical and mysterious articles adrift in New York’s waters.
Thousands of Bottles (Dead Horse Bay)
A photo of a washed-up bottle in the photoseries "Dead Horse Bay," by artist Adel Souto. [Photo: Adel Souto/Underwater New York]
“Today my own little girl broke a teacup – the green one painted with a family on a hillside, all that space to breathe – and I sent it like a missive to the trash. Tomorrow a team of horses will cart it off to the island with the rest, and soon enough the horses themselves will be worn by life into bodies, borne to Barren Island, boiled into bone.” – from the short story “Cold,” by Nicki Pombier Berger
Nicknamed “Bottle Beach,” the shores of Dead Horse Bay are filled with thousands of seaweed and brine covered bottles that date back hundreds of years. Every time you visit the cluttered beach of Dead Horse Bay, you’re bound to stumble across something new. The objects clinking and lulling in the waves are remnants of an island that is no longer an island.
Dead Horse Bay and the Floyd Bennett airfield were once a smelly marshland called Barren Island. From the 1850s to the early 20th century it was populated by Polish, Dutch, and Italian immigrants and dominated by the stench wafting from rendering facilities. Each day, horse carcasses from all five boroughs were brought to Barren Island’s factories to produce glue and fertilizer—a process emitting odors so strong that some organizations in mainland Brooklyn tried to shut the operation down.
After World War I, the industry slowly died and Robert Moses, the former city parks commissioner, envisioned the area as a gateway national recreation park. He decided to build the Bennett airfield and in 1926 the surrounding waters of Barren Island were filled with sand, coal, and trash, connecting it to the rest of Brooklyn. In the 1950s, the area was used as a landfill, one of which burst, hurdling trash from the early 20th century into the bay.
The waterway is sealed off from the rest of Brooklyn by tall swaying sea oaks. In order to reach it, you must trek down a winding trail at the end of Flatbush Avenue by foot until you emerge in front of a vista awash with all kinds of historical objects waiting to be discovered. You can visit Dead Horse Bay this coming August with Underwater New York.
“Arthur Kill, that slim waterway that prevents Staten Island from being a part of New Jersey, has a surplus of discarded watercraft. Scuttled, sunken, or just eternally moored.” – from the photoshoot “Arthur Kill,” by Nate Dorr.
You know you’re getting closer to the tugboat graveyard the more your shoes sink into the muddy marshland of Arthur Kill tidal strait. Recognized as the official dumping ground for old, wrecked ships, the fleet of decrepit ghost crafts rusting in the polluted water between Staten Island and New Jersey have inspired photographers and documentarists.
In the 1930s, John J. Witte started the Witte Marine Equipment Company, a business that scavenged ships for usable parts. However, it couldn’t keep up with the influx of decommissioned ships, and the crafts began rotting so quickly it was difficult to salvage anything. By 1990, Arthur Kill was a floating wasteland of wood and metal, with about 200 shells of ships resting in their watery graves.
Today, there are fewer than 25 ships that can be seen at the tugboat graveyard. Among them are the historical U.S.S PC-1264 submarine chaser, which was the first World War II U.S. Navy ship to have a predominantly African American crew, and the NYC Fire Department fireboat Abram S. Hewitt.
1,600 Bars of Silver (Arthur Kill)
Painter and book maker Sarah Mostow wrote and illustrated the book If You Look, which features objects below water. This is an original painting inspired by the 1,600 bars of silver. [Photo: Sarah Mostow/Underwater New York]
In September 1903, the ship Harold carried very precious cargo. Stacked on its foredeck were 7,678 ingots of silver mined from the interior mountains of Mexico. Each bar was two feet in length, weighed 100 pounds, and consisted of approximately 75 percent silver and 25 percent lead.
The Harold was making its way up the shallow waters of Arthur Kill in a string of towed ships. Early in the morning at 2 a.m. when the captain was asleep, the vessel suddenly pitched sharply starboard, causing the stack of silver bars to topple across the deck and plunge into the dark waters, W.C. Jameson wrote in the book Buried Treasures of the Mid-Atlantic States.
Divers immediately began to search the channel for the missing silver. For a week, they came up empty handed, and the crew began to suspect that the ship had been hijacked. Eventually, a few bars were found around the coast of Sewaren, New Jersey. Over the next ten days, the divers recovered over 6,000 silver bars, leaving behind about 1,600 scattered in Arthur Kill. Small independent attempts have been made over the years to find the lost silver, but none have been successful. Perhaps new seafloor surveying equipment may help locate them.
“At an estimated value of several millions of dollars, the treasure may well be worth the wait,” Jameson writes.
There are many abandoned ships sunken in Coney Island Creek, but perhaps one of the most famous crafts is the ill-fated submarine, Quester I. The 45-foot, chromium yellow painted submarine was built in 1967 by local shipyard worker Jerry Bianco. He built Quester I to try to raise and excavate the sunken Andrea Doria, an ocean liner submerged in the Atlantic Ocean after colliding with another ship in 1956, the New York Timesreported.
It is said that the wreckage of Andrea Doria contains valuable artifacts. After three years, Bianco was ready to launch his scrap metal submarine. While lowering it down with a crane, the vessel’s structure didn’t allow it to balance properly causing it to tip sideways and become stuck in the mud. Bianco tried to recover the Quester I, but couldn’t raise the funds. Today, Bianco’s self-made submarine—poking above the Coney Island Creek's waves—has a sheen of orange rust in addition to the bright yellow paint of the cap.
Early in March of 1945, a convoy of 26 American ships left Scotland and headed north, towards the Barents Sea, to deliver aid to Soviet allies. The ships had traveled up Scandinavia and were heading to a port not so far from the Russian border, when they were attacked. A German U-boat hit the Thomas Donaldson, a convoy ship loaded with 7,679 tons of cargo, including food, ammunition and giant tanks.
After the ship was hit, in the engine room, it was towed towards its destination, but never made it. The ship sank off the western tip of Kildin Island, about 75 miles from the border with Norway. Three members of the crew died during the attack and another died later of injuries. But most of the crew was rescued and made it safely to shore. The Donaldson was the only boat in the convoy that failed to make it to the destination.
When it sank, it took down with it those thousands of tons of cargo, including a 102mm gun and antiaircraft weaponry. There were at least three tanks on board: another was rescued in 2014. There are some great photos of that operation here: after decades underwater, the tanks are fuzzy, rusty messes.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
In so many other situations, an octopus on the train tracks may cause severe alarm. But the cephalopod intruder doesn't disturb anyone here. Not on this railway line, to Underwater City.
More than 50 years since Lego's founder formed the first bricks, people around the world construct hidden worlds, above and below. The train to Underwater City certainly continues that legacy.
On the floor of a pristine swimming pool, that one imagines is attached to a handsome villa, some bright person has put down a lego train track and a platform full of passengers. At least one Stormtrooper and several blokes in scuba gear have a train to catch.
The little yellow train zooms along on the edge of the pool. We then see the driver; a man in a tie and a motorcycle helmet. He loves his job!
Then the finale, as the locomotive descends into the clear water. With some nifty camera work, we see the train propel itself along to the Underwater City platform to collect its passengers. Well done, well done indeed.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.
Bosnia is littered with thousands of mines, the dangerous remnants of the Bosnian War, which ended after over three years of bitter fighting in 1995.
Hundreds have been killed since then after accidentally setting off the mines, which are scattered across the country.
But Pokémon Go, which encourages players to explore the real world around them in a quest to catch 'em all, presents a unique new threat. That's because recently players have been wandering into fields explicitly marked as potentially containing land mines, players who, like the one pictured above, might do anything to snag a Zapdos.
“Today we received information that some users of the Pokémon Go app in Bosnia were going to places which are a risk for (unexploded) mines, in search of a pokemon,” Posavina bez mina, an NGO, said Monday on Facebook. “Citizens are urged no to do so, to respect demarcation signs of dangerous mine fields and not to go into unknown areas."
According to the Guardian, 2.3 percent of the country's total area is said to be covered in land mines, and hundreds of thousands people live in close proximity to them.
And among those, presumably, are a good chunk of Pokémon Go players, who now can't say they haven't been warned.
Pipelines loaded onto a 'Conundrum' during Operation PLUTO. (Photo: Public Domain)
With a view onto a wide, sandy beach and the English Channel beyond, the three whitewashed holiday bungalows along the Kentish coastline were a vision of the perfect summer escape.
Yet these charming cottages concealed a secret that would help the Allies defeat the Nazis during WWII.
Inside them were no fishing nets, deck chairs or half-empty bottles of tanning oil. Instead, the buildings hid machinery to pump thousands of tons of fuel to France, underwater. They were part of Operation PLUTO, a top-secret, and in its day, radical plan to lay pipelines across the English Channel.
Three locations along the English coastline—Sandown on the Isle of Wight, Romney Marsh and Dungeness—pumped fuel to the underwater pipelines. The stations were hidden inside the holiday cottages, a Brown's ice cream shop, and an amusement park.
PLUTO laid down 500 miles of pipelines, underwater and above land. (Photo: Public Domain)
The rationale for such a risky, technically complex project was that tankers full of petrol and oil were easy targets for German bombers, the coastline was riddled with underwater mines, and sending hefty ships to fuel Allied forces after their planned invasion of occupied France would bring more traffic to an already cluttered shoreline.
Avoiding German detection of the underwater pipeline was essential. Although there were many moving parts, the British government managed to keep the project hidden from the Nazis for nearly the entirety of the war. This was done in a few novel and very British ways.
Anyone who transported materials to the various PLUTO facilities asked for "Captain Jones" before they could continue. The British Army even commissioned an architect to construct a three-mile-long fake dock at the English ferry port of Dover, just across the Channel from the French port of Calais. It was the final act of trickery to encourage the German Army to think the D-Day invasion would take place at Calais, not Normandy.
To distract Nazis from the real target, even King George VI inspected the dock, which was replete with false pipelines, storage tanks, a fire brigade and anti-aircraft guns.
The first person to float the idea of an underwater fuel route was Lord Mountbatten, a senior figure in the British Army. In 1942, Mountbatten instructed the Petroleum Warfare Department to explore laying a pipeline along the English Channel. It wasn't thought possible, though; nothing like this had been tried in the theater of war before, the Channel had exceptionally strong currents and the German Army had fortified the coastline with mines and other underwater obstacles. Petroleum Warfare didn't take the matter any further.
However, Clifford Hartley, chief engineer at the Anglo-Iranian oil company, was convinced the plan could work. He was also inspired by an Iranian-designed pipe that could transport liquid petroleum at high speed. Across the Atlantic, Hartley saw how Shell had already developed technology to transport oil and other liquids across huge distances in the U.S.
The British, too, had started to lay overland pipelines across the country. Still, in the realm of pipeline innovation, the operation was virgin territory.
The British Army tested Hartley's lead pipeline—just three inches in diameter— and found out it was strong enough to resist a bomb explosion underwater. Bernard Elis led British engineers from the Burmah Oil Company in the design of a second pipeline, this time made of steel. PLUTO—Pipeline Under the Ocean—was born.
Once engineers began production, the next challenge was how to move the miles of pipeline and secure it under the Channel. To accomplish this, the Hartley pipeline was transported to one of several loading docks, then slowly coiled around 50-foot oil drums and loaded onto tankers, which would release it underwater.
Elis' steel designs, although cheaper to produce, were too fragile to be wound up in the same fashion, directly onto a boat. The material would snap. So the Petroleum Department worked with the Miscellaneous Weapons Department, nicknamed "wheezers and dodgers," to create something unique to the operation: a giant, floating spool known as "Conundrum." One of these stored up to 90 miles of pipeline. A tugboat towed the huge spool, which would spin and release the pipeline into the water.
As D-Day approached, officials worked on the logistics for PLUTO. The pipelines would pump fuel across two secret routes. The first, with a code-name of BAMBI, went from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg, France, a distance of 70 miles. The other, code-named DUMBO, connected Dungeness, a small town on the south coast of England, to Boulogne, France, a distance of 30 miles.
In total, 500 miles of pipeline connected the French coast across the Channel to England, and along overland pipeline to oil terminals near Liverpool.
Some 200,000 men and 20,000 vehicles landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. After the successful D-Day landings, it was PLUTO's job to send fuel to support the Allied advance across France. The tankers and "Conundrums" were sent out to lay the pipeline but the first few attempts failed, which threatened the entire operation.
Those in charge decided to use the BAMBI route to Cherbourg. A stray ship's anchor broke the first lines. A propellor from a nearby ship destroyed the second attempt. After four months the first gallons of fuel rushed through the pipelines. But it was a false start. Later, more of the pipelines simply broke, and barnacles rotted the material.
The army turned to the DUMBO route as its last hope. By October 26, 1944, the second set of pipelines to Boulogne was deemed a success. In a few months time, pipelines were transporting 3,000 tons of fuel a day. By the end of the war that had increased to 4,500. An estimated 172 million gallons of fuel were supplied during the landings–all underwater and under the Nazis noses.
Reflecting on the war, Dwight Eisenhower, in charge of the United States Army at the time, said that without the pipelines the U.S. forces would have run out of fuel. Winston Churchill, then British Prime Minister, declared “Operation PLUTO is a wholly British achievement and a piece of amphibious engineering skills of which we may be proud.”
The team behind PLUTO disbanded on August 31, 1945. But the holiday cottages are still around today, as are some of the overland pipelines.
Clapping is no longer allowed at the Elanora Heights Public School. (Photo: Evan-Amos/CC BY-SA 3.0)
A primary school in Sydney, Australia has recently adopted a policy that bans clapping at assemblies, according to SkyNews. As written in the school’s newsletter, the restriction was created in order to protect students who might be more sensitive to loud sounds.
The Elanora Heights Public School released a newsletter on July 18 formally announcing the clapping ban. Instead of clapping and hollering, the teachers will prompt the students to do “silent cheers,” which can consist of making excited faces, punching the air, and squirming around. According to the newsletter, in addition to making the school a safer space for kids that might be upset by loud noises, the quiet celebrations are also a good way to tire out the restless students, and reduce fidgeting.
The silent cheering initiative follows in the wake of a number of other sensitivity programs at schools around the country. Among them, many schools have banned hugging between students, and one school passed a rule that requires the use of gender neutral pronouns on the same day the announcement about the Elanora Heights rule was released.
It’s possible that this is the first school to ban clapping, although in 2015, a feminist conference in the United Kingdom also banned clapping as it triggered some people’s anxiety. Their preferred replacement cheer was jazz hands. It is unclear if jazz hands will be permissible under the new Elanora Heights policy.
Judging by the video evidence, this polar bear at an "ocean theme park" in Guangzhou, China doesn't seem terribly happy with his situation. There's a lot of laying around and slow movement. He seems a little thinner than he should be.
Would you be depressed if you lived in a glass cage alone and everyday were forced to be in random tourist selfies? You would be depressed.
Which is to say that calling this polar bear—whose name is Pizza—"the world's saddest polar bear" is not much of a stretch. Could there be sadder polar bears in the world? Yes, theoretically, there could. But check this guy out. He needs a lot more than a therapist.
Pizza needs—according to a petition signed by over 285,000 people calling for the closure of the park where he lives—to be free.
China's exploding middle-class has led to a corresponding rise in so-called ocean theme parks, meaning that Pizza is far from the only bear suffering from the effects of captivity.
But Animals Asia, a charity based in Hong Kong, has said they were working to try and improve conditions in many of the parks, if they're not able to free the animals altogether.
That includes helping Pizza at the Guangzhou park, where park directors said last week they would be working to try and provide a "better life" for Pizza and the other animals at the park, in part because of pressure from the charity, according to the Guardian.
So hang in there, Pizza. Life might get a little better soon.
Uncovering the local legend of the steamboat Arabia laying buried beneath a farmer's field. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arabia Steamboat Museum)
“You don’t have to go into the ocean to find a shipwreck,” says Kansas City explorer David Hawley. “They’re buried in your own back yard.”
Hawley and his intrepid team have quite the incredible passion: discovering and excavating steamboats from the 19th century that may have sunk in the Missouri, but now lie beneath fields of farmer’s midwestern corn. “Ours is a tale of treasures lost,” says Hawley. “A journey to locate sunken steamboats mystery cargo that vanished long ago.”
In 1988, Hawley and his crew uncovered the steamboat Great White Arabia, which sank in 1856 a few miles west of Kansas City. The discovery yielded an incredible collection of well-preserved, pre-Civil War artifacts. Hawley, along with his father, brother and two friends, unearthed over 200 tons of items, the equivalent of 10 container trucks. Many of these artifacts, from shoes to champagne bottles, are on display at the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City. Its tagline is “200 tons of treasure.”
When designing the museum, inspiration was drawn from departments stores to see how the merchandise would have been displayed. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
While most rescued sunken treasure is heavily water damaged and covered in rust and barnacles, the cargo of the Arabia was in relatively pristine condition, about as immaculately preserved as the day she sunk 160 years ago.
Now Hawley and his team are excavating another steamboat, again buried not underneath the waters of the Missouri, but in a field a few miles southwest.
The first mystery is, of course, how a boat that sank mid-river ends up buried in a field. The answer lies with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. During the latter half of the 19th century, the Corps of Engineers undertook projects to forcibly alter the shape of the Missouri River. The plan was to bring the banks closer together, and by narrowing the width of the river, speed up the current, making boat passage much faster.
Preserved fillings for fruit pies. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arabia Steamboat Museum)
One such place was near Parkville, a few miles north east of Kansas City. It was here in 1856 that the Arabia sank after hitting a snag of a sycamore tree, sinking in minutes. As the course of the river was altered decades later, the steamboat became preserved not under the muddy waters of the Missouri, but in a corn field.
Local legends grew of a sunken steamboat under the cornfield of retired magistrate Norman Sortor. Rumors said it was filled with gold, or hundreds of barrels of Kentucky bourbon. “The lost cargo of liquor made the Arabia famous,” Hawley says. “Many searched for the treasure believing it to have 'aged to perfection' in the oak barrels lost deep in the river mud. It wasn't the booze that was of interest to us, but rather that boat sank quickly … and it was reported to be full of cargo.”
Even items as delicate as reading glasses were preserved immaculately deep underneath the field. (Photo: Luke Spencer)
Along with his father Bob, younger brother Greg and two family friends—David Lutrell, a local construction expert, and Jerry Mackey, a restaurateur—Hawley decided to see if the local legends were true. In 1987 they started gathering clues from old newspaper reports and river maps that showed where the Missouri had once coursed. Using electronic magnetic testing and sample drilling, the team started to see if they could find this stricken treasure ship lying underneath a corn field.
“Learning was done as we went along,” says Hawley. “First one needed to learn to research, then use a metal detector, then run equipment.”
By the autumn of 1988, the team had not only located the steamboat, but traced the outline of its main deck in the soil. It appeared that the Arabia occupied an area about the length of a football field, but was located 45 feet underground. The land owner gave them permission to dig, but with the proviso that they were out in time so that he could sow crops in the spring.
Working night and day, and funding their project themselves—each member of the team put in $10,000, supplemented by loans from local banks—they dug through the frost of Kansas winter nights. “We didn’t dig the boat to create a museum,” says Hawley. “It was the adventure of finding buried treasure.”
Their first discovery was splintered spokes from one of the giant paddle wheels. The vast engine boilers emerged, and the shape of the main deck gradually appeared from the earth.
Marking the outline of the Arabia; 45 feet deep and about the length of a football field. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arabia Steamboat Museum)
There was no sign of the legendary hoard of gold and whiskey barrels. But then they reached the cargo holds below, and discovered what would be the largest time capsule of 19th-century American history.
Steamboats dominated travel in the US during the 19th century. Before the advent of the railroads, steamboats pioneered the rapidly expanding Western frontier, carrying passenger and supplies along rivers such as the Mississippi and the Missouri.
In August, 1856, the Great White Arabia was chartered for a run from St. Louis to Omaha City, Nebraska. She was carrying over 220 tons of cargo destined to help equip 16 frontier towns, including St. Joseph, Missouri and Sioux City, Iowa. She also carried 130 passengers, mostly women and children, who were traveling to meet the husbands who had forged ahead to settle the land.
Steamboat voyages were frequently hazardous, and hundreds of steamboats sunk along the Missouri alone. The vast amounts of chopped wood required to fuel the steamboats meant the rivers were littered with lethal remnants of logs, known as snags. It was one such snag, hewn from a sycamore tree, that did in the Arabia.
Advertisement for the Arabia's final voyage; steamboats were used to carry both passengers and cargo. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arabia Steamboat Museum)
On September 5, 1856 about an hour north of Kansas City, the Arabia hit the sharp snag, and within minutes lay at the bottom of the Missouri River. All her passengers were saved, except for a mule, chained to a sawmill on the ground deck. But the Great White Arabia was lost, along with all her precious cargo.
A hundred and thirty years later, the exact contents of the steamboat’s cargo hold was still a mystery to Hawley and his team. It was entirely possible that there was nothing lying under the field they had so expensively began to dig up.
But three weeks into the dig, they found the first artifact: a small rubber shoe lying on the ship’s deck. The condition was so pristine they could easily read the stamp on the sole, “Goodyear Rubber Company.”
The first artifact found, the shoe was lying on the main deck of the Arabia. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arabia Steamboat Museum)
As the cargo deck was gradually unearthed, so too was the remarkable scale of the find. “The dishes were uncovered soon after,” says Hawley. “It was the dish barrel that really gave us the encouragement that the enormous amount of money being spent might actually be worth the gamble.”
Visiting the collection of treasure rescued from the Arabia, the scope of the artifacts is staggering. The Arabia was, after all, going to be supplying everything needed for 16 outpost towns. That meant everything from axes to saddles to skillets to umbrellas. To give some indication of scale, the team found over 4,000 shoes and boots and over three million Indian trade beads.
Like walking into a pre-Civil War department store; the collections size is matched by the pristine condition of the artifacts. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arabia Steamboat Museum)
Today the collection is so vast it is housed in a former fruit market in Kansas City that the team turned into a museum. Walking inside is like stepping back in time into a well-stocked department store from just before the Civil War. And because of the peculiar nature of the moving of the Missouri River bank, the collection is mint and pristine. Crates of cognac and champagne taste just as they did in 1856. Household matches are dry enough to light the cords of still fragrant tobacco, that could still be smoked in the dozens upon dozens of preserved, delicate clay pipes.
Clay pipes survived the shipwreck, as did the tobacco to fill them. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arabia Steamboat Museum)
The collection is so big that Hawley estimates it will take another 10 years to present it all. Until then, the items waiting to be catalogued are preserved encased in ice blocks. Visiting the lab, I saw, among the artifacts being cleaned that day, a sawmill vice, cast-iron stove hinges and yet more shoes.
At the tail end of 1988, the treasure hoard of the Arabia was finally unearthed, the team working in the freezing cold. “It was like Christmas every day,” Hawley says. But as winter moved into spring, their time ran out. The diesel-fueled generators and water pumps fell silent, and the remains of the giant side-wheeler Arabia was once again buried over, ready for that years crops to be sown.
“We came to cherish each and every item we located, and vowed not to sell”, Hawley says, “but instead to preserve the Arabia collection … no artifacts have been sold and its supported only by those willing to purchase a ticket for a museum tour.”
Uncovered pistols from the Arabia; small and pocket sized, but would have provided protection at close range. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arabia Steamboat Museum)
While the Arabia lies once again dormant in the cornfield, plans are already underway for the next excavation this winter: the steamboat Malta. Operated by the American Fur Company, the Malta sank in the Missouri in 1841, headed for trade with Native Americans, and would have returned laden with expensive pelts.
“We recently completed the outlining of the Malta”, says Hawley. “That was followed up by core sampling to confirm the existence of recoverable items, and to allow us to evaluate the condition of what lies buried.”
Like the Arabia, the Malta is underground and not underwater. “The boat lies about 50 feet deep and is situated about 1,500 feet from the Missouri River,” says Hawley. It “will be recovered during the winter months to provide cold air for the collection and lessen the threat of spring and summer flooding of the river.”
“The stories of these great frontier steamers”, says Hawley, “and the heroic pilots that steered them up this uncertain river have fallen silent. It seems this amazing chapter of American history is overlooked ... perhaps our efforts in retelling the Arabia’s story, and that of the steamboat Malta will pass along to a future generation a glimpse of what life was once like in a younger America.”
But just what lies in wait underneath this midwestern field remains a mystery to be uncovered this winter.
It takes two to tango. Sometimes it also takes a giant pool.
In this video posted on Vimeo by Freediving Dancer, a couple’s choreographed creation becomes a little more fluid when it goes underwater.
The woman in the video is Marisa Cecchetti, an Italian dancer trained in countless genres of dance—classical, hip-hop, and break dancing, to name a few—and who's been a certified diver since 1997, having completed more than 100 dives in what she says are some of the most challenging and beautiful bodies of water around the world.
The tango takes place in Y-40, an indoor pool in a hotel in Montegrotto Terme, Italy that claims to be the world’s deepest pool at 40 meters (131 feet). There’s more than enough space for these intertwined two to twist and twirl.
According to Cecchetti's website, the water temperature (34 degrees Celsius, or about 93 degrees Fahrenheit) provides the optimal conditions for letting her body relax and her movements to be as smooth as possible—that is, until she has to come up for air.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.
Marijuana activists will not be overlooked at the Democratic National Convention next week, mainly because no one will be able see over one group’s bus-sized joint. As the Philly Voice reports, the massive college-cigarette-shaped balloon will make its convention appearance on Monday at an event sponsored by the weed lobby, DCMJ.
The giant joint has previously made stops at events in New York and Washington DC, but this will be the first time it makes a trip to Philadelphia. According to the Philly Voice, the joint balloon is more or less a horizontal version of one of those dancing balloons found outside of car dealerships and electronics stores that are having a sale. The balloon is propped up by volunteers who usually carry it along its prescribed route like some sort of green god.
For the joint’s Philadelphia journey, it will start at the DCMJ’s Jaywalk To The DNC rally at City Hall in the early afternoon. Then a series of volunteers will hoist the inflatable spliff and march it into the heart of the convention near the Wells Fargo Center, where it will remain for the rest of the convention.
The giant joint is meant both as a celebration of the strides marijuana legislation has taken in the past few years, and also as a reminder that there is still a lot of road ahead before full legalization. No matter how you feel about the issue, you certainly won’t forget that it is on many voters’ minds.
When you think of swimming in the sea, do you get a sinking feeling? Does the thought of what monstrous behemoth might be hiding just beneath the waves fill you with dread? Are you acutely aware that the ocean is the most terrifying place on the planet?
Then you might suffer from thalassophobia, the compulsive fear of the sea (or really any deep, dark body of water). But that doesn’t mean you have to live with your fear forever.
Like all phobias, thalassophobia is a fear response triggered by a single, specific stimulus. In this case it’s the mysteries of the depths that can cause someone to have an adverse reaction. Thalassophobia differs from a fear of water itself (hello, aquaphobia), in that what most sufferers focus on what might be hiding below the surface, be that a shark, a sea monster, or simply the vast abyss itself. Those with true thalassophobia can experience extreme symptoms when confronted with large bodies of water, including sweating, shaking, and vomiting, although most people who would identify with the phobia probably just get really scared.
Searching for solutions to thalassophobia, or really any irrational fear will direct you almost exclusively to psychologists and hypnotists who can help people get the tools they need to get a grip on what scares them. “A phobia is a little different than a fear, in that it’s an irrational fear,” says Marc Carlin, a consulting hypnotist who specializes in helping people overcome their fears and phobias with a mix of cognitive therapy techniques and hypnotherapy. He has helped people overcome a number of common phobias such as a fear of spiders or snakes or bees. While Carlin admits that he has never treated a patient suffering from thalassophobia specifically, the psychology is much the same as with other fears.
“A lot of our fears are irrational to an extent,” says Carlin. “We create this reality where we think they are real but they’re really not.” For those suffering from a fear of the ocean, there is probably nothing dangerous in the vast majority of open water, but that doesn’t make the danger feel any less real.
In reality, the odds of getting attacked by a malevolent sea creature are exceedingly low. Between 1958 and 2014, there have only been 35 fatal shark attacks in the waters around the United States. But the fear of sharks has become wildly disproportionate, leading to many people’s anxieties about open water. Specifically many people’s fear of the ocean can likely be traced back to a certain movie about a killer shark. “A lot of people can identify with [thalassophobia]. Especially if they grew up the period when Jaws was a big thing on the scene,” says Carlin.
Even though the numbers might not support the fear response associated with thalassophobia, Carlin says that fear of the sea is actually very understandable. “In context [a fear of the sea] is not irrational. It’s primal,” says Carlin. “We all have this fear of darkness because we can’t see and we rely on our vision to protect us. If you shut your eyes and you can’t see, now you have to rely on senses that you don’t normally rely upon.” As he describes it, thalassophobia is related to this very basic emotion. Given the average person’s comparative helplessness in water, and the limitations being in a large body of water puts on our senses, that fear of the dark can easily translate to a fear of the deep.
The good news is that for all of the terror the oceans might hold, that fear is not an impossible obstacle to overcome. In fact, according to Carlin, the truly phobic might have an easier time getting past their worries than those who just think it’s unsettling. “A true phobic response is learned in an instant,” he says. “But because we learn it very quickly, we can unlearn it very quickly. Sometimes a fear might take a number of sessions. A true phobic response can be done in like 5-10 minutes.” Since most of the normal fears people harbor that keep them safe while navigating the world were learned over time and repetition, training them out of people is equally challenging. A phobia is an intense emotional response, usually related to a single memory, be it an object or experience.
The actual steps to overcoming thalassophobia can differ from person to person, but in general Carlin counsels taking it step-by-step. “If your challenge is a fear of the water, [I want] to give you a way to access a safe and secure feeling,” he says. “I want to give you the ability to access that feeling, where you can turn it on as an act of will. Then gradually bring you into more challenging situations.” This can be achieved by finding out what experience triggered your fear, and slowly facing it with more and more confidence, hopefully with the emotional tools provided by a therapist or a hypnotherapist, until the experience, and the larger fear is no longer such an impediment.
There are no hard numbers on how many people suffer from thalassophobia, or just a real fear of the ocean, but as some indication, the Reddit group devoted to the phobia currently has over 88,000 subscribers (not a recommended destination for anyone suffering from true thalassophobia). Most sufferers of this fear probably take the easy way out and just stick to dry land where all the giant squid, Nessies, and nightmare sharks can’t touch them. But for those still need to heed the siren call of the seas, a little hypnotism never hurt. As Carlin told us, “If you let your thoughts run wild, without any control, they will definitely control you.”
In 1935, a shark on display in an Australian aquarium vomited up a human arm.
In a regular shark attack story, this would be the happy ending, with the beast captured and at least part of its victim’s body recovered so it could be laid to rest.
But this is no ordinary shark tale. The shark, it turns out, didn’t attack anyone. It wasn’t the villain, but more like the jogger in a Law and Order episode who discovers a body and sets the story in motion. Its bout of indigestion was just the beginning of a murder investigation and one of Australia’s most infamous crime stories.
The 14-foot tiger shark had been caught in mid-April off Coogee Beach in Sydney by a local fisherman named Bert Hobson after it got tangled in the line while eating a smaller shark that Hobson had hooked. He and his son hauled the fish to shore and brought it to the Coogee Aquarium and Swimming Baths, run by Hobson’s brother, for exhibition. After a few days in which it seemed to adjust to its new home, the shark became irritable and began behaving erratically. It repeatedly rammed the walls of its tank before sinking to the bottom and swimming in lazy, irregular circles.
Finally, it began to vomit. According to areporter from the Sydney Morning Herald who was there to write about the new display, a “copious brown froth which smelled really foul” issued from the shark’s mouth and a “bird, a rat, a load of muck and human arm with a piece of rope tied around it” floated to the surface.
The police were called, and the coroner and a shark expert examined the arm. They concluded that it had not been bitten off—there were no tooth marks anywhere and the limb had been cleanly removed at the shoulder with a blade. The police started a homicide investigation and allowed a local newspaper, Sydney’s Truth, to print a description and picture of a tattoo found on the arm’s bicep in hopes that someone would come forward with information.
A man recognized the tattoo, an image of two boxers squaring off, andidentified the arm as belonging to his brother James Smith, a bookie, amateur boxer and small time crook who had gone missing a few weeks earlier.
Detectives quickly pieced together Smith’s most recent activities. He was last seen alive at hotel in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla drinking and playing dominoes with his friend Patrick Brady, who had rap sheet full of forgery convictions.
As the investigation continued, it became clear that the two friends’ night out had taken a bad turn. Brady’s landlord told police that Brady had vacated his rented bayside cottage shortly after Smith went missing, and before the lease was up. When the landlord inspected the place, he found that a mattress and trunk had been replaced, the walls had been cleaned and a rowboat included with the cottage had been scrubbed.
With Brady, the police had a suspect, and they soon found a motive. A cab drivertold the investigators that the day after Smith was last seen, he’d driven Brady—who looked disheveled and nervous—to north Sydney and dropped him off outside a house belonging to Reginald Lloyd Holmes.
Holmes was a respected boatbuilder and businessman, but also deeply involved in Sydney’s criminal underworld. He controlled a smuggling ring and sometimes employed Smith and Brady to take his business’s speedboats out to pick up cocaine, cigarettes and other contraband thrown overboard by passing ships. He also orchestrated insurance scams in which Smith and Brady intentionally sank or set fire to his boats so he could the insurance money. The detectivesfigured that after one of these frauds had gotten botched and the insurance company refused to pay out, the conspirators had a falling out and one of the men had murdered Smith.
Both Brady and Holmes were brought in for questioning, but refused to cooperate. While Brady was charged with the murder and further pressed for a confession, Holmes, who claimed to not know Brady or Smith, was released.
A few days later, Holmes took one of his speedboats out into Sydney’s Lavender Bay, shot himself in the head and fell into the water. He only managed to wound himself, though. The small caliber bullet had flattened against his forehead and merely stunned him. The fall into the water revived him and he climbed back into the boat, only to find that onlookers had called the police. He led police boats on a hours-long chase around the bay, through Sydney Harbor and out toward the ocean, where he finally gave up and let the cops take him to the hospital.
After recovering from his wound, Holmes was ready to talk. At first he tried to explain away his suicide attempt and the boat chase by saying he’d been attacked and shot in his home, fled in the boat and mistook the police for his assailants. Eventually, he claimed that Brady had murdered Smith at the cottage, dismembered the body and buried most of it at sea in a trunk (which would explain the missing items and cleanup). He kept the one arm, though, and brought it to Holmes’ house, threatening that Holmes would wind up like Smith if he didn’t pay Brady off. Afterwards, Brady tied a weight to the arm and threw it into the water where it was swallowed by the shark, and Holmes suffered a nervous break and decided to kill himself on the boat.
Holmes agreed to repeat all this in court, but the night before the trial began, he was shot dead in his car. The crime scene and Holmes’ recent behavior suggested suicide, but his impending testimony pointed towards murdering him to keep him quiet. Legal historian Alex Castlesargued another explanation in his book about the case: that Holmes took out a hit on himself. That would’ve spare his family any embarrassment if his own crimes were revealed during the trial, and also allow them to collect on his life insurance, which might not have paid out if he committed suicide.
The coverage of the trial The West Australian newspaper on Tuesday September 10, 1935. (Photo: National Library of Australia)
With Holmes dead, the case against Brady fell apart. His lawyer argued all the other evidence was circumstantial and, more importantly, that an arm was not a body and with no body there was no homicide. A one-armed Jim Smith could still be alive somewhere, the defense said. The judge agreed and directed the jury toacquit. Brady was freed, but arrested on forgery charges as soon as he walked out of the courthouse. He maintained his innocence in the murder until his death in 1965.
Smith’s murder was never solved, but Castles suggested that Smith was a police informant (charmingly known as a “fizgig” in early 20th-century Australian slang) and was killed by bank robber Eddie Weyman after Smith provided info that led to his arrest.
As for the shark, it was killed and opened up in a search for more of Smith’s remains, but like the man whose arm it swallowed, the fish’s days as an informant were done.
Ariel peers into an anachronistic porthole. (Image: The Little Mermaid)
If I were asked to picture a shipwreck, a clear image would pop into my mind. I’ve never seen a shipwreck in real life; most of us haven’t. My imaginary shipwreck has a very clear source, though, one that was influential on my young mind. I'm imagining the shipwreck from Disney's The Little Mermaid.
For me, the shipwreck that Ariel explores was iconic. But, if this is the vessel that defines shipwreck for me, how much of my idea of a sunken ship is pure Disney magic? Is there any truth to it?
Kevin Crisman, the director of the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation at Texas A&M University, immediately knew the genre of ship I was talking about: maritime archaeologists joke about “Hollywood shipwrecks” all the time, he says. One of the shipwrecks they “love to hate to watch" is the 18th-century ship that Nicolas Cage finds frozen in Arctic ice, at the beginning of National Treasure. (It’s very shortly blown to pieces with centuries-old gunpowder.)
The Little Mermaid shipwreck was not one he had considered closely before, but Crisman graciously agreed to watch a few clips from the movie and give me his professional opinion about the wreck where Ariel famously finds a dinglehopper (also known as a fork). Now that I write about real shipwrecks, I wanted to know: What type of ship were we looking at? What made internal sense? And what was total fantasy?
Crisman's take on the nautical accuracy of The Little Mermaid? “There are discrepancies." Some big ones. But there were also some details that made a surprising amount of sense.
The shipwreck enters early in the film. At Triton’s palace, the entire court has gathered to celebrate the debut of Ariel, the sea king’s youngest daughter, at court. But when the shell where she’s supposed to be hiding opens—gasp!—she’s not there. Instead, we see her swimming with her anxious yellow pal Flounder, far from the palace. She’s in search of anything that once belonged to humans, and shipwrecks are treasure troves. She has a destination in mind.
The shipwreck. (Image: The Little Mermaid)
I had worried that the ship might be a Frankenstein's monster of a vessel, with different parts grafted on from different eras of shipbuilding. But to Crisman it's a recognizable type of ship. “I think they’re going for a Spanish galleon," he says. The ship appears to have been built in the 1500s or early 1600s; it's in the style of Europe's Renaissance period. There are still ropes and sails hanging off it, which gives a clue to the time frame of when the ship went down. In saltwater, organic matter like this rots quickly. Since the sails are still there, this ship probably sank within the last four to six weeks.
It’s also pretty obvious to Crisman why it sank. “There’s no way for the water to flow around the rudder of this ship, which would have been impossible to steer,” he says. The stern of the boat is flat, like the top of a barrel. Some ships of this era did have flat sterns, but they were tapered to allow the rudder to reach the water. This boat never had a chance.
Once inside the ship, Ariel and Flounder start exploring; Flounder makes the first find.
Flounder encounters a fairly recent skeleton. (Image: The Little Mermaid)
Flounder, nervous about being in the forbidden shipwreck to begin with, is not exactly reassured to come face to face with a skeleton. The skull, though, is also consistent with the timeline that Crisman laid out. Bodies deteriorate pretty quickly; usually the corpse floats on the underside of the deck. But since the boat sank recently, it’s not so surprising that Ariel and Flounder would discover the bones of an unfortunate passenger still resident in the ship.
What is surprising is that Ariel finds a fork in a 16th-century ship.
Ariel makes a discovery. (Image: The Little Mermaid)
“The fork is kind of problematic,” says Crisman. “Forks don’t come into widespread use until a couple of centuries later.” And even when they first start being used, forks didn’t look like this one—they had only two tines. Metal also starts to corrode quickly in the ocean; the fork is awfully shiny for having been under the water for a month or more.
The other big problem, according to Crisman, is the pipe Ariel finds.
And another one. (Image: The Little Mermaid)
In the 16th century, tobacco had just crossed the Atlantic to Europe. Citizens in the Iberian peninsula had started getting into it, but they were more likely to roll tobacco leaves in cigars. Pipes didn’t become popular until the 17th century at least, and this one is a 19th-century style.
Similarly, round portholes, like the one on the side of the ship that Flounder has to squeeze through, didn’t become a feature on ships until much later in time. In the 17th century, Crisman explains, war ships sometimes had round openings, but they would have had lids that fit tightly inside to close them. More likely, any opening low on the ships would have been square, and lidded shut. The portholes that we're most familiar with, round glass windows, didn't become part of ship design until the 19th and 20th centuries.
There is one artifact here that would belong on a 16th century ship: the cannon that Ariel and Flounder swim by fits that time period. A glass window, also, might have been found in the stern gallery reserved for a captain or admiral. But this is a pretty extensive glass window:
Ships like this might have had windows, although this one is impressive. (Image: The Little Mermaid)
Hans Christian Anderson wrote the original Little Mermaid in the 1830s, and the clothes of the human characters in the movie also look to be from the 19th century. So one possible explanation that squares the style of the ship with the anachronistic artifacts is that some 19th-century shipbuilder decided to make a replica of a 16th-century ship. That could also explain why whoever built the ship did such a poor job.
Beside the problem with the rudder, Crisman points out another big structural issue. The frames—what people think of as the ribs of the ship—on the interior of the ship are too widely spaced from each other. They wouldn’t be adequate for structural support. Sometimes, 16th-century shipbuilders would also add interior supports called riders, and, Crisman says, “If they’re riders, then the Little Mermaid people nailed it. But if they’re supposed to be frames, then there’s a gross misinterpretation of 16th-century framing.”
We also took a look at Ariel’s grotto, where she stores all the loot she’s collected from this and other shipwrecks. There’s a pretty big problem with this concept to begin with: stuff designed to survive on land would not survive long in an underwater environment. The metal would oxide. “Sea worms” often feast on wood. Perhaps there’s something special in the water of the grotto that’s preserving all the artifacts.
The idea of a candelabra being in a shipwreck isn't so out there. (Image: The Little Mermaid)
But Ariel’s artifact collection does accurately reflect, to some extent, the objects that might be salvaged from shipwrecks. The candelabra in which she places the fork, for instance: “Things like that do occasionally turn up on shipwrecks,” Crisman says, although typically anything that was used on the ship would have a more practical design.
On the shelves of the grotto, it’s possible to make out (on the righthand edge of the image below) a giant lantern on one shelf. That, according to Crisman, looks like a stern lantern; he spotted examples in the shipwreck clip as well. “They fly,” he says, although “they probably wouldn’t survive a sinking, unless it was a very gentle, slow sinking.”
In the bottom left of the shot, there are large, open-mouthed pots that also pass muster. The Portuguese used pots like these as storage jars, to transport commodities like olives and olive oil.
Ariel in her grotto. (Image: The Little Mermaid)
There was something else that bothered Crisman about the grotto, though. “As an archaeologist, I’m troubled by her collecting proclivity,” he says. “The scientist in me thinks she’s destroying scientific information for future archaeologists.”
Stashed in the grotto, the objects offer no clues about where they came from or how they were used. But perhaps Ariel was keeping meticulous notes on her discoveries, along with their original locations and contexts. If she only applied a rigorous scientific method to her collection process, Ariel’s enthusiasm for the material culture of seafaring humans might have made her a good candidate for a career in archaeology.
We decide to give her the benefit of the doubt. “If she had not gotten involved with that prince, she could have gone on to be a maritime archaeologist of some renown,” Crisman concludes.
In the magical world of Pokémon Go, Pokémon are all around you. But they’re hidden—to find them, you’re supposed to just walk around until one pops up. This is fun, but time consuming and sometimes frustrating. One developer, though, figured out how to create a map that shows exactly which Pokémon are in an area and their exact location.
This map first emerged from a subreddit for developers playing Pokémon Go, as the Verge reported. One of the contributors managed to start pulling out Pokémon Go data, and another, Ahmed Almutawa, started playing with that, which led him to create the first version of this map. His original intent, he wrote on Reddit, was to set “a coding exercise for myself.” But he was also interested in how Pokémon appear and their spawning patterns, which led him to make the map.
He posted the project on Reddit, and even though it required some coding knowledge to use, overnight it blew up and Almutawa’s time basically became consumed with trying to make the map work better and helping people use it. The code’s open-source, so already there are many variations on this idea and spin-offs, many also overwhelmed with demand.
Niantic, the company that made the game, doesn’t want people to be using the raw data in this way; the creator of this spin-off map project, for instance, already received a cease and desist order.
Whether or not using these maps is a fun or fair way to play the game, there is something delightful about seeing how fully the world is now populated with Pokémon.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
All good tech must come to an end. Funai Electric Comapany—the last known producers of Video Cassette Recorders, or VCRs—have hit "stop" on manufacturing, Japanese newspaper Nikkei reports.
VCRs (and their good buddies, VHS tapes) first hit the shelves in the 1970s and quickly rose to dominance, acting as the centerpiece technology for endless sleepovers, late night TV recordings, and screenings of shakily filmed Little League games. By the 1990s, 95% of American households had one. Just ten years later, though, DVD players were successfully muscling in on this territory, and producers of VCRs and VHS tapes slowly began to give up.
The last holdout was Funai, which built their recorders in China and sold them in North America under the Sanyo brand. According to Nikkei, Funai is stopping production this month, citing a shrinking market and the difficulty of finding parts.
One of the coolest things about VCRs is pressing that rewind button and listening to the tape spin back. Technological progress, however, moves relentlessly forward, and you can't rewind it, no matter how kind you are.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear, from 1889, a year before Van Gogh killed himself. (Photo: Public domain)
Vincent Van Gogh, the groundbreaking late 19th-century Dutch painter, was a troubled man.
At age 37, he shot himself in the chest, but managed to miss his major organs, only dying a day later because of what's assumed to be an infection.
But the most famous story about Van Gogh revolves around his left ear. In 1888, after increasingly violent behavior, Van Gogh is said to have sliced off part of his ear with a razor, wrapped it in paper, and left it with a woman. Why? No one really knows, but some suspect his fraught relationship with fellow artist Paul Gauguin might have been a driving factor.
Van Gogh left his ear with a maid at a brothel the two frequented in the French city of Arles, apparently intended for Gauguin, and for over a century the maid's identity has been a mystery.
On Wednesday, the Art Newspaperidentified the woman as Gabrielle Berlatier, a teen then not old enough to be a registered prostitute. A recent book, Van Gogh's Ear: The True Story, had published some clues relating to Berlatier's identity, but had refrained from publishing it out of respect for her family's wishes.
But the Art Newspaper said that they had connected enough dots to conclusively be able to say that it was Berlatier.
The year 1888, in fact, was probably the roughest year of Berlatier's life. Months before she received Van Gogh's ear, she contracted, and recovered from, rabies. Her later years were much kinder, though, according to the Art Newspaper, as she married and lived "well into old age."
We're compiling a collection of scents from both the RNC and the DNC (with a h/t to Jordan Sargent at Gawker for the inspiration). If you were there, please let us know what you smelled and where. Everyone is talking about what the candidates are saying, but what do they smell like? Give us your descriptions of the heady convention floor by filling out the short survey below, and we'll compile the results in a later article!
A brightly-colored nudibranch. (All Photos: Aron Sanchez)
The biggest nature-focused Instagram accounts score millions of followers by going broad. The U.S. Department of the Interior, with a million followers, frequently posts scenic vistas of the Rocky Mountains or cute videos of red foxes. National Geographic posts pictures of people and especially cute and popular animals (pandas, lemurs, chimpanzees) for its 55.7 million followers.
Aron Sanchez, on Instagram under the name Waterbod, posts pictures and videos of sea slugs, decomposing octopuses, venomous snakes, barnacles, and more animals of the squishy, spiky, and kinda-gross varieties. He is not a biologist and has rarely lived away from the coast of California—as a matter of fact, most of his posts are from Los Angeles and its immediately surrounding areas.
Yet his work is startlingly compelling: not whitewashed or staff-approved, sometimes goofy, always surprising and beautiful and strange.
Sanchez is a 32-year-old freelance photographer and videographer who does, he says, various odd jobs to make ends meet in between gigs. Growing up in the arid San Diego area, he read and absorbed anything he could about the natural world. “As a boy, I wanted to see the tropics, I wanted to see strange lizards and komodo dragons, and growing up in San Diego, a desert, I didn't see anything like that, ever,” he says. “And I remember feeling very frustrated by that.”
But in his adult life, Sanchez has turned that frustration right back around—not by heading to the tropics (he’s lived, aside from a few years in Oregon, his entire life in California), but by actually taking a look at his own surroundings.
A horned lizard.
Location is key to Sanchez’s work. He tags his posts with the county where it was filmed, along with the species’ Linnaean name, and the vast majority of the animals depicted were filmed in surprisingly urban areas. His most popular location is Los Angeles County, followed by the counties immediately surrounding Los Angeles (and also San Francisco, where he lived for almost a decade). “I think a lot of people associate exotic finds like an octopus or sea slug with the tropics, a place you'd have to go on vacation to. That's one of the things I really enjoy about doing this—saying hey, there are really exciting things right here,” he says.
The idea that anyone can do what he does is a refrain for Sanchez. His main tools are not expensive; he relies on field guides (he likes the National Audubon Society’s guides as well as California Natural History Guides from the University of California) and free online tools. “The county is so large, and there are so many people, so the more desirable areas, with a sandy beach and restaurants and entertainment areas and things like that, a lot more people are drawn to those areas,” he says. But heading away from those touristy areas, even staying within Los Angeles County, quickly lands him in less disturbed, more wild areas: tide pools, rocky coastline, desert.
An ochre sea star.
Sanchez says he goes out into the field about five days a week, for a few hours at a time. Sometimes he’ll have a specific species he’s trying to find; other times he’ll simply find a new spot on Google Earth and head out to see what’s there. “Sometimes I don’t find what I’m looking for, obviously, but I never regret spending time in nature,” he says.
One area that he’s been particularly enjoying lately is the Mojave Desert, which overlaps a few square miles into the far northeast corner of L.A.. “Out there in the desert there isn't much of the traditional interests Los Angelenos seem to have with the outdoors, whether that's mountains or the oceans or the prettier things that you find,” he says. “But as far as a place you can go to find animals, that's not crowded, where the land is kind of left alone to do what it does, it’s great.”
A glossy snake.
A bat star in San Mateo County.
Sanchez intentionally does not specify exactly where he films these animals, partly out of environmental concerns (some of the animals, he says, are rare and subject to poaching), but also out of an overarching philosophy. “I want people to feel like wherever you are, if you can find a body of water, if you find nature, you will find animals,” he says. “And they will be interesting!” He notes that he uses no specialized equipment, certainly nothing like scuba gear or a boat or a helicopter, and even that his camera equipment is nothing too special. “I want to stress, like, I did this with a used camera I bought off B&H,” he laughs, referring to the New York-based electronics store.
What Sanchez lacks in breadth compared to a NatGeo, he gains in depth. “The natural world is all around us,” he says. “Even in Los Angeles, even in Brooklyn, it's there.”
Every empire comes to ruin. The technological marvels of today are the wreckage of the future. In this destruction there can be great beauty. Each of these sunken ruins, dating from ancient to modern times, is both enchanting and ominous: these are places where the thrill of exploration mixes with the foreboding knowledge that swimming among ruins is glimpse of our own potential future.
Appearing in a few rare inscriptions and ancient texts, the city of Thonis-Heracleion was not something anyone expected to find. No one was even looking for it.
So it was a shock when French archaeologist Franck Goddio saw a colossal face emerge from the water. Goddio had stumbled upon the completely submerged Thonis-Heracleion four miles off Alexandria's coastline. Among the underwater ruins were 64 ships, 700 anchors, a treasure trove of gold coins, and statues standing at 16 feet.
Most notable were the remains of a massive temple to the god Amun-Gereb, and the tiny sarcophagi for the animals that were brought there as offerings. Once a grand city, today its history is largely obscured. No one is quite sure how it ended up entirely underwater.
In its heyday, the classical Roman city of Baia was the Las Vegas of its time. Now its remains are beneath the waves.
A prominent resort city for centuries, Baia catered to the recreational whims of rich and powerful Romans. The city, which was located over natural volcanic vents, was famous for its healing medicinal hot springs. Some of antiquity's most powerful figures, including Nero, Cicero, and Caesar, were known to have visited the city; a number of them built permanent vacation villas there.
Today the ancient remains of Baia can be visited in one of the world's few underwater archaeological parks. Visitors can view crumbled structures and amazingly preserved statuary through glass-bottomed boats, or scuba dives that allow people to actually swim amongst the copious ruins. While the city is no longer a resort, its waters still hold wonders.
The graves of the sunken cemetery. (Photo: Atlas Obscura User Aribancale)
There are no flowers to mark the resting places of the lost citizens of Camiguin—instead a giant cross rises up out of the water marking where this cemetery once was.
In the 1870s, a volcano near the island erupted and caused the capital city, including this cemetery, to sink below sea level. In order to commemorate the loss, a looming cross was built in remembrance. Beneath the surface are the remains of the cemetery itself.
Hidden beneath the waters of China's Qiandao Lake is a collection of ornate Eastern Han Dynasty buildings dating back to the 2nd century. This city, known as Shi Cheng, wasn't drowned under mysterious circumstances, but rather in the march of progress.
In 1959, the valley in which the ancient city of Shi Cheng was located was flooded in order to create the man-made Qiandao Lake, which in turn would power a hydroelectric plant. This hid the city from view under over a hundred feet of water. To this day there are almost 300 arches still standing beneath the lake, along with a great number of intact buildings. A Shanghai-based dive company has taken to exploring the ruins of Shi Cheng, and there are now plans to build a bridge across the entire lake.
Exploring a ritual structure made of stones. (Photo: Hanay/Wikimedia)
Off the coast of the village of Atlit lies the submerged ruins of the Neolithic site of Atlit-Yam. The site, which dates between 6900 and 6300 B.C., lies around 10 meters beneath the current sea level. At the center of the settlement seven megaliths are arranged in a stone semicircle around a freshwater spring, which may once have been the site of water rituals.
Scientists believe that Atlit-Yam was abandoned suddenly as a result of a tsunami hitting the region, probably caused by a volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean area. Of particular interest to archaeologists was the discovery of two skeletons, a woman and a child, which revealed the earliest known cases of tuberculosis.
Beneath the waves of Roatàn you will find the cannons of a Spanish galleon and a Mayan cemetery.
The place is known for its combination of marine life and history, spanning four eras of habitation by Spanish settlers, Mayans, and Garifuna. The museum shows numerous pre–Colombian figures, most of which were found on the island.
In addition to the sculptures and artifacts, you can also find tropical fish living in the Mesoamerican barrier reef that surrounds the island. There are aquatic turtles, stingrays, and other tropical fish that call the reef home.
There are plenty of newer ruins to explore as well. Beneath Lake Huron sit the ruins of more than 150 years of shipwrecks.
Various misfortunes have caused over 200 vessels to sink beneath the waves in and around Thunder Bay, nicknamed "Shipwreck Alley." Thanks to the resulting treasure trove of historic artifacts, the State of Michigan created a 290-square-mile underwater preserve in the area in 1981; this state preserve became a 448-square-mile national marine sanctuary in 2000. After being enlarged again, to 4,300 square miles, in 2014, it now encompasses essentially all of the waters from the shores of northeastern Michigan to the U.S.-Canada border.
Almost 100 shipwrecks have been discovered and identified within Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The known wrecks date from 1849 to 1966 and range from wooden schooners and early steamboats to modern steel-hulled freighters. The cold, fresh water has kept this impressive historical cross-section of watercraft extraordinarily well-preserved, with many wrecks exhibiting structural and mechanical components and sailors’ personal effects that have remained largely unchanged since coming to rest at the bottom of Lake Huron.
Exploring the wreck. (Photo: Flickr / Mike Miller)
While the site of the Corsair Plane wreck is a dramatic beauty, it didn't actually have a very dramatic end, at least as far as plane crashes go. A routine mission in 1948 ended abruptly when the WWII aircraft started to sputter. As the engine began to fail, the pilot managed to make a smooth water landing, wheels up, flaps slightly extended. The pilot was rescued bobbing nearby in his lifejacket. The plane wasn't even damaged.
It wasn't buoyant either, so despite the soft landing, it still ended up at the bottom of the ocean. The wreck lies at about 115 feet in an area known for unpredictably strong and swift currents, as well as a unique garden eel population. Divers must descend using the anchor line and swim about 30 feet to the wreck. Eels, jacks, and stingrays all frequent the site.
While many sunken ruins are the result of great disasters, in the case of Mermet Springs the watery wreckage is quite intentional. Lurking beneath the murky waters of a flooded Illinois quarry are a number of vehicles that have been sunk into the makeshift lake as attractions for divers to explore.
From the land, the waters appear to be nothing more than another forest lake, but Mermet Springs hides a number of wonders. These include a motorcycle, an ambulance, a full semi trailer, and a rail car, among others. However the most incredible item is the Boeing 727 that was dropped in the lake after being used to shoot the film, US Marshals.
