In mid-July, in the vast waters of the Norwegian Sea, two ships collided, loosing 12 massive sections of pipe into the water. No one was hurt, but the pipes scattered. Some were salvaged, while others drifted away. Last week, they began washing up on the beaches of Norfolk, England.
The pipes were apparently headed for power and desalination projects in Algeria, and are extremely large—nearly eight feet in diameter, with the longest around 1,570 feet in length. A video from The Guardian gives you a sense of the scale here:
The plastic pipes were created by a Norwegian firm called Pipelife, which has told beachgoers not to approach the pipes or climb on top of them, lest they be crushed. This hasn't deterred the curious, as recent "aerial footage showed two men walking on top of one of the pipes, as others took selfies," The Guardian reported. A salvage operation is currently under way to tow the pipes back to Norway.
“It is essential now that the salvage team fence off the pipes," Trygve Blomster, a manager at Pipelife, told The Guardian. "If a 2.5-meter diameter pipe, several hundred-meter long pipe is moving in the water it is extremely dangerous. If you fall beside that while it moved you will be smashed."
Most people are taking care to protect their eyesight during next week’s eclipse, but that may be the least of anyone’s worries. The South Carolina Emergency Management Division (SCEMD) recently warned of something much more ominous: the Lizard Man.
The SCEMD is referring to the local legend of a roaming Lizard Man, unique to South Carolina. Sightings of the South Carolina Lizard Man have been reported on a consistent basis for decades, and as one local news source describes the cryptid, it is “basically South Carolina's Bigfoot.” The creature is most often described as being around seven-feet tall and covered in scales, with red, glowing eyes.
SCEMD included a map of Lizard Man sightings in the tweet, advising residents of Lee and Sumter counties to “remain ever vigilant.”
"As an emergency management professional, this is kind of embarrassing. Are you trying to be funny? Is that all this is?" One tweeter, named Panama Jack, asked, to which the SCEMD said, "Hey Jack... check the headlines," linking to a news report that will be especially relevant next week: a map of places where people can go to see both the eclipse and (possibly) Bigfoot.
At East Beach, in Charlestown, Rhode Island, an object was recently found about 10 feet from the shore at low tide. It's a bit of a mystery. The object resembles a starfish, but is made of concrete and metal. And at first, Peter Brockmann, the president of the East Beach Association, was afraid to touch it, worried that it might be a bomb.
“We wanted to figure out what it is before we go tugging on it,” Brockmann told The Westerly Sun last week, adding that authorities are now pretty certain that it is not explosive.
So what could it be? Brockmann contacted a number of places he thought it might have come from, including the U.S. Navy, a company building a nearby wind farm, and a local harbor master. All said that it wasn't theirs, though some University of Rhode Island professors told Brockmann they thought it could be the mount for what's known as an acoustic doppler profiler, an instrument used by scientists (and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, among others) to measure the speed of currents in the water.
Whatever it is, the object's been stuck where it is for a while—Brockmann said it might have been discovered as early as sometime last year, and that he thinks a lot of it is buried beneath the surface.
Either way, we'll know for sure soon. Brockmann told The Westerly Sun that the East Beach Association had hired a contractor to drag the object from the ocean sometime this week. Mount for a scientific device? The tip of a Bond villain's lair? Leftover alien spaceship part? Some mysteries are meant to be solved.
Human beings have been predicting solar and lunar eclipses for almost 2,000 years, long before they knew what exactly was happening or why it is meaningful. These days, we have a pretty good understanding of when they’ll take place: NASA has plotted out every single one for the next 1,000 years or so (and the previous 4,000). But if you don’t want to rely on the experts, what are your options for predicting a solar eclipse yourself?
Counting
Perhaps the easiest way to predict a solar eclipse doesn’t require any sophisticated knowledge of the universe whatsoever‚ just the ability to watch, and to count, for a long time. In fact, people have been watching and counting—making calendars, essentially—for almost as long as they’ve farmed the land. “Every organized, agriculturally based civilization develops a calendar, because that’s what you need to determine planting times,” says Ramon Lopez, a space physicist at the University of Texas at Arlington. “You don’t need a heliocentric model, you just need to know rising and setting times of various models in the sky.”
Ancient people may not have known that the Earth is round, or spinning, or orbiting the Sun, but once they started recording when things happened, they began to notice patterns. One of the clearest patterns for predicting solar eclipses is the Saros cycle, first observed by the ancient Mesopotamians. Within a Saros series, solar eclipses occur at intervals of 223 lunar months. These cycles each last around 1,000 years—eclipse after eclipse after eclipse.
Unfortunately, the subsequent Saros eclipses don’t happen in the same place, but one-third of the way around the Earth. It takes three Saros cycles for an eclipse to recur in a similar place as the first one—approximately 54 years later.
There are three challenges to predicting eclipses with Saros cycles. The first is that two out of every three eclipses are going to be very far away from where any given one was first observed. The second is that the time when one might occur could be at night, and therefore unobservable. The third is that multiple cycles occur at the same time. Hot on the heels of the upcoming 2017 eclipse that will pass over North America, for example, is another total solar eclipse, in April 2024, that will span the country from Texas to Maine. But the two aren’t related: Each is part of its own Saros series. Given that there are about 40 of these cycles taking place at any given time, and each lasts 1,000 years, even if you’re lucky enough to observe multiple eclipses, it’s hard to tell which is part of which pattern. Pattern recognition is a reliable and accurate way to predict solar eclipses, but it requires long-term, dependable observations made over as much as half a century or more.
Furthermore, there are other eclipse cycles—known to ancient astronomers across the world—including the Metonic Cycle, which is 19 years long, the 345-year Hipparchus cycle, and, in China and Central America, the Tritos, which is just under 11 years long (plus the Triple Tritos, 32.7 years in total). By the first few centuries A.D., ancient Roman astronomers were able to predict eclipses with some accuracy using pattern recognition, though not because anyone understood the nature of the celestial event.
Some Quite Laborious Mathematics
Another way of predicting an eclipse—one that requires far more understanding of the universe and time—is to work it out mathematically. In an eclipse, lunar or solar, the Sun, Moon, and Earth line up to produce what’s excitingly known as a syzygy. Figuring out when this will happen is a matter of geometry. Alexander Jones, Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity at New York University, says the math is not necessarily that hard, but there’s a lot of it. “It doesn’t take anything that’s much more advanced than, say, grade school mathematics to do,” he says, “but it would take you working with pencil and paper probably a couple of hours to do a complete calculation.”
“You really need to know that the Earth is round, and you need to know where you are on that spherical Earth, because the shadow of the Moon is such a small area,” adds Jones. “If you don’t know your location on the Earth, you’re not going to make forecasts of solar eclipses that are very meaningful.” By the last few centuries B.C., the ancient Mesopotamians had more or less figured out the mathematical approach, but they didn’t know that the world was round, or where they were on it.
For the calculation, you have to compute the motion of the Moon’s shadow on a plane that crosses the Earth’s center. From there, what’s known as the "shadow cone” can be projected onto the Earth’s surface. This is known as the Besselian method and, according to NASA, even today is “the most powerful technique [to predict solar eclipses], even with the application of the digital computer.” Here’s how they explain it:
To define the Besselian elements of an eclipse, a plane is passed through the center of Earth which is fixed perpendicular to axis of the lunar shadow. This is called the fundamental plane and on it is constructed an X-Y rectangular coordinate system with its origin at the geocenter. The axes of this system are oriented with north in the positive Y direction and east in the positive X direction. The Z axis is perpendicular to the fundamental plane and parallel to the shadow axis. The X-Y coordinates of the shadow axis can now be expressed in units of the equatorial radius of Earth. The radii of the penumbral and umbral shadows on the fundamental plane are also tabulated as L1 and L2, respectively. The direction of the shadow axis on the celestial sphere is defined by its declination 'd' and ephemeris hour angle 'm'. Finally, the angles which the penumbral and umbral shadow cones make with the shadow axis are expressed as f1 and f2, respectively. These eight parameters, often tabulated at hourly intervals serve as the only input needed to characterize an eclipse.
Grade school mathematics? Perhaps not. For the mathematically uninclined, it’s headache-inducing just to look at these instructions—almost as much as looking at a solar eclipse with the naked eye, though far less likely to irreparably damage your vision. Probably.
Get a Machine to Do It for You
You don’t need to have a modern computer or even a calculator to predict an eclipse, though some kind of a machine may be helpful. One of the most exciting historical examples is the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient machine that kept track of the date, and the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. “It also predicted eclipses and kept track of upcoming Olympic games,” Jones writes in his book A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism. The machine worked through a series of interlocking dials—37 in total—“which may have been manipulated by a hand crank.”
It’s a gloriously intricate piece of ancient technology, likely once very beautiful, and mostly made of bronze. Found in 1901 on a wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, it is believed to date to some time between 205 and 87 B.C., though the wreck itself probably happened around 65 B.C. On the front of the mechanism, a clock-like face displayed the calendar date through two concentric circles: one showing the 12 Greek zodiac signs, and the other the 12 Egyptian months of the year.
The Antikythera Mechanism needed resetting every 223 months for the Saros cycle, Jones says. Each period was divided into little cells for each lunar month, with inscriptions that indicated when eclipses of the Sun or Moon were possibilities. On top of that, he says, “there was an indication of what would be the estimated time of the day or night, depending on what kind of eclipse it was.” The actual data behind that counting system, however, was based on mathematical information. “In a way,” Jones says, “both methods are being used.”
Look to the Shadows
There’s yet another way to predict solar eclipses—though it only works in the hour or so before everything starts to darken—with a pinhole camera. These are easy enough to make, but also appear naturally.
Take, for instance, a perforated leaf that has served as some insect’s snack. If you hold it up to the sun, the shadow will be leaf-shaped, with a little speck of light in the middle. Depending on its distance from the ground, the light spot will be round, like the sun. But, if an eclipse is on its way, that spot will show a crescent shape, long before everything starts getting dark.
A similar effect can be observed in any crystal with multiple flat facets. Pull the shades almost all the way down, so just a sliver of sunlight slips through. If the crystal is placed on the sill in front of that sliver, spots of light refracted onto the walls will form that same crescent shape ahead of an eclipse.
It's not much of a predictive tool, but it might be a good way to show off your eclipse knowledge next Monday, just before the whole thing goes down.
Photographer John Margolies spent nearly 40 years documenting what we now know as “roadside Americana”—the gas stations, motels, drive-ins, and diners that attracted road trippers with quirky signs and kooky architecture. In 2017, a year after Margolies died at the age of 76, the Library of Congress made its Margolies holdings available online—more than 11,000 color photos of food-shaped restaurants, catchy neon signs, and an intriguingly large number of dinosaurs.
Margolies photographed the pink-hued Brontosaurus at the entrance to Florida’s Gatorland parking lot. At Myrtle Beach’s Wacky Golf, he captured a dinosaur marauding through a landscape crowded with a windmill, a sphinx, a church, and an assortment of cacti. And on Colorado's State Highway 64 he shot a stegosaurus loitering outside a town hall, smiling slyly at the camera.
The photographs have other similarities, too. They’re all taken under clear, blue, often saturated, skies. They are devoid of people. And they’re perfect examples of what Margolies became renowned for: photographs that celebrate the vernacular of America's highways and byways, and elevate its quirks to a kind of high art.
Margolies’ love of the road was a lifelong affair. As a teenager on family trips, he was drawn to the places “where everything was screaming for attention: ‘Look at me. Look at me,’” he recalled in a 2015 interview with the Washington Post. In the early 1970s, he returned to the road, in a rental car, with a 35 millimeter Canon FT camera and the mission of documenting the architecture that many consider tacky.
Margolies didn’t agree with that assessment. Speaking with the Canadian paper The Globe and Mail in 1987, he said“People generally have thought that what’s important are the large, unique architectural monuments. They think Toronto’s City Hall is important, but not those wonderful gnome’s-castle gas stations in Toronto, a Detroit influence that crept across the border and polluted your wonderfully conservative environment.”
Margolies had specific views about how his photographs should look. “I want these to be timeless pictures without identifying details,” he said. He kept a broom in his car to sweep debris from his frames, and waited for good weather. He traveled alone, for weeks on end, ultimately racking up more than 100,000 miles.
The landscape that Margolies was chasing was disappearing even as he documented it. Drive-in theaters, also part of his collection, had been in decline for decades. Freeways had changed how people travel, and there were instances where buildings were knocked down just days after he photographed them. But, despite the feelings his images often evoke, Margolies wasn't the type for nostalgia: “I don’t value sentiment.”
Some of the dinosaur-related locations that Margolies photographed remain open, including Michigan’s Dinosaur Gardens. Located near Lake Huron, this dinosaur park not only has concrete dinosaurs, but also Ice Age–era humans and a statue of Jesus Christ holding the world. Other sites survive but are now abandoned. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Margolies’s quest to find the “deepest nowhere,” and the strange, garish beasts that he found there.
Ten years ago, researchers at Hot Springs National Park, located just outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas, surveyed the microscopic life living in the park’s thermal waters. This summer, two interns decided to follow up on that work, The Sentinel-Record reports.
They sought out pools of water throughout the park where they might find evidence of teeny tiny life; one of the most fruitful spots was at the former site of the Government Free Bath House, which was originally funded by Congress in 1878.
Their search was successful: The two young researchers found five species of tiny “seed shrimp” that were not known to be living in the park. These creatures are called ostracods, and they can be less than 1 mm in size. The ones living in the hot springs are extremophiles that thrive under conditions that most creatures would pass on. (While it’s nice to take a dip in a hot springs, most of us wouldn’t want to live in that steaming water full time.)
The survey turned up more than tiny shrimp, too. According to The Sentinel-Record, the interns also found snails “about the size of the a grain of sand” in the water. That’s very small!
The MTV reality show Jersey Shore solidified an image of the titular New Jersey vacation destination as one of bustling boardwalks and trashy drama. Then there’s Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, over 250 miles away, far from any seashore, and nearly the complete antithesis of the craziness that the name typically conjures.
Maybe the only thing they have in common is that where the show made a joke of over-the-top New Jersey personas, the Central Pennsylvania town also got its name from making fun of some guys from New Jersey.
Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, is a small borough near the center of the state that’s home to a population of just over 4,000 as of 2016. “Modern day Jersey Shore is a small, close-knit community, nestled along the west branch of the Susquehanna River,” says Jersey Shore Borough Manager Joseph Hamm. “There’s a lot of pride in our small borough,” he says. Home to a nationally recognized historic district that preserves a number mid-19th century structures, and surrounded by scenic wilderness, the area could hardly be more different than the party-hard beach destination the next state over.
So how did this quiet, landlocked burg come to share a name with its more famous counterpart? In some ways, it all goes back to an old joke.
The area that is now known as Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, was claimed as a state territory in 1785. Among the first to settle on the western bank of the bending Susquehanna River was Reuben Manning of Essex County, New Jersey. Manning left the Garden State, possibly to escape the growing population in his home state, and start his own community inland.
The land where he started his settlement was owned by his nephew, Thomas Forster, who was also originally from New Jersey. Forster owned and lived on a large island (which was also confusingly named: Long Island) in the middle of the Susquehanna, just across the water from the Manning settlement.
The Manning settlement survived into the 1800s, and began to grow around the turn of the century. As it got bigger, Manning named the village Waynesburg. A post office bearing that name opened in 1806. But the name didn't last.
The change ultimately came thanks to settlers across the river in what is today called Nippenose Township. According a 2012 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the settlers on the eastern side of the river, who were mostly Scotch-Irish, were fond of coming to the taverns on the western side of the river to "raise some hell." The area earned the nickname "Jersey Shore" as a joking reference to Manning and his fellow New Jerseyans, who were increasingly moving to the western side of the river. And they couldn’t live it down.
In 1826, the town was legally organized not under the name Waynesboro, but as Jersey Shore, making what had essentially been a nickname official. Even the name of the post office changed.
Despite it being hundreds of miles from the coast, people still manage to get confused, says Hamm. “We’ve had multiple interactions with folks who think they’re calling, or coming to a town with a beach,” says Hamm. “I had a wife call whose husband was a local officer wherever they were living, and she was calling to see if we had any officer openings because her and her family would love to live in a community where it wouldn’t take them long to get to the beach. I had to break the news to her.”
Guanajuato, a city of around 170,000 people smack in the middle of Mexico, has been hosting a summer festival for decades, when it crowns one young woman its queen. Since 1969, those queens have had an additional duty: joining the city’s official delegation to Ashland, Oregon, to help celebrate the Fourth of July. That year, Guanajuato and Ashland "twinned," or became "sister cities," despite Ashland having just one-eighth the population. (Guanajuato, in a serious case of high-order multiple birth, has 17 other "twin" cities.) For nearly 50 years, festival queens have taken a seat in an open convertible for the Ashland celebrations and waved to thousands of cheering American spectators.
But in 1980, something went wrong. Guanajuato officials failed to make the necessary arrangements, and the year’s summer festival queen, Gabriela Cardenas, a 19-year-old grade school teacher, slipped through the cracks. She didn’t go that year, or the next, or the next. In fact, it would be 33 years before she finally made it to Oregon, as director general of the Guanajuato Municipal System of Integral Family Development. Last month was Cardenas’s second visit to Ashland, now as a Guanajuato city councillor. And she finally took a seat in the parade, flanked by this year’s festival queen.
Ashland and Guanajuato have an unusually strong bond, as sister cities go. Many "twins" do little more than namecheck one another on signs. In fact, Cardenas recently wrote in an email to the Ashland Daily Tidings that Ashland “is the only city that maintains such strong bonds of friendship, fraternity, and—most of all—solidarity with Guanajuato’s most needy citizens.”
This year is the 60th anniversary of widespread practice of city twinning. In the wake of World War II, it was thought of as a good way to kindle international cooperation and generally help thaw frostiness between former foes. For example, Coventry, Stalingrad, and later Dresden composed a sorority of cities heavily bombed during the war, as an act of reconciliation.
In theory, the relationship between such cities should look like Ashland and Guanajuato's, with regular opportunities for people from both places to mingle and mix. But it doesn’t always work out: Bishop’s Stortford, a village in Hertfordshire, England, voted in 2011 to consciously uncouple from Friedberg in Germany, after 46 years of sisterhood.
Sometimes, the city pairs offer an opportunity to be a little snooty. Paris and Rome are an exclusive twosome, with the accompanying motto: “Only Paris is worthy of Rome; only Rome is worthy of Paris.” Other sister cities have been chosen because of some perceived similarity in their urban DNA. Oxford, for instance, calls university cities Bonn, Leiden, and Grenoble its sisters, while a number of Welsh towns have partnerships with formerly Celtic Brittany, in western France. Occasionally, these relationships allow urban planners and councillors to let their hair down. In 2012, the Scottish village of Dull agreed to twin with Boring, Oregon. They’ve since welcomed Bland, Australia, to the fold.
Trichlorethylene is an industrial solvent once used to degrease metal parts, clean rocket engines, and remove paint (it was even used as an anesthetic) that is now known to be carcinogenic and a cause of developmental and nervous system problems. The chemical doesn't occur naturally, but is found in soil and water in areas contaminated by industrial waste. Cleanup efforts often require laboriously excavating contaminated soil or using expensive groundwater treatment processes.
Scientists have now developed a new approach for getting trichloroethylene out of soil. A particular strain of bacteria acts as a sort of probiotic for poplar trees, and helps them absorb the chemical from the soil to break it down into less harmful compounds. Using plants to clean up toxic waste is known as phytoremediation, and while it's a relatively inexpensive method, the plants involved are at risk of stunted growth, or may die in the process. But in field tests in California, the trees given the probiotic not only grew better than control trees, they also pulled more trichloroethylene out of the soil.
The bacteria is a naturally occurring strain that scientists found in the Midwest. Researchers combed through wood samples from a grove of poplars growing at a site contaminated with trichloroethylene, and eventually isolated the helpful microbe. “The poplar at the older site in the Midwest selected for the best microbes to help it do its job,” said Sharon Doty, a professor at University of Washington and lead author of the study, in a press release. “We took advantage of that natural selection process. We just had to find the best ones that the plant already chose.”
When you've finished cutting the grass on a balmy summer's day, does a part of you just want to keep going? And when you step on the gas to drive your lawnmower back into the garage, does it rev a little harder than usual, as though it wants more?
If so, you and your mower might consider competing in next year's "12 Hour Endurance Race," an annual extravaganza in which lawnmowers show their speed and humans prove their gumption. The most recent one happened just this past weekend, on August 12, in West Sussex, England.
The 12 Hour Endurance Race is the flagship event of of the British Lawn Mower Racing Association (motto: Per Herbam Ad Astra, or "To the Stars Through Grass").
As they detail on their website, the BLMRA was born in 1973, when a rally car racer named Jim Gavin grew tired of athletic commercialism and decided to invent a motor sport that would be immune to sponsorship. Forty-four years later, they host a series of races every summer, all over the United Kingdom.
Unlike other lawnmower-loving speedsters, BLMRA members are not permitted to modify their vehicles' engines. They can change the gearing, though, and a skilled driver on a good machine can reach speeds up to 50 miles per hour. (Before you ask, the blades are also removed.)
This year's Endurance Race drew around 50 teams, which first had to prove their worth with a few speed laps along the twisting dirt track. Those who qualified then rumbled from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., counting laps as they went.
Some elements of the competition—the decorated helmets; the ever-ready pit crews; the colorful trackside commentary—will be familiar to anyone who has taken in a more traditional car race.
Others are more unique. After a few rainy days, the track was "quite soft, [and] covered with a lot of actual grass," as commentator Jake Sanson put it. A lot of the racers got some pretty good air. The winning team—“Northerners Kick Grass," who brought home their fifth consecutive trophy—completed 363 laps over the course of the race, totaling about 318 miles.
But the best summation of what makes all this special came just before the start, as one of the racers waxed poetic to Sanson. After describing the dirt and the noisy atmosphere, he backtracked briefly. "I mean, you know," he said. "They're just lawnmowers."
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.
Eclipse chasers may seem a little intense—they often go to great lengths to see total solar eclipses around the world, booking hotels and flights years in advance. If you didn’t plan years ahead for totality on August 21, or if you find yourself addicted after experiencing it, you’re in luck. The next eclipse is just less than two years out, and another chance comes to the United States in just seven years. Here’s a list of notable upcoming total solar eclipses, and some of the stunning places you can view them.
July 2, 2019, or December 14, 2020
The next possible opportunity to see a total solar eclipse is in Chile and Argentina in 2019, but the air might be a little brisk and clouds could get in the way—July is winter in the Southern Hemisphere. But the 2020 eclipse passes over the same countries during the summer. Both Termas Geometricas, a cluster of hot springs in Chile, and the caves of Villarrica Volcano lie in the path of totality. They might not be the best places to view the eclipse itself, but they’ll make for great stops once it’s over.
April 8, 2024
It’s unusual for the same region to experience two eclipses in close succession, but the United States will have another total eclipse soon, this time from Texas up to the Great Lakes. Mexico and Canada will catch totality, too. The path of totality for this eclipse even crosses the August 21 path, so some places—Carbondale, Illinois, aren’t you lucky—will get to see two in less than a decade. And this time around, totality will last nearly twice as long as for the 2017 eclipse. There will be plenty of picturesque places to watch. Unique viewing locations include El Faro de Mazatlán, a lighthouse in Mexico, or next to a model of Earth in Houlton, Maine. Hopefully April showers won’t be an issue.
August 12, 2026
This solar eclipse makes landfall in just two places—western Iceland and Spain—but the view will be great no matter which country you pick. Iceland's famous Blue Lagoon lies right in the path of totality, and so does Reykjavík. Farther south in Spain, there are plenty of castles and monastery ruins that would make stunning backdrops.
August 2, 2027
At its height, this total eclipse will last a whopping six minutes and 23 seconds near Luxor in Egypt. Gibraltar, the northern coast of Africa, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Somalia also lie along the path of totality. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to check out Oran, Tangier, or Luxor, this eclipse fits the bill. Or you could watch the eclipse from a small sliver of Spain in Morocco, or the ruins of an ancient Roman city on the Libyan coast.
July 22, 2028
Some parts of Australia will experience five total eclipses in the next 30 years. This particular one has a path of totality that passes directly over Sydney. The Royal Botanic Gardens or the Sydney Observatory are sure to be great spots to watch, but if you like an eclipse with a side of weird geology, the Devil's Marbles or the Bungle Bungle Range are perfect choices. The eclipse will also be visible in New Zealand, with Milford Sound and the Moeraki Boulders in the path of totality.
September 2, 2035
China's and North Korea's capital cities both lie along this eclipse's path of totality, along with part of Japan, north of Tokyo. The Beijing Ancient Observatory may have been constructed to view distant stars, but visitors will be able to experience one minute and 33 seconds of totality there. Alternatively, you could watch the eclipse surrounded by Japanese macaques at the Jigokudani Monkey Park in Nagano, Japan.
August 23, 2044
Only a small slice of Montana and a swath of Alberta and the Northern Territories will see this total solar eclipse, but that includes some incredible landscapes. The unearthly rock formations of Makoshika State Park, in eastern Montana, will offer a quiet place to watch the eclipse (and impressively dark skies for stargazing). The Hoodoos of Drumheller Valley are similarly strange rock formations in Alberta, and also lie in the path of totality.
August 12, 2045
If, by the time this eclipse rolls around, coast-to-coast paths of totality seem like old hat to you, you can spice up your eclipse-viewing experience with a trip to the Caribbean or South America. The path of this one starts in Northern California and bends down to pass through Florida (right over both Disney World and Miami), but the location of longest totality—six minutes and five seconds—is in the Bahamas, near the Great Isaac Cay. Book your boat now. Nearly all of the Dominican Republic and the northern coast of South America, from Venezuela to Brazil, will also see full occlusion.
August 2, 2046
People along the path of totality through Angola, Botswana, South Africa, and virtually all of the nation of Swaziland will be treated to nearly five minutes of darkness during this eclipse. Some areas in the path are not especially comfortable—such as the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, which you will likely have all to yourself—but an ancient stone calendar in South Africa would be a fitting setting.
Other Notable Total Solar Eclipses
Two eclipses will be visible from parts of Indonesia, and a small bit of Australia on April 20—first in 2023 and again in 2042. Another eclipse visible in Australia, as well as parts of southern Africa, will take place on November 25, 2030. Australia and New Zealand will see other eclipses on July 13, 2037, and December 26, 2038. Some of the least accessible eclipses include one on November 14, 2031, that just barely grazes Panama, another on March 30, 2033, that will only be visible in northern Alaska and a tiny bit of Russia, and one on December 15, 2039, that can only be seen in remote parts of Antarctica (remote even by Antarctic standards). Parts of Africa, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China will see an eclipse on March 20, 2034, and Africa will catch another on April 30, 2041.
Late July. New York City. A bedroom on the top floor of a four-story building in which I installed an air conditioner with several thousand too few BTUs. I barely know what a BTU is. The temperature that day reached into the upper 90s Fahrenheit, with humidity just short of actual water. The tiny weak air conditioner struggled to cool the room down while a few feet away I struggled to fall asleep. And yet I was unable to sleep without some sort of covering. In this case it was the barest edge of my lightest sheet, touching the smallest possible part of my torso.
Why this compulsion to be covered, however minimally, in order to sleep?
Blankets are common, but not universal, to humans during sleep, at least in the modern day. But historically, the effort involved in weaving large sheets put blankets at much too high a price point for most to afford. From the linen bedsheets of Egypt around 3500 B.C. to wool sheets during the Roman empire straight through to cotton in medieval Europe, bed coverings were for the wealthy.
By the Early Modern period in Europe, which followed the Middle Ages, production had increased enough so that more middle-class people could afford bedding, though not easily. “The bed, throughout Western Europe at this time, was the most expensive item in the house,” says Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech who has written extensively about sleep. “It was the first major item that a newly married couple, if they had the wherewithal, would invest in.” The bed and bedding could make up about a third of the total value of an entire household’s possessions, which explains why bedsheets frequently showed up in wills.
In place of blankets and sheets, other sources of heat were common at night, usually from multiple people sharing a bed, or often livestock.
Today, there’s minimal anthropological work about bedding around the world. The best is a 2002 paper by Carol Worthman and Melissa Melby of Emory University, who compiled a study of sleeping arrangements in different parts of the world. “Recognition of the paucity of anthropological work on sleep is galvanizing: a significant domain of human behavior that claims a third of daily life remains largely overlooked by a discipline dedicated to the holistic study of the human condition,” they wrote. This passes for outrage in an academic paper.
The paper looked into some foraging and non-foraging peoples who live in hot climates near the equator, and found that only the nomadic foragers regularly sleep without bed coverings. Everyone else uses some form of covering, whether that’s plant matter or woven fabric, even in central Africa and Papua New Guinea, both tropical climates. Much more common than sheets or blankets are some form of padding; basically nobody sleeps simply on the ground as a matter of course.
As one more example of the goodness of blankets, there has also been a decent amount of research about the calming effect of weighted blankets, which can weigh up to 30 pounds. Studies indicate that they can curb anxiety and even be used in the treatment of autism.
“The requirement for blankets takes on two components to it,” says Dr. Alice Hoagland, the director of the insomnia clinic at the Unity Sleep Disorder Center in Rochester, New York. “There's a behavioral component and a physiological component.” The latter is a little more clear-cut, so let’s dive into that first.
About 60 to 90 minutes before a usual bedtime, the body starts losing core temperature. There’s a physiological explanation for that: when the body is heated, we feel more alert. And conversely, when the body cools down, we tend to feel sleepier. Cooler internal body temperatures are correlated with a rise in melatonin, a hormone that induces sleepiness. A bunch of doctors tested this out by making people wear skinsuits—they kind of look like cycling outfits—that dropped their body temperature just a touch, one or two degrees Fahrenheit, to see if they’d sleep better. They did.
Your body’s ability to regulate its own heat gets way more complicated than that at night, though. Say you sleep for eight hours each night. In the first four hours, plus the hour or so before you fall asleep, your body temperature will drop a bit, from around 98 degrees Fahrenheit to around 96 or 97. But the second four hours are marked by periods of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a phenomenon in which most of our dreams take place, along with a host of physical changes.
One of those physical changes is an inability to thermoregulate. “You almost revert to a more, and this is my word, reptilian form of thermoregulation,” says Hoagland. She says “reptilian” because reptiles are unable to regulate their own body temperature the way we mammals can; instead of sweating and shivering, reptiles have to adjust their temperature through external means, like moving into the sun or into cooler shadows. And for those brief periods of REM sleep, we all turn into lizards.
Even in perpetually hot climates, nighttime temperatures drop, and the night is coldest, coincidentally, right at the time when our bodies are freaking out and unable to adjust to it. (The night is coldest right after dawn, in direct contradiction to aphorism.) So, like lizards, we have to have some way to externally regulate our body temperatures. You may think it’s unnecessary to use a blanket at 10 p.m., when it’s still hot, but by 4 a.m., when it’s colder and you’re unable to shiver? You might need it. So we may know from past experience that we’ll thank ourselves later for having a blanket, and thus force ourselves to use one (or at least have one nearby) when going to bed.
There’s more to it than that, though. Another strange thing that happens in the REM periods of sleep is that our bodies drastically lower their levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter most associated with feelings of calm, happiness, and well-being. You know what’s associated with higher levels of serotonin? Blankets. Various studies have indicated that sleeping with a weighted blanket can trigger an uptick in the brain’s production of serotonin. So yet again, the blanket might be filling a need that our REM-addled brains create.
The other element that might explain our need for blankets is what Hoagland refers to as “pure conditioning.” “Chances are you were raised to always have a blanket on you when you went to sleep,” she says. “So that's a version of a transitional object, in sort of Pavlovian way.” Basically, our parents always gave us blankets to sleep with—babies are a bit worse than adults at thermoregulation, meaning they get cold easily, meaning well-meaning adults put blankets on them—and so getting under a sheet or blanket is associated with the process of falling asleep. Instead of Pavlov’s dogs drooling at the sound of a bell, we get sleepy when covered with a sheet.
If you Google around for this question, you’ll end up with a bunch of theories about blankets simulating the warm, enclosed feeling we had in the womb. There could be some element of theoretical protection or security imbued by the blanket, which might be another bit of conditioning, but Hoagland thinks the womb comparison is pretty unlikely. “I'm very suspicious of anyone who implies that this goes back to the feeling of being in the womb,” she says. “I think that's very far-fetched.”
Another possible reason is that blankets are soft and feel good. I could not find any studies that examine the question of whether people like blankets because they’re soft and feel good, so this may remain a great unanswered question.
Awe is not an everyday emotion. You don't wake up awestruck. A satisfying lunch doesn't leave you filled with awe. Even a great day is unlikely to leave you in a state of jaw-dropped, consciousness-opening fear and trembling.
Perhaps that's why, up until about ten years ago, psychology "had surprisingly little to say about awe," wrote Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt in a 2003 paper. As the two psychology professors outlined the key qualities of an awe-inspiring encounter, they suggested that awe typically includes feelings of vastness and accommodation. That is, awe is inspired by something larger than a person's self or experience, and that encounter helps expand his or her understanding of the world.
Awe might come from seeing a mountain taller than you thought a mountain could be or listening to a symphony that soars and sinks and feels like it's expanding the universe a bit. People can be awe-inspiring, too: Think of a political leader whose presence and power overwhelms. The emotion of awe might be negative or positive, depending, Keltner and Haidt suggested, on whether or not accommodation happens: It's terrifying if you cannot understand and incorporate a new experience, but enlightening if you do.
The psychologists laid out a research agenda intended to tease out "the similarities and differences between awe and gratitude, admiration, elevation, surprise, fear and perhaps even love." In the years since, they and other researchers have been testing awe. What is it? How does it work? What seems awesome, and why? For the first time, they're starting to understand both what awe does to us and what it might do for us.
When psychologists first started studying awe, one of the unanswered questions was: What do we look like when we're feeling it? Emotions come with facial expressions (smiles for happy, frowns for sad, mouth open for surprise—your basic emoji alphabet). But no one had studied what an awestruck face looks like.
Keltner and two colleagues hypothesized that an awe-filled person would widen her eyes and raise her head, eyes, and eyebrows, just a bit. And they were on track. When they asked people to perform awe, they found that people indeed often raised their eyebrows and widened their eyes. They also opened their mouths and dropped their jaws and, sometimes, breathed in. And, the researchers noticed, few people smiled.
Awe is a serious emotion. "Clues suggest that awe’s function may lie in how it makes you think," Michelle Lani Shiota, who collaborated on this research, wrote. In subsequent experiments looking at "the nature of awe," the researchers found that it often occurs when people have an opportunity to expand their knowledge of the world. When it happened, it turned a person's attention outwards, instead of towards the self.
"Nobody feeling awe is not coming out of their comfort zone," explains Craig Anderson, a doctoral student in Keltner's lab. "The experience of awe is positively coordinated with anxiety. You're experiencing something you’ve never experienced before."
It might be big or small, natural or man-made, but it stops you cold—while other positive emotion arouse the body, people feeling awe are very still—and makes you reevaluate what you actually know.
In other words, awe is kind of mind-bending, and it alters how a person perceives the world in subtle but meaningful ways. It can, for instance, make time seem to slow down.
When Melanie Rudd, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, was reading about awe, she kept coming across mentions of timelessness and this sense that time is stretched out. Time—or the lack thereof—is one of her interests, and she was intrigued by the idea that feeling awe could manipulate people's perceptions of time. In a series of experiments, she showed that after people felt awe, for short while, they felt "less pressed for time."
Awe also encourages people to account for what they're experiencing. When you're feeling this emotion, "you have this strong motivation to explain what's in front of your eyes," says Piercarlo Valdesolo, an assistant professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College. A couple years back, he and a colleague looked at how people deal with the uncertainty inherent in awe. They found that awe seems to nudge people towards "agentic explanation"—they're less likely to accept that something happened randomly.
Instead, they attribute it to an agent, like a god, a supernatural force, or a person. "There's something about awe that seems intimately related to that," says Valdesolo. In their experiments, people in a state of awe were more likely to report belief in supernatural forces, and to believe that a random series of numbers was created by a human. His recent work indicates that awe also makes people more likely to report that science explains all natural events.
"It generally increases this desire to explain what's in front of you," says Valdesolo. "You gravitate towards whatever explanatory framework you prefer."
All this early research indicates that Keltner and Haidt's initial description of awe was accurate: It's a feeling induced by vastness that requires some sort of mental accommodation to overwhelming new information. The next step is understanding why it exists at all.
Emotions, as a rule, have a purpose. "We've evolved these emotions to help us deal with selection pressures across the evolutionary history of the species," explains Anderson. "When people are scared, they freeze or run away. People that behaved like that tended to survive long enough." In the same way, awe should have some sort of reason for existing. "This pattern of expressive behavior and subjective experience is an evolved response to situations where you’re encountering things that are vast, that sort of blow our minds," Anderson says.
So far, it seems, the purpose of awe might have something to do with drawing people together. Rudd's research shows, for instance, that when awestruck people feel like they have more time, they're more willing to use it to help others. "One of the main reasons that people don’t do those things is that they feel too busy," she says. "If awe can make you feel you’re more rich in time, you’ll be able to give more time away."
A recent study that Keltner's lab collaborated on shows that, even more than other positive emotions, awe promotes generosity. It also improves participants' ethical decision making. A paper still under review indicates that awe can makes people more humble, too.
How does that work, exactly? Anderson's research focuses on curiosity as one possible explanation. People who are prone to feeling awe also score high in curiosity, and it seems like that might be the mechanism by which the emotion creates social benefits. "You're open to meeting new people. Maybe you're a better listener," Anderson says. "Those behaviors fall under the umbrella of 'helping people fold into collectives.'"
"We actually experience awe a lot more frequently than we think," says Rudd. We encounter something in the big wide world, our minds open as we look for an explanation, and as a result we open up to connecting to other people. "But if you are keeping yourself in your routine of life, it’s going to be hard to experience that feeling of accommodation," she says. "Just going out into newness, you’re going to be more likely to run into something that’s awe-inspiring."
Last Wednesday, Ian Cowe took a photograph of a white-letter hairstreak in Scotland—the first time since 1884 the butterfly had been seen in the country. The butterfly, he told the BBC, was "a very ragged and worn individual found feeding on ragwort in the grassy edge of an arable field."
The white-letter hairstreak is native to the United Kingdom, though its populations were devastated decades ago by outbreaks of Dutch elm disease, which killed the trees the white-letter hairstreak's caterpillars feed on.
And while the butterfly's reappearance in Scotland after such a long time away has been met with some celebration—bringing the number of butterfly species known in the country up to 34—Paul Kirkland, the director of Butterfly Conservation Scotland, told the BBC that it's not all good news. The white-letter hairstreak, he said, is likely back in part because of climate change.
Still, a new resident is a new resident and, Kirkland said, the conditions are right for the white-letter hairstreak to survive and perhaps stay a little while longer. (The only other prior confirmed sighting of the white-letter hairstreak in Scotland prior to 1884 was in 1859.)
"Although Dutch elm disease occurs in Scotland," he said, "we still have a good amount of wych elm, so hopefully it will prosper and spread."
Kirkland's organization will now start looking for a white-letter hairstreak colony nearby to confirm that the butterflies intend to make their latest stay more permanent.
In 1715, Edmond Halley published a map predicting the time and path of a coming solar eclipse. Today the astronomer is most famous for understanding the behavior of the comet now named for him, but in his lifetime he was a hotshot academic, elected to the Royal Society at age 22 and appointed the second Astronomer Royal in 1720. He was fascinated with the movements of celestial bodies, and he wanted to show the public that the coming event was not a portent of doom, but a natural wonder.
When the Moon’s shadow passed over England, Halley wrote, if people understood what was happening, “They will see that there is nothing in it more than Natural, and nomore than the necessary result of the Motions of the Sun and Moon.”
The map he created shows England with a broad, gray band across it, with a darker patch within that shows how the moon’s shadow would pass over the land. It was simple and clear—a piece of popular media as much as a scientific document. His work heralded what Geoff Armitage, a curator at the British Map Library, calls “the golden age of the eclipse map.”
“True eclipse maps, in the sense of geographical maps showing the track of eclipses, are a phenomenon of the eighteenth century onwards,” Armitage writes in his book The Shadow of the Moon.
Astronomers have studied the patterns of solar eclipses going back millennia and had some success in predicting their arrival. But as 18th-century astronomers sharpened their understanding of the solar system and the motion of the Earth, Moon, and planets, they were able to predict the paths of solar eclipses with unprecedented accuracy. With his original 1715 map, Halley included a plea for observational data—“A Re-quest to the Curious to observe what they could about it, but more especially to note the Time of Continuance of total Darkness.”
His original predictions, it turned out, were off, but only by a bit. After collecting data from his citizen scientists, Halley updated his original map. He had predicted the time of the eclipse to within 4 minutes, but had the track of it off by about 20 miles—surely a disappointment for anyone in that band of uncertainty. But the work remains a remarkable achievement, and he was confident enough in his calculations that the second version of the map included a prediction of a future eclipse, in 1724, as well.
Part of the reason that 18th-century scientists produced groundbreaking eclipse maps is that there were so many eclipses in this time period—two annular and five total solar eclipses in the British Islands alone, which is a greater frequency than normal. Popular publishers (John Senex and Benjamin Martin, in particular) wanted to produce broadsides that could help inform the public about the terrifying wonder that would cross the sky.
With each eclipse, the maps iteratively improved. For the 1736 annular eclipse, for instance, Thomas Wright, a self-taught astronomer, land surveyor, and instrument maker, created a map that adopted Halley’s design but added visualizations of what the partial eclipse would look like outside the path of totality.
British scientists weren’t the only ones working to improve predictions and public communication about eclipses. In the 17th century, Dutch astronomers had created some early eclipse maps that set the stage for the 18th-century advances to come. In the 1700s, German scientists excelled at creating maps that focus on particular scientific themes.
With each eclipse to pass over the British Isles, publishers became more savvy about promoting the event to the public. In 1737, mathematician and astronomer George Smith published a predictive eclipse map in The Gentleman’s Magazine, which is thought to be the first eclipse map published in a popular publication (as opposed to as a stand-alone broadside). By 1764, writes historian Alice N. Walters in a 1999 paper, “so many eclipse maps were on the market—each with a different prediction—that one commentator likened the competition between them and their producers to an event quite familiar to the English public: a horse race.”
In the 19th century, eclipse mapping continued to advance, and accurate predictions became a matter of course. The most scientific maps took on utilitarian aspects and were less likely to have the aesthetic, public-pleasing qualities of their 18th-century forebears. At the same time, though, beautiful data visualizations that tried to communicate the essence of eclipse science started appearing in almanacs as well.
With these maps, the darkening of the sky became a knowable phenomenon and, as Halley hoped, "the suddaine darkness wherein the Starrs will be visible about the Sun, may give no surprize to the people." Instead of an ominous portent, the solar eclipse became an event to look forward to.
Talia Rappa and Skyer Ashworth were searching through the piles of clothes at a Salvation Army in Florida that was going out of business, when they came upon a white suit with a NASA logo on it. Underneath were five more suits, in blue, that also came from NASA.
They bought the suits for 20 cents a piece, $1.20 in total. Their thrift store find has now been authenticated, News 6 reports: These were authentic NASA suits worn by ground crew and astronauts in the early 1980s.
No one knows how the suits came to be at the thrift store; they may have been there for years. Rappa and Ashworth found them under a pile of sweaters. The labels on the suits indicate that they were worn by astronauts George Nelson, Robert A. Parker, and Charles D. Walker.
The thrifters stand to make a substantial profit on their discoveries: According to News 6, a local TV channel, the suits could be worth $5,000 a piece. They'll be auctioned through the American Space Museum in November. Rappa and Ashworth say they'll donate a portion of their profits to the museum, and the rest of the money will go towards their college tuition. Ashworth, whose parents have worked for NASA communications, will be studying aerospace.
If you have to escape from the same place twice, it probably means you're not that great at it.
Still, we should give some credit to Abuh the tortoise, who has managed to evade her captors at Shibukawa Animal Park in Okayama, Japan twice already this summer. As Agence France-Presse reports, Abuh was returned to the zoo today after a two-week stint on the lam.
Both times, Abuh has escaped using a tried and true method: high-tailing it slowly out the front door while everyone was distracted. Last time she got out, in late July, she was found walking down the highway less than 500 feet from the zoo. (At 121 pounds, she's a little too big to hitchhike.)
Despite the length of this more recent escape, Abuh was again found close to home, this time hiding in some shrubbery. Her keepers, who offered a large reward for her return, are happy to have her back.
Although tortoises are no flamingos, they have historically shown a certain amount of escaping panache. Last July, a pet tortoise successfully evaded Los Angeles's disastrous Sand Fire by getting out of his house and walking down the freeway.
In 2015, two elderly tortoises on opposite coasts broke out of their homes at the same time, perhaps to meet up. The year before that, a tortoise in Michigan may have even aided and abetted the escape of a fellow reptile, Carlos the alligator.
Eventually, one of these attempts is going to pay off—for Abuh or someone else. Slow and steady wins the race.
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.
For the past 22 Augusts, the 14,000 townspeople of Malmedy, Belgium, have come together with hands out and bellies empty. Each summer, in the square, the local chapter of the Global Brotherhood of the Knights of the Giant Omelette tends to an enormous pan. Their mission? "To prepare and serve, free of charge and full of joy, a giant omelette."
The brotherhood sprung up in the 1970s in Bessières, France. A cracking idea, it turns out, is a cracking idea: Rapidly, it accrued outposts all over, from New Caledonia to Argentina to Belgium. Knights don toques blanches and wield wooden spoons the size of oars. The pan itself is appropriately vast: 13 feet across, with a handle (decorative, apparently) made of a telephone post. The vessel sits over an open fire and, eventually, contains 6,500 eggs and many, many pounds of duck fat.
But this year, on Tuesday, there was fear, along with chives and bacon bits, on the lips of some diners. A scandal, in which thousands of eggs were found to be contaminated with the insecticide Fipronil, has worried consumers across the continent. Not these, chapter cofounder Benedicte Mathy told the Associated Press. Organizers apparently verified the sourcing of all the eggs and deemed them safe. Still, not everyone was as confident. "We'll see how it goes, because you still hear a lot of rumors and people are saying they're a bit frightened," reported "grandmaster" Robert Ansenne, in an interview with the BBC.
Traditionally, giant omelettes made by the brotherhood contain 10,000 eggs or more. This year's was smaller because of the concerns over contamination, as well as a drizzly forecast. The event apparently went off without a hitch.
Nearly 13 years ago, in a garden in Armena, Alberta, about 45 miles southeast of Edmonton, Mary Grams, then 71, lost her diamond engagement ring.
Grams's husband Norman had given her the ring in 1951, but rather than tell him that she lost it, she just replaced it. "I thought for sure he'd give me heck or something," she told the CBC.
When Norman passed away five years ago, the ring was still missing, with Grams was convinced she'd never see it again. But this week, Colleen Daley, Grams's daughter-in-law, pulled up a carrot in the garden that appeared to have taken a liking to the ring, and grew right through it.
"I knew it had to belong to either grandma or my mother-in-law," Daley told the CBC, "because no other women have lived on that farm."
Grams said the ring still fits (though it doesn't appear to have fit the carrot very well), adding, "I recognized it right away."
In the spring of 1930, a group of scientists and artists sailed to a tropical island called Nonsuch in Bermuda. They awaited a submersible called the “bathysphere,” which would bring the team of men and women deeper into the ocean than humans had ever gone before and permit the first studies of deep-sea creatures in their natural waters.
The bathysphere—“bathy” meaning “deep” in Greek—was a hollow, steel ball less than five feet in diameter with three small windows and a steel cable to tether it to a ship. Engineer Otis Barton and boat architect John Butler designed it for an expedition led by William Beebe, a naturalist with the New York Zoological Society’s Department of Tropical Research. The record human aquatic descent at the time was a mere 525 feet and Beebe wanted to see what life was hidden further beneath the waves.
In May, the completed bathysphere arrived at the research station. After several unmanned test dives and a short, manned descent to 45 feet, it was deemed ready for a plunge.
On June 6, a tug towed a barge bearing the sphere out to sea. Beebe and Barton wriggled through the pod’s 14-inch opening, arranged themselves on the cold, curved floor, and the crew tightened the lid. As reported in Descent by Brad Matsen, oxygen flowed from two tanks, trays of soda lime and calcium chloride absorbed exhaled carbon dioxide and moisture, and the men waved palm leaf fans about for circulation.
Slowly the crew cranked the winch to raise the bathysphere up, over the ship’s deck, and down into the cerulean sea. Gloria Hollister, the chief technical associate for the Department of Tropical Research, stood on deck with a telephone in her hand. She served as the passengers’ only line of communication to the world above—copying down Beebe’s every observation, relaying their depth, and passing on orders to raise or lower the sphere—via a telephone line clamped to the steel cord.
Down the bathysphere sank. Fanged and bioluminescent animals swam before the window. The blue ocean light was a strangely brilliant hue that the English language could not account for, Beebe wrote in his account of the expedition, entitled Half Mile Down. He and Barton were witnessing the gradual disappearance of each color in the rainbow as they were absorbed by the water above, an optical effect that produced nameless shades. They stopped at 803 feet that day, getting a glimpse of a previously secret realm.
As summer rolled on the crew made more descents and meticulously recorded each lanternfish, eel larva, and sea sapphire that floated past the pod. The world’s knowledge of deep-sea fish came mostly from the practice of dragging nets through the water, but some fish could escape the nets and others exploded as the pressure dropped on the way up, leaving scientists with an imperfect picture of what lay below. Now they watched the creatures in their homes and were surprised to find that large fish could exist under the crushing pressure of deep water.
After dives, nature artist Else Bostelmann took to her studio on Nonsuch and transformed Hollister’s notes and Beebe’s recollections of the animals into paintings. Her technical illustrations would be the primary visual documentation of the work in Bermuda, and would appear alongside Beebe’s words in National Geographic Magazine in 1931 and 1934.
Though she painted much of what floated past the bathysphere’s windows, the “greatest fun,” Bostelmann said, “was actually to paint at the bottom of the ocean.” Some days Bostelmann donned a copper diving helmet with air hose attached, climbed down a ladder into the sea, and had her canvas and oil paints, which wouldn’t mix with the water, sent down after. Standing in sandy clearings under the waves Bostelmann painted “tall coral reefs, swaying sea-plumes, slender gorgonians, purple sea-fans”—what she called her own underwater “fairyland.”
In July another female researcher, named Jocelyn Crane, arrived fresh from college graduation. Critics chastised Beebe for hiring women in science, calling him “unprofessional. ” Beebe responded that he hired based on “what’s above the ears” and that he had chosen Crane and Hollister for their “sound ideas for scientific research.” Hollister and Crane continued to study sea creatures and dive in the bathysphere, and Bostelmann continued to paint in spite of these criticisms.
On days the sphere didn’t descend, the team studied dredged fish in the lab. Hollister often used her own system of chemical baths, dyes, and ultraviolet light, to decolor fish organs until they became translucent. This revealed the red-stained skeleton and allowed her to study tail structures.
The team left the tropics in autumn and when the following summer came, bad weather and a broken winch prevented the bathysphere from diving, though other research continued.
The sphere dove again into the world of languid siphonophores and flying snails in 1932, and on one descent, the National Broadcasting Company invited all of America into the deep sea, transmitting right from Hollister’s phone line. On another eventful dive Beebe reported two six-foot fish he did not recognize. They resembled barracudas, he wrote, but with bioluminescent lights down their side and two long tentacles, each with lights on the end. Beebe dubbed the creature Bathysphaera intacta—the untouchable bathysphere fish—but it was eventually reclassified as a new species of dragonfish.
The bathysphere did not always lend itself to glamorous discovery. Dives were thwarted by bad weather and a roiling ocean. More than once the sphere came up full of water, releasing jets of dangerously pressurized water. When, on one occasion, the telephone line up to Hollister failed, Beebe described a feeling of sudden, true isolation, “as if hose, cable, and all had gone. We had become veritable plankton.”
After exhibiting at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the bathysphere returned to Bermuda in 1934. That summer, Hollister set a women’s world record during a dive to 1,208 feet. On August 15, 1934, Beebe and Barton sat in the cramped steel sphere 3,028 feet below sea level. They rested about a tenth of the distance underwater that Mount Everest towers above sea level. Beebe described the region as akin to “naked space itself, out far beyond atmosphere, between the stars.” They peered out at an unfamiliar fish, about 20 feet long, that the Chicago Tribune described as “illuminated by myriads of tiny lights glittering like a diamond tiara.”
Submerged excursions proved too expensive to continue past 1934 given the sad state of the U.S. economy. Hollister took off to lead scientific treks in the jungles of British Guiana (now Guyana), while Bostelmann illustrated children’s books and painted for National Geographic. Crane and Beebe continued to work together and she took over as Director of the Department of Tropical Research when Beebe passed away. Barton the engineer turned to filmmaking with Titans of the Deep, a flop of a film that combined footage taken in Bermuda with invented drama.
The bathysphere itself now sits on display at the New York Aquarium while remotely operated submersibles like the Deep Discoverer descend almost four miles into watery darkness. The Alvin can carry passengers down nearly three miles, untethered. But before them came a little steel sphere in Bermuda, the submersible that carried science into a new domain.
