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Medellín's Bright Future Is Tangled Up With Its Dark Past

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Decades after the end of the narco era, a Colombian city wonders if it is better to forget.

In the mountains above the sleepy Colombian suburb of Envigado, there's a startling, quetzal's-eye view of the city of Medellín, nestled in a bowl-shaped valley, studded with red and white skyscrapers, and laced with public gondolas that climb into hills to serve neighborhoods once thought too dangerous to visit. A few years ago, monks from a Benedictine order acquired this lofty site—called “La Catedral” (The Cathedral)—and transformed it into a monastery and senior citizens' home. There’s a spare hilltop chapel, statues of saints, and quaint red-tiled living cottages. La Catedral feels today like a meditation retreat, halfway to the clouds.

A blank wall beneath a concrete overhang prompts my Colombian guide, David Rendon, to pull out his phone. “Look,” he says. He shows me a picture he took just months ago of the same wall—covered with a blown-up photo mural of drug lord and native son Pablo Escobar and the message, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Cautionary and repentant though the message seemed, the monks have since removed it. “They don't want to be related to it anymore,” Rendon says. A few feet away from the newly blank wall, there's another banner that proclaims, “Atone for our sins, and we will save our souls.”

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If there is a sin that the city of Medellín still feels the need to atone for, it is named Escobar. Half a lifetime ago, La Catedral was his notorious pleasure-palace-cum-prison. In 1991, he presented himself here for a negotiated prison term that was supposed to last five years. But it was incarceration on his terms, and the South American jungle is only just starting to reclaim the final remains of the excesses of what was called “Hotel Escobar.” There's a frayed soccer net, a wooden stable that once housed prize horses, and a plaque that reads, “Ruins of one of the pleasure rooms, with its round and rotating bed.”

La Catedral's evolution reflects Colombia's uneasy relationship with its past and its doubts about the future. Understandably, many Colombians resent the way Escobar and his fellow criminals have come to define their national identity. Some are eager to move on, to transform, to escape a gawking, bloody tourism in favor of something more enduring or inspiring. “Our presence here means that we are committed to cleanse the face of Envigado, to apologize for that turbulent past, not only here but throughout the city and the country,” a priest from the monastery, Gilberto Jaramillo Mejía, told Colombian daily El Tiempo when it was established.

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But plenty of people are comfortable in Escobar's shadow; he was beloved by some and his legacy remains a source of vicarious thrills and very real profit. Foreigners, high on the narco mythos, take selfies at his grave. Locals, especially those born after his 1993 death in a shootout, aren't immune, either. Teens still ask a former cartel assassin, Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, for his autograph in the street. And the cocaine trade persists, though more fragmented, more tolerated, more quietly. Cocaine production has been rising steadily since 2012, which is one factor that pushed voters to president Iván Duque, who ran on a law-and-order platform.

It’s impossible to tell exactly what the future of Medellín will look like, but today there seem to be two cities, superimposed atop one another: one still infatuated with the thrill of transgression, and another attempting to face down its own worst impulses.

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There is a well-trod route for the narco-obsessed visitor. It includes the Monaco Building, where Escobar and his family occupied the penthouse, the rooftop where he was gunned down after “escaping” La Catedral, and the streets of Envigado itself, where he grew up. Some enthusiasts even pay a visit (and an entry fee) to Pablo's brother and narco-accountant, Roberto, who maintains a cartel-era museum in his house. T-shirts featuring Pablo’s famous mugshot—charming smirk and all—go for about $10.

This is, in an academic sense, called “dark tourism.” It involves fascination with criminality or violence, and also the catharsis gleaned from once-dangerous places where peace again reigns. Americans in particular, according to Anne-Marie Van Broeck, a dark tourism scholar at Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, have a long-standing obsession with outlaw individualists. Escobar fits that profile, alongside Ma Barker and Al Capone.

For Colombia, responding to a new swell of international interest in Escobar means finding some kind of balance, which other nations have negotiated with varying degrees of success. In Poland, the national mood about maintaining memorials to victims of the Nazis is conflicted. Some death camp sites, such as Auschwitz, have been well-kept, while others, such as Chelmno, have been all but forgotten. And in Cambodia, the development of a memorial attraction at the Choeung Ek Killing Fields has upset many. Reportedly, some guides have even dug up bone fragments to give to visitors. (Escobar’s crimes are on a different scale than these, but his cartel’s body count is in the thousands. Cartel wars resulted in the murder of a staggering 4,367 Medellín residents in 1990 alone.)

In Medellín, many, perhaps most, people are disgusted by the renewed focus on El Patron, as he was known. It's hard to find a person who survived the era who doesn't have some sort of connection to one of its victims. The wounds are fresh enough, Rendon says, that lots of people give him a hard time for showing visitors anything to do with Escobar. “The other day, a guy said to me, 'I can't believe you're showing them this part of the city.'”

Other residents turn to an irritated silence. Near the rooftop where Escobar was killed by Colombian soldiers, an old woman sits in her front yard breathing from an oxygen tank. Rendon tells me she lived here during the height of the drug wars.

“Does she remember anything?” I ask.

“Of course she does. She doesn't like to answer questions,” Rendon says. “A lot of times people just hide, or they close the doors.” A few moments later, I notice the woman has gone inside.

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For Diego Buitrago Pérez, a 20-something local who works at a hostel in Medellín's El Poblado neighborhood, total silence feels over the top. He happily talks about how the cartel wars shaped present-day Colombia, but also he’s happy to move on. “I don't like to stand in the past,” he says. “It's a new country now.” He sees people looking to make a quick buck off of tourists’ sinful fantasies, which is not the Colombia he wants people to see. “It's okay if you want a piece of that story. But not too much.”

In the mid-'80s, when Rendon was about nine years old, his family moved to suburban Long Island to escape the violence. But every six months, he and his parents returned to Medellín for visits, and the contrast was jarring. “I would come back here, and I wouldn't even be able to go in the streets after six.” These days, when fellow Medellín residents call him out for teaching visitors about the cartels, he pushes back. “This is part of our history,” he says, “and we should share it.”

Tourism expert Van Broeck agrees with Rendon, saying that fascination with the malign can eventually lead tourists to fuller, more nuanced perspective of a destination. “You've never had a better promotion for Colombia,” she says. “Say, 'Look at our past, and look at how beautiful it is now.'”

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Perhaps the next stage in this process, after indulgence, is reckoning. The most obvious site for this in Medellín is the Memory House Museum (Museo Casa de la Memoria), tucked into an unassuming residential neighborhood.

Opened in 2013, the museum spotlights the victims of violence in Medellín, rather than its perpetrators. Inside, stark angles destabilize viewers, and dark panoramas are pierced by narrow beams of light. In the largest exhibit room, screens play video testimonies from people who lived through the country’s bloodiest escapades, and in another, photographs of victims light up one by one, then disappear, evoking a starry night sky.

The Memory House isn't packed the day I visit, but it hosts a steady stream of visitors. “We have to be aware of what happened to families,” says teenager Brenda Zapata of Medellín, who is sitting outside with some friends. She sees the reality of the violence as important, in part, because some of her peers still equate Escobar-style vice with glamour and success. “There are many young people who want to be involved in crime,” she says.

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While the murder rate has dropped by more than 90 percent since the narco years, Rendon agrees that there are still plenty of reasons to keep the history alive as a cautionary tale—to get people, and especially the city’s youth, to confront the reality and risk of corruption today. “We're exporting more cocaine now than when Pablo was around,” he says. The difference is that politicians are more involved, he asserts, and rotate out of office every few years so no single criminal figure emerges. But despite his concerns about the ongoing rot, Rendon is optimistic.

That turn is evident in the Comuna 13 neighborhood, once a place where Escobar chose and groomed his loyal assassins, known as sicarios. Thirty years ago, “it was so common to see bullets flying around the neighborhood,” Rendon says. “People took out white sheets to demand peace.”

These days Comuna 13 has evolved into a cultural hub. Laws stipulate that Medellín's major utility provider, EPM, must plow about a third of its profits back into the municipal government. This windfall has fueled all sorts of civic initiatives, including a cultural center called Casa Kolacho, named after a local hip-hop artist who was murdered. As I ascend into Comuna 13's steep hills, I pass a dizzying assortment of larger-than-life street murals painted by local artists. One striking example depicts a woman with an entire terraced neighborhood—characteristic of the city—sprouting from her head. “We have a big-time artist movement going on right now,” Rendon says. “That opens up the doors for kids to get out of the streets.”

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Walking around Comuna 13, with its transformed physical and moral landscape, it's tempting to agree that maybe the past is best left alone. It’s easy to say that clear-eyed remembrance and wrangling with the moral failings of the past is somehow cathartic, like eating your vegetables. But that’s not always the case, according to David Rieff, a global policy analyst and author of In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. Rieff writes that collective memory weighted with trauma can lead “to war rather than peace ... and to the determination to exact revenge rather than commit to the hard work of forgiveness.” And that's not even considering the very personal pain and loss many Colombians feel when Escobar even comes up in conversation. “You can say people have to remember,” Van Broeck says, “but who has to remember? They, or the tourists? Do [they] necessarily have to tell this story about the conflict, about the pain, to somebody outside?”

The experience of some countries underscores Rieff's warning. In Germany, where swastikas are banned and World War II–era guilt is so thick you can breathe it in, far-right movements have sprung up, in part as an angry reaction to the weight of collective remorse. But it's also possible to err on the side of forgetting. Francisco Franco's forces killed more than 100,000 during and after the Spanish Civil War. It wasn't until 2008 that Spain declared Franco guilty of crimes against humanity, and the lack of a sustained national reckoning or effort toward reconciliation has festered.

For Rendon, the Memory House and its communication of Colombia's past is a fertile starting point for renewal, so long as it's balanced with a fair accounting of the present. As one of Van Broeck's Colombian interview subjects told her during her fieldwork on dark tourism, “We'll reach the point ... to have a tour that talks about our past, but include[s] the transformation. That's how we will structure this past, which harmed us very much, but which also gave us so much strength to build [the] present we are building.”

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At places such as La Catedral, the act of rebuilding speaks louder than any words. The monks' chapel is built in a simple log-beam style. When we arrive, we are the only visitors, but most days, Rendon says—especially on weekends—the wooden pews are occupied by spiritual seekers, some of whom ascend along a harrowing bike path to get here. One of the icons at the altar is Maria Desatadora des Nudos (Mary, Untier of Knots), who also appears as a stone statue on the grounds. She’s a poignant choice, undoing earthly problems and—in some depictions—treading on a knotted snake representing the devil.

The entire outdoor space is blanketed in green and quiet. There are no car horns, no loudspeakers—scarcely even a human voice, since the monks live in seclusion. In the midst of such a sanctuary, it's difficult to imagine what was once here. When Escobar arrived in 1991, he viewed the place as a sanctuary, too, safe from cartel foes and DEA agents. But his nature wasn’t about to change, and he soon began conducting new orgies of excess and violence. While still at La Catedral, he smuggled in two disloyal underlings, Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada, and had his men torture and kill them. This grisly operation prompted the Colombian government to take over La Catedral, but as troops began storming the jail, Escobar fled.

These past horrors are undeniably present here, but evidence of atonement is on the terrace below the chapel, where the senior citizens' residence is located. Looking down on its brightly-colored mosaic walls, tension recedes temporarily into the background. The site has been reimagined in the context of community, instead of the rogue pursuit of power and profit, and that gives it a kind of momentum. But the newly blank wall that once held the Escobar mural declares something else, too: that some kinds of renewal—some kinds of remembrance—may thrive best outside a villain's shadow.


Unboxing the World's Largest Lizard

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The Field Museum preserves its Komodo dragon specimens in Everclear, which they buy in 55 gallon drums.

At the Field Museum in Chicago, Komodo dragon specimens are kept in custom-made stainless steel tanks that can hold over 100 gallons of solution. The lizards weigh an average of 125 pounds, making them the largest, though not the longest, lizard species on Earth. Like the rest of the museum's specimens, the lizards are preserved in 70 percent ethanol. These Komodo dragon specimens weren't unboxed for research until about 18 years after the museum first acquired them.

In the video above, Atlas Obscura gets a behind-the-scenes look from Collections Manager Alan Resetar at exactly how these massive lizards are preserved for future research.

Temple Wall Recipes Reveal a Wealth of Unexplored Culinary History

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Medieval epigraphs carved in stone offer a unique glance at South Indian cuisine.

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Today, making a donation might land you a tax deduction, but in medieval South India, it would likely be an occasion to have your name carved into stone. During the Chola period, temple walls served as a slightly more permanent community bulletin board, except carved by hand and written in Tamil, one of the longest languages in the world. Announcements and public records that made it onto the temple included government mandates, sales of properties, and temple finances—including, most importantly, records of donations given by worshippers.

Researchers have been studying these medieval, temple-wall inscriptions for years, parsing through thousands of epigraphs to piece together financial accounts of medieval South Indian history. But Andrea Gutiérrez, who studies South Asian foodways at the University of Texas, saw the writing on the wall a little differently. Some of these inscriptions, Gutiérrez argues, have something baked into them: They are, in a sense, recipes. Though donations could be general offerings, often for anointing, bathing, or decorating gods, many were intended to be put towards naivedya, food offerings prepared for, and served to, the temple god.

According to Gutiérrez, suddhannam, or boiled white rice, was (and continues to be) the “naivedya par excellence,” since it was one of the most highly-valued foods in medieval South India. Countless inscriptions dictated suddhannam provisions, often giving no specific instructions or recipes. This tends to be the case with many inscriptions, Gutiérrez notes. The dishes were often common, and the temple cooks well-versed in naivedya, so no further details had to be given beyond the name or quantity of the dish.

But medieval naivedya could take many forms. Some dishes, such as suddhannam, are presented daily, while others, such as jaggery rice fried in ghee, would be reserved for festival days. Some inscriptions cover standard offerings, while others go into elaborate detail as to which ingredients ought to be used. As a general rule, the larger the donation given, the more stipulations for expensive ingredients, perhaps more ghee or unrefined sugar.

In India and beyond, sugar played a significant role in medieval temple offerings. As Gutiérrez pored through thousands of inscriptions, she was struck by their sweetness. Nearly every dish involved sugar, including vegetable dishes and sour curries. In some cases, the dish might call for jaggery, an unrefined variety that would have been easier and less costly to access and prepare. But often, she found, temple recipes specified using carkarai, a somewhat refined brown sugar that required more skill, labor, and processing to produce. This added some flavor to the dish, and perhaps a bit of texture to pan-fried foods. But above all, Gutiérrez says, it was a marker of value. “Sugar is ... worth offering to god simply because it is sweet and good, like the divine experience,” she writes. “Offerings to god should be sweet, even when savory!”

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Though they detail food offerings to deities, these inscriptions illuminate much more than sugar-laden medieval fare for the gods. According to Gutiérrez, they also offer a unique glimpse into the quotidian culinary lives of those living in South India from the 10th to 13th century. Until now, much of what we know about South Indian food during this period has come from royal cookbooks, which detail luxurious dishes prepared for nobility. But, as naivedya was often everyday fare, or perhaps a slightly sweeter version of it, these temple recipes likely represent culinary trends and traditions across a much broader demographic.

“What you feed to god should also be what is fed to humans,” says Gutiérrez, “so there’s more of an aspect of normalcy to it.” Temple food known as appam, such as flat pancakes and steamed or fried sweet snacks, were, and are, both sacred fare and common street food. “For the most part, these are dishes you could also find in food stalls and on any number of people’s kitchen tables for breakfast or lunch.”

While the dishes were not always luxurious, elaborate, and rare, the occasion for the donation often was. According to Gutiérrez, worshippers often made naivedya donations to commemorate a milestone or event of great importance, and brief accounts of these moments are sometimes included in the inscriptions. Gutiérrez describes her delight when she found an inscription that explained how a chieftain made a food offering to mark the first feeding of solid food to his infant son, a Hindu rite of passage still celebrated today. “This is where you really get to have fun,” she says, “when, along the way, you learn something about someone's daily life, and what really mattered to them.”

Deep care and personal connection to the dishes served to god is an important part of Hinduism, Gutiérrez notes, particularly in South India. Many naivedya offerings detailed in these temples resemble contemporary temple food, prasad, which is first fed to god as naivedya and later served to worshippers, a common practice in Hindu and Sikh temples.

Gutiérrez found one particular recipe for an elaborately flavored appam carved into stone at the Srirangam temple that she recognized as an early predecessor of contemporary appam still served there today. The Tamil inscription called for seasonings such as pepper and cumin, along with unrefined sugar, banana, and coconut. “That something like this is still served, 800 years later, is pretty remarkable,” she says. “It’s prepared a bit differently ... but it would be weird if people were eating the exact same thing hundreds of years later.”

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According to Gutiérrez, descriptions of pongal appearing early in the inscriptional record sound similar to that which is still served in thousands of temples as prasad, as well as during the Pongala festival. “It’s pretty much identical, though today people will sometimes add cashew nuts,” she says, noting cashews weren't introduced to India until a few centuries later. But if you’re craving authentic medieval South Indian temple food, she notes, there are still traditional temples that don’t use ingredients from the Western Hemisphere, such as tomatoes, chilis, and cashews.

“These temples, themselves, are sites of historical preservation,” says Gutiérrez. “You can step inside and experience food that tastes similar to how it would have tasted several hundreds of years ago.”

The ‘Wine Archive’ That Quietly Improves the World’s Wine

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A collection of more than 7,000 grapevine varieties is a boon to vintners and scientists.

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Planted in the sandy soil between the Thau lagoon and the Mediterranean-fronting beaches of Marseillan, France, is a 27-hectare vineyard (about 67 acres) containing the most comprehensive array of living grapevines on the planet. Known as the Center of Biological Resources of the Vine of Vassal-Montpellier (CRB-Vigne), it is home to about 8,200 different varieties from 52 countries. Some of the plants are more than 150 years old. Many were gleaned from the world’s most ancient vineyards.

For viticulturists and winemakers, the CRB-Vigne is nothing short of a mecca. Many speak of visiting with a reverence typically reserved for religious sites.

“You go there and you are just overwhelmed by the scope of what is growing,” says Gabrielle Rausse, who is currently the head winemaker at Jefferson Vineyards. Containing five specimens per variety, the collection features an almost unfathomable diversity. What’s more, the vines are cataloged according to historical use, native region, physical characteristics, and genetic profile (including parentage, progeny, and relatives). Samples of rare medieval varieties are planted alongside modern descendants such as merlot or cabernet sauvignon. “It is like a living history book,” Rausse adds. “You walk through the rows and here is an almost total history of grapes and winemaking, right before your eyes.”

Better still, with a staff of top-notch researchers for tour guides, the experience is interactive. Winemakers fly thousands of miles to discuss varieties they are cultivating and inquire about potential additions. Growers interested in founding a vineyard often ask about climate and soil conditions, and varieties that may produce the best or most interesting wines where they live. Sometimes, scientists provide growers with samples and work with them to research how the plants respond in new areas.

Rausse consulted with the CRB-Vigne while working to bring Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a Virginia vineyard to life in the early 1980s. (At the time, trying to grow premium wine in Virginia was considered crazy.) Following Jefferson’s gardening notes, Rausse inquired about historical varieties from North Africa that Jefferson had speculated would do well at his home in Monticello.

“If a region produces wine, then winemakers from that area have been in contact with us to talk about what they have, or what they should be growing,” says Jean-Michel Boursiquot, scientific director of the CRB-Vigne, which is now managed by Montpellier SupAgro. “This is because, here, we have compiled the most comprehensive body of [viticultural] knowledge in the world. It is our job to share this resource with other professionals.”

According to Boursiquot, if a person wants to know something about grape varieties, the answer can likely be found at Vassal-Montpellier. “And if we cannot answer the question, then it is probably something new,” he adds with a laugh. “Then we will begin to investigate and see what we can do. In the process, maybe we make a new discovery!”

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The collection at Vassal-Montpellier has its origins in the Great French Wine Blight of the 1850s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. When wild vines from the New World were introduced to Europe in the early 19th century, they brought along new pests and diseases. Though North American varieties were naturally immune, European vines were not. The result was a massive die-off that ultimately led to a 50 percent reduction in French winemaking.

In the early 1870s, the primary culprit was discovered to be an aphid known as Daktulosphaira vitifoliae (now commonly referred to as grape phylloxera). Realizing that the bugs—and also virus-carrying nematodes—would be unable to reproduce in sandy conditions, scientists at the School of Agriculture of Montpellier scrambled to collect samples of as many French grape varieties as possible. Traveling the country, they took cuttings from vineyards and transplanted them to the school’s sandy grounds for safekeeping.

“The blight was like a wine doomsday,” says Rausse. There was true fear that many varieties had already gone, or might soon go, extinct. “This was the scientists’ plan to save French vines and keep them alive for the future. Eventually, someone would discover a cure for phylloxera, and the plants could be used to rebuild the vineyards.”

But as the collection grew, something interesting happened: Its mission expanded as well.

“First, the idea transitions from a focus on France, to include samples from other wine regions as well,” says Boursiquot. Fearing future calamities—and a subsequent loss of beloved regional grapes—expeditions were mounted to collect samples from prized vineyards in Spain, Portugal, Italy, North Africa, and elsewhere.

By 1949, the increased stock necessitated additional space. That year the vines were moved to Domaine de Vassal, a university-owned estate bordering the small seaside town of Marseillan. Varieties were planted side by side in long rectangular plots positioned just 30 meters from the sea. Though growing conditions were not ideal for wine production, scientists had no need to fear the spread of diseases, parasites, or viruses. This made the site perfect for a living collection.

“Some time passes, and [the institution] decides to gather wild varieties too, which are, of course, the parents of the first domesticated vines,” Boursiquot says. “At this point, the mission becomes global. They begin to seek to identify and collect samples of every grape variety in the world.”

Today, 400-meter-long greenhouses have been installed to create new cuttings, facilitate research, and to care for rare or endangered samples that arrive in poor condition. Hundreds of varieties are mailed to Vassal-Montpellier for inspection each year. If a visual identification cannot be made, a genetic analysis is undertaken, and the results are cataloged in a database.

Around 400 new varieties have been discovered and added to the collection since 2015. “And we believe there remain many more to be found,” says Boursiquot.

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According to Boursiquot, if it wasn’t for the work of Pierre Galet—whom he describes as the most important vine expert of the 20th century—the CRB-Vigne might have taken a very different course.

Born in 1921, Galet was a staunch advocate of preserving genetic diversity and was instrumental in expanding the CRB-Vigne to include wild varieties and older variations no longer deemed desirable for wine making.

The idea, says Boursiquot, was essentially two-fold. On one hand, advances were being made in the emerging field of genetic analysis. As technology improved, a comprehensive collection of vines would enable researchers to map the genetic history of the 18 noble grape varieties such as pinot grigio, viognier, and grenache. Using selective breeding techniques, they could use the genetic information to create hybrids capable of producing wines equal in flavor to their noble brethren, but that are less environmentally damaging to grow.

“From the standpoint of ecology, growing European grape varieties has essentially been unsustainable since the 1870s,” explains Buorsiquot. Following the introduction of New World pathogens, neurotoxic spray treatments were needed to protect vines from imported viruses and diseases. Grafted to non-native rootstock to protect them from phylloxera, synthetic fertilizers and additives were used to fuel their growth.

The process has similar effects to factory farming. “In France, many vineyards are located close to villages, and so you have to worry about [pesticides] getting into the water supply,” says Buorsiquot. Runoff washes fertilizers into streams, he adds, where increased nutrients fuel algal growth that can choke out oxygen and endanger wildlife. But high-quality hybrids bred for natural resistance to North American diseases and pests can greatly reduce, or even eliminate, the need for harmful inputs.

“Professor Galet was one of the first to comprehend this issue,” says Boursiquot. “He saw the collection as a storehouse of genetic material that will help us to reduce environmental damage and, also, allow vineyards to adapt to what we are now calling climate change.”

As Galet’s mentee, Boursiquot assumed the directorship of the CRB-Vigne in 1985.

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“When I started, we had to identify everything by eye using physical characteristics like leaf shape, colors, and so on,” he says. Chuckling, he goes on to compare those days to the dark ages. “Of course, the ability to look at genetics changes everything. At first, it was very expensive and sort of like science fiction; we had to learn how to use this new technology effectively.”

For the past 30 years, Boursiquot has worked to implement, develop, and standardize genetic mapping techniques at Vassal-Montpellier. Analyzing the CRB-Vigne’s 70,000-plus-plant collection, he trimmed its official number of varieties from 14,000 to around 7,200. Additionally, he used the methods to make groundbreaking discoveries.

In 1994, Boursiquot located a purportedly extinct variety of noble European grapes growing in Chilean vineyards. Astonished, he and the CRB-Vigne worked to help Chilean growers isolate the variety and reintroduce Carménère, a wine no one had tasted since the 19th century. Today, it is considered the national wine of Chile.

In the late 2000s, Boursiquot identified a medieval variety of grapevine that was previously thought to be a mythical invention, and, through its genetic analysis, revealed the unknown parentage of merlot. He has since partnered with genetic researchers around the world who hope to use clones to create new hybrids that may compete with, or even become, noble varieties.

The effort was an extension of Boursiquot’s work to facilitate partnerships with viticulturalists and winemakers to develop viable hybrids. These days, he says, he spends a lot of time advocating for the European Union to pass legislation that makes it easier to grow hybrids for wine production.

All told, Boursiquot’s efforts have led to the digitization of a 670,000-page database containing what amounts to the world’s collective knowledge of grape vines. The next step, he says, is making it available through the CRB-Vigne’s website.

“His contributions cannot be underestimated,” says Rausse. “They have helped to make the [CRB-Vigne] more than just some crazy biological museum. It is today regarded as the most prestigious genetic research institution in the world, and the primary source of reference for the international community [of winemakers].”

A Visit to the World's Only Sourdough Library

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Step inside Karl De Smedt's singular collection of starters.

According to Karl De Smedt, sourdough belongs to the entire world. Burbling away in refrigerators at his Puratos Sourdough Library in St. Vith, Belgium, are over 100 sourdough starters from around the globe. Each one has been chosen specifically for its renown, origins, and often, estimated age.

In the video above, Atlas Obscura gets an insider's tour of the world's only sourdough library. As De Smedt explains, his institute aims to preserve the biodiversity of and histories behind sourdoughs from around the world. For more on De Smedt and his work, read Anne Ewbank's recent feature story.

Margarine Once Contained a Whole Lot More Whale

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And helped launch a corporation now worth more than $40 billion.

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Once, the homes and streets of Europe were lit with whale oil, burning bright but smelling awfully fishy. In the 19th century, the whaling industry was a major force in the world’s energy markets, until oil wells started shooting up in Pennsylvania. As petroleum began to boom and kerosene became a popular lamp fuel, the world had surplus of whale oil, looking for a new market.

It went to the makers of margarine.

Margarine was invented in 1869, just as whale oil was on the verge of falling out of use as a fuel. To simulate butter, margarine must contain some kind of fat. That might come from a variety of vegetable oils—as in most margarines today—or beef fat. But in the first half of the 20th century, since whale oil was “no longer needed for illumination” and a “large amount became available,” as one researcher wrote in the 1960s, most of the world’s supply was being whipped into a spreadable butter substitute.

Today, whale oil is a taboo substance, its use restricted by international convention. “The interesting thing about whale oil as a commodity is that it’s the only known fuel that humanity has weaned itself off of,” says Charlotte Epstein, a political theorist at the University of Sydney, who has written extensively about whaling. “It’s the only source of industrial energy the human beings have successfully moved away from.”

Before we managed that, though, the whale oil industry poured its product into margarine, creating, in the process, a multinational company now worth billions of dollars.

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French inventor Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès first made margarine because there was money in it. Napoleon III, eager for a lower-cost replacement for butter—some sort of luxurious everyday fat for the lower classes and the military—offered a tempting cash prize to anyone who could come up with one. By purifying beef fat and then combining it with water, milk, and a little bit of soda bicarbonate—oh, and yellow food coloring—Mège-Mouriès was able to produce a solid, butter-like food substance.

The French did not exactly take to this new product, but it grew popular in other parts of Europe. “Before World War I, the manufacture of margarine exceeded that of butter in England and Scotland,” Epstein notes in her book, The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse. “Nobody ate more margarine per capita than the Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes,” according to Norwegian historians Pål Thonstad Sandvik and Espen Storli. In Britain, margarine reached peak consumption per person in 1929 and 1930, while in Germany, per capita consumption of margarine was close to 17.5 pounds year in 1930. At that time, as The History of Modern Whaling reports, whale oil was “the cheapest of all edible oils”—a natural economic choice for margarine production. (It could, however, leave the margarine with a "fishy taste.")

On top of the declining market for other uses of whale oil, the whaling economy was very volatile, which led to surpluses. “It’s quite easy to turn a big boat into a whaling boat. As soon as the price of whale oil would start shooting up, everyone would get into whaling,” says Epstein. “As soon as the prices dropped, that’s when you had a huge amount of whale oil.”

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Margarine manufacturers swept in to buy it up at low prices. In 1929, as Epstein writes, two companies—Lever Brothers, a British firm, and Margarine Unie, a Dutch company—discovered how to improve the chemical process used to harden whale oil into a margarine ingredient. As a result, margarine could be made with whale oil as its only fat. Rather than competing, the companies quickly merged and became Unilever, today one of the world’s top companies, valued at more than $40 billion and responsible for everything from Axe Body Spray to Ben & Jerry's.

Unilever became “the world’s largest purchaser of oils and fats,” Sandvik and Storli write. By 1935, 84 percent of the world’s whale oil was going directly into margarine. Unilever bought up all the whale oil that Norway produced, for instance, and sent it directly to its factories in Germany.

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As tensions in Europe increased, though, whale oil became an increasingly contested commodity. In the years leading up to the war, the product had become a major part of the food supply in Britain, and in 1938 the British government named it a “national defense” commodity. (Beyond its use as fuel and food, whale oil was also made into soap, used as motor lubricant, and helped protect soldiers from trench foot in World War I.) “That tells you how important it was,” says Epstein. “It was a matter of national security.” Nazi Germany once sent an expedition all the way to Antarctica in search of whale oil to make margarine.

But once the war was over, the importance of whale oil in margarine production began to decrease, and the ethical concerns about whaling started to escalate. The whaling industry crashed so badly that General Douglas MacArthur encouraged Japan to buy up boats for cheap and start up a whaling economy there. At the same time, margarine producers had figured out how to make it cheaply with vegetable oil and phased out whale oil as an ingredient. Today, the only fishy thing about margarine are any claims about its health benefits.

Teach Yourself to Echolocate

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A beginner's guide to navigating with sound.

Daniel Kish navigates the world like a bat does—and he does so without ever leaving the ground.

After losing his vision as an infant, Kish taught himself to move around with the help of echolocation. Like bats, Kish uses his mouth to produce a series of short, crisp clicking sounds, and then listens to how those sounds bounce off the surrounding landscape. (Our winged neighbors tend to emit these clicks at frequencies humans can’t hear, but Kish’s clicks are perfectly audible to human ears.) From there, Kish makes a mental map of his environment, considering everything from broad contours—like walls and doors—down to textural details.

Kish now teaches echolocation, mostly to students who are blind. For these students, Kish believes that an echolocation practice can buoy confidence and independence. Kish’s own experience is persuasive—he famously bikes along hilly, car-lined streets—and a growing body of scholarly research has begun to unpack exactly how expert echolocaters do their thing. This research has also backed up the idea that this skill is highly learnable. When researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, asked novice echolocators to use tongue clicks to determine which of the two objects in front of them was larger, the newbies were soon able to do so in a way that the scientists couldn’t attribute to chance.

Whatever your sightedness, there’s something to be said for learning to listen more attentively to sonic scenery. Kish believes that vision has a way of blunting the other senses unless people work to really flex them. Deft echolocators, he says, are able to perceive fine differences—distinguishing, say, between an oleander bush (“a million sharp returns”) and an evergreen (“wisps closely packed together, which sound like a bit like a sponge or a curtain”). They’re discovering sonic wonder wherever they go. We asked Kish to tailor a lesson for first-timers just learning to listen to the landscape.

1) Practice tuning in

Before you begin producing your own sounds, just practice noticing the ways that sounds change around you. Try this exercise next time you’re in a car (assuming you’re not in the driver’s seat).

Crack open the window and close your eyes. This is a good chance to pass through a varied landscape pretty quickly, and begin to differentiate between sounds. “On a residential street, you should hear the sound of the car jump in and out as you pass other parked cars, possibly trees, posts, mailboxes, or houses near the curb,” Kish says. “Everything we pass reflects the sound of our car differently.” Prime yourself to pay attention to incidental soundtracks.

2) Pick your supplies

If you are a sighted person, you’ll want a blindfold. “It’s very, very difficult to discern these kinds of subtleties if your eyes are working at the same time,” Kish says. Occluding one sense gives the less-dominant ones room to stretch their legs.

Now is also a good time to stock up on what you’ll need for your practice sessions. First, you’ll need a metal tray or a bowl, so make sure you’ve got one on hand. Once you start moving through space later on, it will also help to have a trekking pole or a cane, or at least a partner you trust to shout if you wander too far off base.

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3) Choose an environment

Expert echolocators like Kish can get a bit fancier with their choices, and try to hear the character of a room. Tin decor, buttresses, or other accoutrements that might make a realtor swoon will also give Kish reason to perk up his ears. “It will sound more alive,” he says. “It will sing to you.”

For beginners, picking the right place is a bit of a Goldilocks situation: You don’t want a flat field, where there’s nothing for sound to bounce off. Then again, you ought to steer clear of spots where your hearing will be impeded by, say, a sea of carpet. “Probably the best is a fairly quiet, open space without a lot of clutter, maybe a non-reverberant room,” Kish says.

4) Practice your clicks

Clicks are not created equal, and some of them will work against you. “The most commonly produced rubbish click is a ‘cluck,’” Kish says. A cluck sounds something like two clicks on top of each other, which masks the returning sound. A good click can’t be sloppy, and it must be possible to reliably reproduce.

For beginners, Kish says that a dental click fits the bill (this is a tsk-tsk sound, Kish says, “like you’re disappointed”). Another contender is the sound you might use to prompt a horse to giddy-up; a “ch” sound, as in “check” or “church,” is another option.

The key is finding the option that’s comfortable for you. “You settle on whatever click you can do, and stick to it,” Kish says.

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5) Start simple

The goal with clicking is to take stock of three things. The first is presence/absence (is something there?). Then, the location (what direction is it in?). Finally, distance (how far away is it?).

To teach these skills, Kish often starts with this exercise: Students pair up with a partner who holds a bowl or flat paddle somewhere above their head. The student clicks, turns their head, and tries to gauge where the bowl is—straight above them, or off to the side?

Kish doesn’t click all the time—only when he needs to refresh the mental map he’s working from. For beginning students, though, it’s helpful to practice the physical mechanics of clicking, in order to learn how to listen to bouncing sounds.

6) Get moving

The next step is to do all of this while in motion. Walk along a hallway and try to listen for differences in sounds that might indicate corners or open doors.

At first, you’ll shuffle and fumble through this exercise, and it’s bound to be frustrating. Go ahead and ask your partner whether or not you’re on the right track—but, if you’re using a blindfold, keep it on. “The temptation is very strong to pop the blindfold off and on,” Kish says. “I resist that because there is an adaptation process that has to happen here. You disrupt it entirely when you pull off the blindfold. I wouldn’t use vision to spot-check an experience; I would try to avoid that.”

7) Stop when you need to

Moving through the world in a new way can be both thrilling and thoroughly disorienting. Kish has found that people who are sighted, and are unaccustomed to not being able to rely on their vision, need to take breaks every 30-45 minutes. His blind students, for whom non-visual navigation is routine, can hang in longer.

Echolocation takes patience and practice. Kish cautions that it’s hard to get good at this—it took him years. But trying it out can open your ears to the world.

Millennial Aboriginal Australians Have Developed Their Own Language

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Spoken by Warlpiri under 35, it emerged from code-switching in one remote community.

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Millennials, in a way, are a firmly bilingual group, thanks in no small part to “textspeak.” With the rise of Web 2.0 at the turn of 21st century, instant messaging slang and the bevy of acronyms that resulted have become a de facto marker of age, if not cool-factor. Down under, in the remote village of Lajamanu located in Australia’s Northern Territory, recent generations of Indigenous Australian Warlpiri people have created a language much less ubiquitous. Light Warlpiri, a mixed language no more than 40 years old, is spoken almost exclusively by people aged 35 and younger.

Light Warlpiri is made up of a triumvirate of languages: Warlpiri, the indigenous one, Standard Australian English, the colonial one, and Kriol, the English-lexified creole. This blend makes its status as a “mixed language” plain. “Most of the verbs and the grammatical patterns that go along with verbs are from Kriol and English,” says linguist Dr. Carmel O’Shannessy. “And most of the grammatical patterns that go along with nouns are from Warlpiri.” O’Shannessy is Light Warlpiri’s definitive researcher, whose work with the language began as part of her PhD research over a decade ago.

“From 1998-2001 I was living and working in Lajamanu community, not doing any research, but supporting the teaching of Warlpiri in the school’s bilingual education program in Warlpiri and English,” she says. “I heard a lot of what I thought was code-switching [alternating between languages according to who they were speaking with] … and thought that it was interesting.” With the community’s permission, O’Shannessy began researching the way young people were talking as part of her PhD. In 2003, she realized they had developed their own language by systematically melding elements from the two languages they grew up with.

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“For a mixed language to develop you have to have bilinguals or multilinguals, who code-switch a lot, in a very systematic pattern, and who have some kind of social reason to create their own way of speaking,” says O’Shannessy. “Code-switching doesn’t usually lead to this kind of outcome, it’s fairly rare.”

O’Shannessy is now based at Australian National University in Canberra, and has visited the Warlpiri community of Lajamanu several times since. “The language is split down the middle, with verbs on one side and nouns on the other,” she says. “This is pretty interesting because there are not many ways of speaking in the world that have this split pattern between nouns and verbs.”

It’s not entirely clear why Light Warlpiri developed in Lajamanu when it did, but through linguistic research, scholars have been able to gather how it did. The most prevalent theory is that Light Warlpiri emerged from gaps in understanding between generations within the Warlpiri community. “Adults were code-switching between Warlpiri, the traditional language, and English and Kriol, a relatively new language,” O’Shannessy says. “Kriol is a creole language that was created in north Australia from 1908 on, and has most words from English but most grammar and the sound system from Indigenous languages. Somewhat like the creoles in the Caribbean and some of the U.S.”

When the code-switching adults were raising their children during the 1970s and ‘80s, things got even more layered. When speaking to young kids, adults “dropped in pronouns and verbs from English and Kriol into the middle of Warlpiri sentences,” says O’Shannessy. “Those little kids processed this as one language, not as switching between languages. They added in some new grammatical patterns, that come from the other languages but are not the same, and then they had their own, new way of speaking.” For the younger generation, this adult method of speaking didn’t register as code-switching, but instead as its own language, the language that would become their language, Light Warlpiri.

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The term code-switching is often applied to the verbal volleying many Black Americans participate in; in some environments, like majority-white workplaces, standard American English is most “appropriate,” and in others, like family barbecues or church services, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) becomes more fitting. The reasons behind this oscillation between two different but identifiable ways of speaking are numerous, and Light Warlpiri operates similarly. Socially, code-switching functions as a way “to signal ourselves as members of one group versus another,” says O’Shannessy. Additionally, it can be employed to “add flavor to our conversation,” and “when the meaning we want to express does not have an exact translation in the other language.” Early Light Warlpiri speakers likely drew upon all three factors when using the language. But young members of the community simply grew up with it as a dominant way of talking and so as they conventionalized it over time, it became a “[signal] for being young and from that community.”

In the 1920s, the Australian government began forced migration of select Warlpiri people to Lajamanu. Before contact with Europeans, the Warlpiri were hunter-gatherers. The Lajamanu community was ultimately established in 1948, at a place then known as Hooker Creek. Prior to this, the land belonged to a neighboring indigenous community called the Gurindji people. “But the government didn’t recognize Aboriginal land ownership so they considered it to be vacant,” O’Shannessy adds.

Lajamanu is remote; the nearest town is 600 kilometers (373 miles) away. In the mid-20th century, lives were in flux, and “[people] were also working for no pay, just rations, with no choice of work and very little agency in their lives. Their lives were run by the government, they were not free to travel or live or work where they wanted to,” O’Shannessy says. Having to start fresh outside of the comfort of relatives, these Warlpiri people were doubly isolated, both from city centers and kin. O’Shannessy says that this remoteness played a role. “Now everyone can talk to each other regularly on a cell phone, but it wasn’t like that in the 1950s–1990s.”

The small size of this particular town allowed for the rapid sharing of a new language like Light Warlpiri because it was common for everyone to see each other on a daily basis, “so a new way of speaking could quickly spread through the friendship groups of the children, and stop at the boundary of the community.” The rapid migration of Warlpiri people to Lajamanu was mirrored in the development of this new language. “With all of this forced change in people’s lives, how they used their languages suddenly had to change also. For example, they suddenly had to talk to people whose languages they didn’t know, which is how Kriol developed.”

Light Warlpiri, mixed-language origin story aside, has a particularly interesting grammatical construction: it has no future tense. Words that have an “-m” suffix indicate an event that has happened previously or is currently happening, but there is no parallel construction in the language for an event that will happen. This single letter word ending is a structural form that does not exist in any of Light Warlpiri’s three mother languages (English, Kriol, and “strong” Warlpiri), thus further situating Light Warlpiri as a separate, newly-formed language unto itself.

Today, it’s estimated that between 350 and 450 people speak Light Warlpiri (which, it should be noted, is not the whole of the village. According to a 2016 census, the total population was 606, but the community has grown since.) The Warlpiri language is spoken by everyone, but the multilingual older millennials who speak regular Warlpiri, plus English, some Kriol, and Light Warlpiri too, represent the cohort of people who created the mixed language and passed it down to their children. These multilingual members of Lajamanu choose to use Light Warlpiri as their main way of talking as a signal for “being young and from this community,” O’Shannessy explains.

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Just because a language exists doesn’t mean it’s yet written, and Light Warlpiri serves as confirmation of this. As it stands, the language is purely verbal because, O’Shannessy says, “the community and I haven’t yet worked out a spelling system.” This will remain the case until the Warlpiri demonstrate that they even want to formally document their language. (The importance of Dr. O’Shannessy’s work is exemplified by the fact that she has been able to track a language in its infancy, rather than upon its imminent death; the fact that Light Warlpiri’s first speakers are still living is another boon.) By contrast, the researcher notes, “Warlpiri is written, and has been for some time, and is used in the school and the church and some public documents.”

Since Light Warlpiri’s first official speakers were very young children, and since the language has only been alive for roughly four decades, the matriculation from verbal use to literary use might take time. In true millennial fashion, however: “People do write on social media, but not yet with a conventionalized way of spelling.” As it turns out, Instagram captions may emerge as a definitive 21st century archive—the bridge between a new language being verbally communicated and officially documented.


Seven Hours in the Air With Some Record-Breaking Swiss Balloonists

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Up, up, and away over the Alps.

When we entered the clouds I started to question the decisions that led me to dangle in a wicker basket 8,000 feet above sea level with nothing between me and the alpine chop but a bit of plywood, straw, and air.

The four of us in the balloon basket had launched predawn from a small airfield in the Swiss city of Villeneuve, on the edge of Lac Leman opposite Geneva. We’d risen over the lake and through a saddle between the low mountains that hemmed the water, then swept through the Intyamon Valley. At times, our balloon floated so close to the hillsides that I could smell their dank, loamy scent. Then we rose over the Alps and drifted northeast towards Thun. Our speedometer clocked us at 30 mph, but because we travelled at the same speed as the wind, I did not feel our pace at all. The stillness was eerie and stunning, interrupted only by the periodic roar and hiss of the propane burner.

I was relaxed only because I knew I was flying with the best. Two of my companions, Laurent Sciboz and Yannick Serex, were members of the Swiss team that holds the world record for the longest, continuous hydrogen balloon flight. They shattered the standing record when winning the 2017 America’s Challenge Gas Balloon Race. Sciboz was half of the two-man crew in the balloon. His team, the Fribourg-Freiburg Challenge, launched from Albuquerque, New Mexico and landed outside of Labrador City, Newfoundland, 59 hours, 19 minutes and 2,280 miles later. As part of the team’s ground crew, Serex followed the balloon's path in a van, keeping them aloft through the tail end of a hurricane that swept the balloon over America at 88 mph.

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Keeping two men in the air in a basket the size of half a bathtub for seven days requires physics and psychology, Serex told me as we floated over Lake Gruyere. “But then,” said Yannick with a grin. “I’m not a psychologist!”

I met Serex near his home in a small Swiss mountain town nestled in the Jura mountains, about an hour and half from Geneva by train. By trade, he works as an electrician, heating specialist, fumigator, and plumber. But when he handed me his business card, it read Yannick Serex, Aérotisier—French for “balloonist.” He’d invited me for what I’d presumed would be a short, touristy balloon trip. We’d gathered up the two other pilots, Laurent (who works as a programmer) and a former student of Yannick’s, Louisa Felis. At 28, Felis is a licensed and highly competitive ballooning pilot in a male-dominated sport. Of all of us in the basket, she’s the only one who owns her own balloon. When not in the air she works as a truck driver, horse-trainer, and mortician.

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As we drift over the peaked red roofs of the oldest monastery in Switzerland, Sciboz and Serex told me: The America’s Challenge is an endurance race. There are few rules and no finish line. Victory is not about who arrives at a location first or even who stays in the sky longest. It’s about who travels the greatest distance. The trick is always to find fast wind without bad weather. But that’s easier said than done. In a balloon you have no control over the direction, only your altitude. In a gas balloon, the adjustment of altitude requires heat, or the release of hot air. In a hydrogen balloon, like the Fribourg-Freiburg Challenge, the envelope is filled with a fixed amount of gas at the start and weighted down by sand. To control altitude or the pressure of the balloon, you release gas or, more often, dump sand. Without burners, travel by hydrogen balloon is silent.

In all the films of Sciboz’s trip the shadow of the balloon sweeps over the landscape to the sound of his breath. It’s the only sound. For seven days, Sciboz and his co-pilot slept in shifts on a bed created by lowering a trap door in the side of the balloon, through which the sleeper would stick his feet and legs. A lined bucket for a toilet. A single seat. Through scalding sun, then rain, then snow. This, in an ecosystem so finely balanced that the evaporation of the crew’s sweat lightened the basket enough to rise. It’s not a sport for the aggressive or the impatient, rather it rewards a certain kind of sensitivity to the call-and-response of the world and a delight of travelling without control over your destination. You drift and land where the wind and the balloon decide.

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The Fribourg-Freiburg Challenge crew landed in the snow-strewn scrub of a bald patch of Newfoundland forest so remote that they had to be retrieved by helicopter. When the nearest police chief was alerted to their presence, he thought it was a joke. The second-place team, from Poland, clocked 69 hours and 4 minutes, but fell short of the distance of the Swiss Team by 89 miles. In their final hours, the Polish crew threw much of their equipment, their sitting bench, and their personal gear over the side of the basket to try to lighten their balloon enough to cross the St. Lawrence River.

“Flying the balloon is like life, the destination is always unknown,” Sciboz told me, while Serex hooked me up to an oxygen tank so that I could breathe as we ascended above 7,000 feet. Once removed from earth and gliding over it, our world feels peaceful. Manageable, even.

We’d risen out of the valley, left the miniature cows and trees and patchwork pastures behind, and reached the level of the snow-capped Alpine peaks. I was bundled in a red snowsuit. The temperature dropped to 14℉. The Alps spread out before us like jagged white-capped waves. Suddenly the sea of mountains was enveloped by clouds. The grey wall so thick, I believed I could reach out and grab handfuls of cottony matter. My oxygen monitor beeped, my feet had grown cold, but the giant flame that heated the balloon at intervals warmed my face and neck. The acrid scent of propane lingered after each burn. We kept rising over the dazzling cloudscape of sun and azure sky and glittering mountaintops to 14,763 feet.

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We landed in a field outside a small village called Kaufdorf, having travelled 42.2 miles overland. There is no runway, no airfield, no wind sock or signposts. Our basket bounced on the ground once, then tipped about 15 degrees off center. In fierce wind, the snag is sometimes hard enough that the crew is thrown. The balloon deflated and collapsed into the grass, and we became earthlings once more.

It had been hours since I ate or drank or had proper rest, but I wanted for nothing. By hovering above the world, I’d found more intimacy with it. Serex said the feeling is the same whether racing or executing an arduous trip over the Alps: “In the air you detach. But when I fly at night and look down at the lights, I wonder who sleeps? Who wakes? You look down and you see the stories—the stories of the lives of others. You can descend into them. It’s not far … therefore you hold riches.”

This strange feeling of lightness and wonder stayed with me long after we dismantled the balloon. If you are desirous of a shift in perspective, rather than focusing on speed and destination, I recommend the balloonist’s solution: travel where the wind decides.

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The Original 'Humungous Fungus' Is Even Bigger and Older Than We Thought

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But it's not the biggest.

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Generally speaking, the idea of a spreading fungus—they make a cream for that—is a pretty revolting concept. But a fungus that spreads across 90 acres? That’s almost inspiring.

That’s the estimate for the size of the famed Armillaria gallica fungus in Crystal Creek, Michigan, deemed the world’s single largest organism when it was discovered in the late 1980s. At that time, researchers believed that the fungus—which is mostly composed of an underground network of tendrils and emerges from the ground in clumps of honey mushrooms—weighed 110 tons and was about 1,500 years old. The same team of Canadian and American researchers recently revisited the fungus to conduct genetic tests, only to find that their initial assessment had been way, way off. In a new paper under review and posted to bioRxiv, the authors posit that the titanic organism weighs four times as much and is about 1,000 years older. For reference, that makes this single individual more massive than three large blue whales, and just a little smaller than Vatican City.

To come to the revised estimate, the researchers studied the genetic makeup of 245 samples and studied the growth rates of the hyphae filaments that help the fungus spread. Genetic sequencing of 15 samples also revealed that just 163 of its genome’s 100 million bases have changed over all that time. That's remarkably steady from a genetic-mutation point of view. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising for something that's been around since the Battle of Thermopylae.

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The new measurements may be exciting, but it's worth remembering that honey mushrooms are parasitic, and can take out surrounding trees and plants. And this individual is still overshadowed by its cousin, an Armillaria ostoyae fungus in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Discovered in 1998, the Oregonian fungus covers 2,200 acres and could be thousands of years older.

35 of America's Most Charming Historic Theater Marquees

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Atlas Obscura readers from across the U.S. share their favorites.

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The heyday of the classic movie palace might feel like the distant past, but in cities and towns across the U.S., vintage marquees can still be found clinging to the sides of buildings. Some are in use at surviving theaters, while others sit abandoned or ignored, waiting to be restored. Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us pictures of their favorite historic marquees, and we received an incredible selection of beautiful neon-and-bulb landmarks.

Many of the marquees our readers sent in are still in use at working historic cinema or theater spaces, though some have clearly fallen into disrepair. But no matter what state they're in today, the lavish designs of classic marquees remain as charming as ever.

Scroll through below to see some of our favorite reader-submitted marquees!

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Arlene Schnitzer Hall

Portland, Oregon

"We saw Bob Marley play there in the 1970s. It has a beautiful marquee and marvelous art deco interior, complete with enormous chandeliers." — Ann Taguchi, Beaverton, Oregon


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The Will Rogers Theatre

Charleston, Illinois

"My father-in-law Dan is 77, and as a little boy, he would frequent the theater with his Uncle Dewey. It has been in disrepair for a very long time though there have been several efforts to restore it." — Bethanny Charleston, Illinois


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ART Theater

Champaign, Illinois

"The ART theater became a cooperative while I was a graduate student. I was always proud to see a movie in the theater I owned (a fraction of)." — Brion Woroch, New Jersey


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Twin City Drive-In

Blountville, Tennessee

"The sign is one of the most direct forms of advertising you will see. You might say it is to-the-point, or blunt, which is appropriate for its location in Blountville. Directness is generally a characteristic for the Southern Appalachian cultural region. The marquee only says, 'NOW SHOWING,' with a big, lighted arrow. Nothing else to identify it." — Casey Brown, Asheville, North Carolina


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The Mayan Theater

Denver, Colorado

"The marquee at the Mayan is my favorite because it’s so bright and beautiful. It's impressive any time of day, but my favorite is going into a movie while the sun’s still up and coming out in the dark to the Mayan’s grandly lit marquee. It always seems to transport me back in time every time I see it. The inside is also a feast for the eyes, amazingly decorated with Mayan figures and faces. It was built in 1930 and was set to be demolished in 1984. But a quick acting, quick thinking group of concerned citizens (The Friends of the Mayan) worked tirelessly for 90 days to ensure its spot on the Historic Landmark List. It has since been renovated and is a gem of a theater on South Broadway in Denver today! It’s a great spot for indie flicks that I can’t seem to find playing anywhere else, as well as old classics. I have so many memories there and plan to keep going almost every weekend! " — Christine Watson, Denver, Colorado


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Bluebird Theater

Denver, Colorado

"It's a beautiful example of a neon marquee on a street known for its vintage neon signs. I've seen many great concerts here, and the feeling of walking under this spectacular marquee as you enter the doors is truly special." — Corky Scholl, Denver, Colorado


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The Iowa Theater

Winterset, Iowa

"The Iowa's marquee is the quintessential small town sign. Situated in the center of town, the brightly lit marquee faces the town's beautiful City Hall, and can be seen from around the entire square. My wife and I traveled four hours simply to visit and photograph this theater. It is truly a remarkable place." — David Leonhardt, Robbinsdale, Minnesota


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Fargo Theatre

Fargo, North Dakota

Submitted by Gary Ball-Kilbourne, Fargo, North Dakota


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The Palace Theatre

Los Angeles, California

"Recently restored, this double exposure was taken on one of DTLA's now annual 'Night on Broadway' events where downtown opens up its historic theaters to the public." — Haley Stoessl, Los Angeles, California


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The Oaks Theater

Oakmont, Pennsylvania

"This beautiful, nearly 100-year-old theater is still in operation. My sister owns it and has preserved it. Now hosting movies, live acts, and bingo/trivia games. It is a community asset." — Janet Burkardt, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania


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Naro Cinema

Norfolk, Virginia

"Many locals in Norfolk, Virginia have a family tradition of seeing a double feature of It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story during the holidays. The Naro Cinema is an independent art-house theater which shows a mix of indies, oldies, and foreign movies. They have also been showing Rocky Horror live continuously on Saturday nights since 1978." — Jeff Frith, Norfolk, Virginia


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The Rialto Theatre

Raleigh, North Carolina

"Original marquee since 1942." — Jennifer Love Raleigh, North Carolina


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Castro Theatre

San Francisco, California

"So many movies, so many different titles, so many opportunities." — Jim R. Feliciano, San Francisco, California


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Apollo Theater

Princeton, Illinois

"The Apollo started out life as Apollo Hall in 1883 as a community civic center, opera hall, and vaudeville stage. In 1930 it was purchased and converted into a movie house by Miles Fox, father of world-famous organist Virgil Fox (a Princeton native), who used the hall to practice in. Movie actor Richard Widmark (another Princeton native) worked there for a short time. It's a wonderful, quaint hometown theater that I spent many a happy year in, lost in fantasy land." — John Purvis, Princeton, Illinois


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Chicago Theatre

Chicago, Illinois

"I love that this is a vertical marquee." — Joseph Kerski, Broomfield, Colorado


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The Rheem Theater

Moraga, California

"Somehow even after several closings, this theater has managed to reopen, with community support, in our small town of Moraga, nestled in the East Bay hills in the San Francisco Bay Area. This theater has special nostalgia for our family, we had our daughter's bat mitzvah reception here. The theme was movies and we rented a red carpet for our guests to walk. They even put her name up on the marquee." — Justine Weinberg, Moraga, California


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Athens Theatre

DeLand, Florida

"I went on a day trip with my mom a few years ago, and we saw this beautiful theater and couldn’t resist taking some pictures of its incredible, old-world beauty. I think it’s still operational and one day, I’d like to go back and see a show there." — Karley, Gainesville, Florida


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The Laurelhurst Theater

Portland, Oregon

"I live near this theater. I just think it is one of the most beautiful neons I've ever seen. It's huge and gorgeous, it will take your breath away." — Kate Widdows, Portland, Oregon


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Lafayette Theater

Suffern, New York

"This theater was my little escape into the past as I was growing up. I first went here with my aunt and brother to see one of the Harry Potter movies. The historical, ornate interior made the movie that much more magical. These theater marquees really make the movie-going experience feel like an event rather than something-to-do. I think about how someone has to take the time to intricately place the movie titles letter-by-letter. This attention to detail make everything feel really special." — Kelsey C., Brooklyn, New York


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Normal Theater

Normal, Illinois

"Last summer I had a job as a seed courier, which meant I drove around to various grain elevators, collected wheat samples, and then shipped them back to the lab. One stop took me to Normal, Illinois. I drove around to see what I could see and I came across this marvelous marquee. It was a soft summer night and the lights were just coming on. I had to take a photo. In fact, I even took a video, because the lighting was so special." — Kim Davison, Kalamazoo, Michigan


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Drexel Theatre

Columbus, Ohio

"The Drexel Theatre has been a local treasure in Bexley, Ohio, ever since it opened in time for Christmas 1937. It has undergone a multitude of changes over the years (including serving for a few years as an 'adult' theater), but its charm and especially its marquee have survived through the years. It is currently the go-to venue for independent films in the Central Ohio area. It began as a one-screen cinema, and in the 1990s was converted into a three-screen theater. And did I mention it has the coolest marquee in the area?" — Larry Cunningham, Gahanna, Ohio


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The Robey

Spencer, West Virginia

"The Robey is in my parents' hometown and it is one of the oldest operating movie theaters in America (since 1911!). I've seen many movies here myself, and this theater hands-down has the best popcorn of any place I've been. If you're a movie/history buff, I highly recommend putting this theater on your bucket list!" — Leah Bartlett, Kansas


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Grand Lake Theater

Oakland, California

"I love that the Grand Lake Theater marquee has timely, political statements. I don’t always agree with them, but I feel good when I see the marquee used for something more than just the names of movies." — Lois Price, Piedmont, California


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The Delft

Marquette, Michigan

"When I was young, all of us neighborhood children would walk the nine blocks downtown to the Saturday matinee at The Delft. We had enough money for the cartoon and movie, and a combo of some goodies. All for 50¢. A quarter for the movie. At that time, it was one of those gigantic theaters, it probably sat 750 people. It had a domed ceiling with beautiful murals. Our mom saved the money out of her household account to make sure we got to go to the 'show.' I credit those afternoons spent at The Delft for my love of the movies." — Lynda Buck, Marquette, Michigan


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Shea's Performing Arts Center

Buffalo, New York

"This was the centerpiece of the Buffalo theatre/cinema scene for years, but it fell into disrepair. Thankfully, several years ago it experienced a renaissance and now is a premier theatre center for the area!" — Michael G. Herrmann, Buffalo, New York


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The County Theater

Doylestown, Pennsylvania

"The non-profit County Theater first opened its doors in 1938. It's the centerpiece of one of America's best small towns. Known locally as The County, it has a history of showcasing many films that go on to Oscar nominations." — Mike Maney, Doylestown, Pennsylvania


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The Rees

Plymouth, Indiana

"What is special to me about The Rees is how the community has been galvanized by their memories of seeing movies there, to the point of purchasing and refurbishing this empty downtown building, and working to turn it into a community performance/art space. They still have a ways to go, but they are moving forward." — Mike Petrucelli, Plymouth, Indiana


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Saenger Theater

New Orleans, Louisiana

"I'm one of the founders of an international group of photographers and artists called 'Signs United.' We take photos of amazing and historic signs from around the world and share them with the public (and each other) as a way to help others learn about the importance of honoring and preserving these works of art. I was on a recent trip to New Orleans, saw this beauty while exploring, and had to take a photo!" — Mike Zack, Burbank, California


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The Quincy Music Theatre

Quincy, Florida

"It was a movie theater named 'The Leaf' after our main cash crop in the area, tobacco, hence the leaf. I saw The Wizard of Oz for the first time in this theater. It's now a music theatre and is going as strong now as it did in its heyday." — Penny O'Connell, Quincy, Florida


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The Iowa Theater

Winterset, Iowa

"The Iowa Theater reopened in May of 2017 after a two-year, million-dollar restoration. My mother and I spearheaded the effort, purchasing the Iowa in 2015 and taking the time to return it to the gem it once was. Built in approximately 1899, the building was originally a one-story grocer. In 1914 the building was made into a vaudeville theater, and then shortly after, a two-story cinema with a beautiful art deco marquee. Though the Iowa went through many interior cosmetic changes and updates throughout the decades, the marquee remained, unchanged, for nearly 100 years. The marquee was the last piece of the restoration effort. We gave the marquee a 'facelift,' and rewired it for long-lasting, eco-friendly, LED lights that have the appearance of the neon lights that used to shine at 121 North John Wayne Drive. Closing down the street (and serving champagne), over 100 people counted down as we flipped the switch. Now, the Iowa Theater's marquee can be seen from blocks away, and is one of the first things you see as you approach the historic town square. And yes, our staff has to climb a ladder each Sunday to change the marquee announcements. Some of them like it more than others!" — Rebecca Fons, Iowa City, Iowa


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Embassy Theatre

Fort Wayne, Indiana

"There is an excitement that can't be described about going to the theater. I've only been inside the Embassy a handful of times, but each time I go, it's like I'm transported back in time. The theatre was built in 1928 and retains most of its very ornate decor, thanks to restoration efforts and volunteers. The current marquee was designed in 2005, a modern update to the marquee used in 1952. I always appreciate when the old is updated to work with current technologies, without sacrificing what made it special in the first place." — Sarah Frey, Fort Wayne, Indiana


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Fourth Avenue Theater

Anchorage, Alaska

"From the age of 13, up through my teenage years, I spent most every weekend attending at least one movie at this theater. In Alaska during the winter, the nights are long and cold and there was not a lot to do for young teens there so we enjoyed our weekly matinees. It's where we met friends and later spent our first dates. During my senior year which was 1964, Alaska experienced one of the most powerful earthquakes the Earth has endured. The downtown area of Anchorage was one of the most damaged. Many of my friends were in the theater at the time but managed to escape. The theater has never been restored to its former glory. There has been an ongoing movement to try and save it but at this point, that remains uncertain." — Suzanne Taylor, Utah


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California Theater

San Bernardino, California

"My grandfather's construction company built this theater in 1928. It was what brought my family from Los Angeles to San Bernardino. My grandfather's name was Art Harmon but, unfortunately, anyone who knew the name of the company has passed away. My father liked to tell the story of how his 'job' was to carry sandbags up into the balcony, so that the load bearing could be tested. My father would have been around 14 years old at the time, so my grandfather may have just been trying to keep him from getting underfoot!" — Valerie Myers, Bend, Oregon


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Art Theater

Champaign, Illinois

"As a huge Beatles fan, I couldn't help but imagine that this looked very similar in 1964." — W. Jake Tatar, Champaign, Illinois


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Louisville Palace

Louisville, Kentucky

"This historical theater was renovated several years ago. The marquee is still the original marquee. The interior was also kept as the original. It's so unique! No other theatre like it!" — Yvonne Miles, Louisville, Kentucky

This Award-Winning Australian Land Art Is Designed to Power 900 Homes

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But will it ever be built?

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On October 11, the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), a biannual sustainable land art competition, announced its first-place winner for 2018. The victorious design is an energy-laced yellow canopy draped like a translucent racetrack across the sky, and intended to hover over a popular park in one of Melbourne’s major urban centers.

Every two years, the competition brings together teams made up of landscape architects, engineers, designers, and renewable energy advocates, who create hypothetical works of public art for a chosen city. The land art is intended to both beautify and power the urban environment, as a way to secure a cleaner future. After focusing on Dubai & Abu Dhabi (2010), New York City’s Freshkills Park (2012), Copenhagen (2014), and Santa Monica, California (2016), this year’s competition centered on Melbourne, Australia. Hundreds of proposals were submitted from more than 50 countries.

St. Kilda’s Triangle, a seaside Melbourne location with a rich yet somewhat indecisive development history, was the public space to be reckoned with this time around. The Triangle is surrounded by various cultural landmarks, the most notable of which is Luna Park, a fairground you enter by walking into the mouth of a giant angry face. This year’s winning public art proposal is called Light Up, a nod to the project’s promise that if implemented, it will illuminate 900 homes in St. Kilda, the Palais Theatre, and a newly redesigned public park and cultural center nearby. But the beauty of a proposal this strong and striking is really that it could exist beyond its assigned location and stare down climate change through its creative use of the natural world.

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The first-place, Melbourne-based team made up of designers and engineers from NH Architecture, Ark Resources, John Bahoric Designs, and RMIT University made a point to make a Venn diagram of their expertise so as to not pigeonhole themselves in one particular strength. The result was a happy marriage of environmental empathy, smart engineering choices, and a bold but organic aesthetic.

Praised for its mix of beauty and practicality, Light Up’s design incorporates “solar, wind, and microbial fuel cell technologies to produce 2,220 MWh of clean energy annually for St. Kilda in the City of Port Phillip...this is buttressed with a nominal amount of energy harvested when wind blows across the swaying canopy, and from the roots of plants using microbial fuel cells,” founding LAGI co-directors Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry say. Since energy storage is generally an issue with respect to renewables, “the design proposes to embed 107,000 used EV battery cells (from 50 fully electric cars) within the handrails of the bridge structures, conserving natural resources by extending the life of batteries that are no longer useful for cars.”

Pre-design, Mike Rainbow, a member of the winning team, says they visited St. Kilda’s Triangle to “understand the restraints” of their environment, which proved exciting because of the tense back-and-forth the community and state government have had over the public space: “It seemed like an opportunity to unlock a bit of an impasse between local government and the community,” says Rainbow. The team challenged themselves to “build something that was in and of the landscape as if it was intrinsic … so it wasn’t like you could pick it up and place it somewhere else because it was grounded in that local infrastructure.”

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Perhaps more important than celebrating the great imagination behind Light Up, is navigating sustainability’s highly politicized status in Australia and finding a way to actually get it built. To date, no LAGI proposal—winning or not—has been fully realized. Rainbow laments this theoretical aspect of working in sustainable energy design and engineering. “That was something we wanted to break, we wanted to find a concept that excites LAGI from the artistic agenda, but that also excites potential stakeholders who would be able to help with funding and investment and those other attributes,” he says. “We were very conscious of delivering a design that we felt was going to be buildable and fundable.”

The initiative’s co-founders say that implementing proposals would require “partnerships between the energy sector, the city and state, community groups, and cultural institutions.”

Meanwhile, the world faces an increasingly desperate climate situation. In 2017, 1.4 percent more carbon dioxide was released globally than in the previous year, and the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report recommended our world reduce 45 percent of carbon emissions by 2030 to reach net zero by 2050. The hope is that solution-based public artworks will swing the pendulum in the other direction. “Art has the power to create cultural transformations and cultural transformation will precede infrastructural transformation,” say LAGI’s co-founders. “So it’s time for creatives to lead the way.”

Maps Have the Power to Shape History

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A groundbreaking female cartographer charted the evolution of the United States—and the dispossession of Native Americans.

In 1828, Emma Willard was 41 years old—only slightly older than the United States of America itself, if you start counting from 1789, when the U.S. Constitution came into force. Of course, there were others ways to count, too. The country was a solid 45, if you mark time from the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War and recognized American sovereignty, and a little over 50, if you start counting from 1777, when the Articles of Confederation were signed. In 1828, the story of the country was still malleable, only just being formed into a shape that would harden into history. Willard’s contribution to that process was to make maps.

Willard is one of the first, perhaps the very first, female mapmaker in America. A teacher, pioneer of education for women, and founder of her own school, Willard was fascinated with the power of geography and the potential for maps to tell stories. In 1828, she published a series of maps as part of her History of the United States, or Republic of America, which showed graphically how the country, as she understood it, had come to be. It was the first book of its kind—the first atlas to present the evolution of America.

The book began with map (below) that was unusual and innovative for its time. It attempted to document the history and movement of Native American tribes in the precolonial past. Willard’s atlas also told a story about the triumph of Anglo settlers in this part of the world. She helped solidify, for both her peers and her students, a narrative of American destiny and inevitability.

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“She’s an exuberant nationalist,” says Susan Schulten, a historian at the University of Denver and the author of Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America. “She’s extraordinarily proud of her country.”

It’d be wrong to call Willard a feminist, but she believed in the intellectual potential and education of women. At the time, education for girls was limited to certain “softer” subjects—geography among them—but Willard knew that girls could tackle philosophy and natural sciences with as much rigor as boys. Before she was 20, she was running a school; before she was 30, she had founded her own. Her school was the first in the country to educate woman at a college level, and Willard’s textbooks were some of the best-selling in America.

But her maps were among her greatest innovations. At the time, as Schulten writes, “Americans discovered that maps could organize and analyze information.” Willard believed that maps should capture information about the sweep of history, a story that unfolded across time and space. She created maps as a pedagogical tool, with the idea that an image could help cement lessons in the minds of her students. (She believed, like most educators of her time, in the power and precedence of memorization.) Her historical atlas was one of the major and influential results of these efforts.

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In all, her atlas included 12 maps, though that number varies a little across editions. The one depicting the movements of tribes she called an “introductory” map, outside of historical time; American history, as she conceived it, began in the period from 1492 to 1578, when European exploration of the land across the Atlantic began. Each map that followed moved along the story of Anglo settlement and increasing control of American land, highlighting key events, from the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock to the Treaty of Paris to the War of 1812, and culminating with the division of states at that time.

But that introductory map of tribal movements already hints at this ending. The boundaries of the future states are already there, in faint outlines. Even as she gave Native American peoples more attention than her contemporaries had, she helped to form a story that wrote them out of American history.

“She often framed the native tribes in terms of respect, sometimes as welcoming the colonists while other times as constituting a formidable obstacle; but more generally she accepted the removal of these tribes to the west as inevitable,” Schulten writes, in an article about Willard’s mapping of “settler society.”

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After the first map, once “history” begins, the tribes appear only when they’re in conflict with or otherwise influencing Anglo-American society. In later versions of her historical atlas, Willard had illustrators depict Chief Powhatan as a “great-man-child” and other native people as stupified by European technology. Though it’s possible to imagine that Willard’s inclusion of tribal movements in her book represents a critique of settlers’ attitudes toward native people, ultimately her views are typical of Americans of her time: God meant for “civilized” people to take this land from “savages.”

What’s innovative about Willard’s work, cartographically speaking, is the way she tried to represent time. “Even though she sees it as inevitable that natives will disappear, she’s collapsing centuries onto a single image,” says Schulten. “She’s trying to map time in a different way as a prelude to what comes next. It’s really an argument that has everything to do with Anglo-America’s vision of the country. She’s a pioneer in that respect.”

Why Scientists Are Studying the Dining Habits of Manta Rays

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These filter feeders might be a ray of hope amidst microplastic pollution.

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Few have watched a manta ray glide through the ocean, fins flapping, mouth agape, without getting chills. The oft-open-mouthed, filter-feeding fish makes us wonder if magic is real. It also makes us wonder, what gets in that mouth? And where does it all go?

At California State University, Fullerton, assistant professor and researcher Misty Paig-Tran was asking the same question. After spending hours watching online videos of manta rays feeding, she couldn’t wrap her head around the mechanics of its mouth. The manta ray is a filter feeder, sifting microscopic plankton and small fish from the ocean as it moves through the water. “All previous research had reported that mantas use a sieving mechanism,” says Dr. Paig-Tran. “Think: Using a kitchen colander to separate pasta from water.” But inevitably, she points out, all sieves clog. “So what I was seeing didn’t jive with what I knew about the mechanics of sieving.”

If your lunch is reliant upon floating through your environment with an open mouth, you’d better have a way to prevent major food clogs. From baleen whales to bivalves, filter feeders utilize a wide variety of solid-fluid separation mechanisms that circumvent this. According to the New York Times, the basking shark is a classic “siever” with a curious unclogging mechanism. Once it’s done the sorting, it dislodges the pileup of coveted flotsam by closing its mouth and delivering a kind of body-quaking “cough.” But the ever-moving manta ray doesn’t do this—no cough, no clearing of the throat, no Heimlich maneuver.

Instead, Dr. Paig-Tran’s team discovered, manta rays possess a unique, complex filtration system that allows particles to drift over its biological straining system, rather than getting stuck in it. If you were to have the great fortune of peeking into the manta’s mouth, you’d see rows of leaf-like, angled lobes that look like slats. When the seawater flows in, tiny, swirling whirlpools form between each pair of slats, pushing the plankton upwards and away from the filters, so that they can be gulped down by the ray.

“It’s kind of like a pinball machine,” says Dr. Paig-Tran. “The particles slam into the filters and bounce off in another direction, in this case toward the esophagus while the water exits out the gill slits.”

According to the scientists, this kind of “ricochet separation” could provide important information about exactly what manta rays feed on—something that remains a bit of a mystery to marine biologists.

But, more curiously, this non-clogging filtration could have huge potential for engineers hoping to design more effective filters—from sustainable wastewater management systems to more efficient vacuum cleaners. According to Dr. Paig-Tran, harnessing the physics of ricochet separation might offer a novel way to filter microplastics from water in treatment plants, and provide better filtration in the food and beverage industry.

“I didn’t set out to find a new type of filtration or better human existence, even though that’s where the study led,” says Dr. Paig-Tran. Rather, she says, this study arose from looking at nature and asking a question. “There’s a big push, especially in politics, to get rid of “wasteful” spending for research that doesn’t appear to have direct human impact. But imagine all the ways nature has solved problems that we still haven’t fully explored.”

Conjuring Wonder in Hollywood's Hidden Sculpture Garden

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An art oasis grows and glows in one of L.A.'s most iconic locations.

Hollywood doesn't reserve its magic just for its movies; the hills themselves are dotted with marvels, from sleepy stucco estates haunted by legendary escape artists to space-age homes that wait, sentinel-like, for a future not yet realized.

One such hidden gem is a secret sculpture garden, nestled just beneath the iconic Hollywood sign. On rare occasion, Dr. Robby Gordon opens his home for private tours, as he did a few weeks ago for Chase Sapphire® cardmembers and Atlas Obscura guests. Located on a steep and winding road and obscured by an overflow of flowering vines, the sculpture garden sits behind Dr. Gordon's home. A collection of both his own artwork and the work of those he admires, the garden is a living gallery of dynamic, modern pieces.

Visitors wandered around the tight, terraced gardens and throughout Dr. Gordon’s home, where practically every surface is covered in art. As the sun set, guests enjoyed a champagne toast and watched as the L.A skyline lit up like a million little stars. Behind them, the vibrant colors of Dr. Robby’s magical garden glowed against the Hollywood Hills.

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To Build a Better Mosquito Trap, First Put a Cow in a Tent

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Then pipe its scent to a warm decoy.

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At the moment, the favored way to catch mosquitoes is to use a human leg as bait. This method, called "human landing catch," has long been used by researchers to track outdoor mosquitos and the diseases they carry, including malaria. It's not complicated—roll up your pant leg and catch visitors in a vial—but it takes a lot of work. The results can vary depending on how good someone is at catching them while resisting the urge to swat. More importantly, it can expose people to the infectious diseases they're out there to study. One alternative is a light-based trap, but it doesn't work quite as well as a tasty, exposed leg. There's got to be a better way.

There are a lot of things that attract mosquitoes—the carbon dioxide animals exhale, body heat, smell, and even visual information, like the dark outline of a large animal. Bernard Abong'o, a doctoral student at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, based out of the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi, might have built a better mosquito trap by putting a cow in a tent.

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As described in a study recently published in the journal Parasites & Vectors, Abong'o and his colleagues developed a decoy trap that brings all of the mosquito magnets together. It starts with a large container to provide the gross visual outline of an animal. Inside is heated water, to simulate body heat. The smell and carbon dioxide come from putting the bait—a human or a cow—in an enclosed tent nearby, connected to the trap by a length of tube. Any visiting insects are trapped by sticky pads, some distance from the bait in the tent.

The traps were tested in two villages in western Kenya. Nearly 2,000 mosquitos later, the research team found that the cow decoy was particularly successful, and captured up to 10 times more insects than human landing catch or the human decoy.

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This is possibly very good news for mosquito-tracking researchers, and perhaps for people who live in regions rife with malaria. "The trap demonstrates the principle involved in mosquito attraction and has potential for use in mosquito control," Abong'o says in an email interview. "The necessary improvements are providing an internal heating system regulated at body temperature to replace hot water for thermal stimuli and synthetic odorant that incorporates all essential components of natural host odors." In other words, don't throw away those citronella candles just yet.

A Century Ago, Wood-Eating Worms Devastated San Francisco Bay

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The battle against them is still being waged today.

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On March 2, 1920, 1,000 feet of wharf came crashing down into Northern California’s Carquinez Strait, just northeast of San Francisco Bay. The problem wasn’t shoddy construction—the wharf belonged to the Union Oil Company—nor was it a storm. It was an invasion.

The invader was the notorious Teredo navalis shipworm. T. navalis is a worm in name and appearance only. It is actually a saltwater clam, with a bivalve shell at one end that anchors a contorting, tapering line of tubular flesh. They feed—obsessively, aggressively, reflexively—on wood that finds its way into the ocean, rendering it unrecognizable, a honeycombed sponge where there was once something solid. Though shipworms have been around since long before we took to the water in wooden boats, our maritime journeys have helped spread them all over the world. We also sink a great deal of wood, in the form of piles, into the water, offering shipworms a rotating smorgasbord that helps them become established in some of our most heavily trafficked maritime areas.

San Francisco Bay is one of those areas. The city had grown during the second half of the 19th century to become one of the world’s premier port cities, handling six million tons of international goods in 1900. By eight years later, 23 piers lined the waterfront. One of them, Central Wharf, stretched 2,000 feet into the bay, as if beckoning the mollusks to feed.

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The journal Nature estimated the damages caused by shipworms in the bay at $25 million between the years of 1917 and 1921. Conservatively, that’s more than $300 million today. By the end of 1921, “the bulk of structures with untreated pile had been destroyed,” reported Nature, “sometimes carrying buildings with them.” Andrew N. Cohen, an environmental scientist with the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions, writes that the casualties included loaded freight cars from Union’s railroad dock, the Municipal Wharf and Customs House for the town of Benicia, “three grain warehouses, one highway and two railroad bridges and twelve ferry terminals.” For two years, Cohen writes in a 1997 conference paper, the devastation ensued at the rate “of one major wharf, pier or ferry slip” every two weeks.

Given that cost, maybe it’s poetic that shipworms likely arrived with Gold Rush prospectors. In 1849 alone, the year gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, 650 ships arrived in the bay, and many were just abandoned there. In the space of a decade, Nature reported, “many wharves were derelict and tottering from their attacks.” But that was just the beginning. The attacks, likely carried out by a Pacific shipworm called Bankia setacea, didn’t make it too far north. In 1914, however, a more pernicious invader arrived from the Atlantic. Around that time, a long drought made the bay saltier and more hospitable to T. navalis, and by 1919 it had proliferated to an astounding degree. The ensuing battle between mollusk and human would be hard-fought, and though the Port was far from unscathed, it survived in the end—a scarred witness to one of history’s most quietly vicious armies.

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Carl Linnaeus—the 18th-century Swedish scientist who developed the system of giving each organism two Latin names—called shipworms, apocalyptically, Calamitas navium. He understood that the mollusks had terrorized mariners and boatbuilders for centuries, poking ships full of tiny holes that can weaken them or sink them outright. In the Iliad, Greek soldiers tarred their fleet with pitch before setting off for Troy to protect themselves from such hazards. Good thing they did. The Viking Saga of Erik the Red, dating to the 13th century, holds shipworms responsible for sinking and drowning the poor explorer Bjarni Grimolfsson, thought to be the first European to see the North American mainland. They got to Columbus, too—two of his ships in 1503. Some believe that the ship that inspired Moby Dick, Essex, was weakened by shipworms before a whale took it down. Same with the Spanish Armada, which may have brought the stowaways with it from warmer waters. Dan Distel, a shipworm biologist at Northeastern University’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center, shared what an old professor told him with The New Yorker: “If it wasn’t for shipworms, we’d be speaking Spanish today.”

T. navalis doesn’t require much to wreak havoc: sufficiently saline water, plenty of wood, and a little bit of company (and maybe not even that). Unlike many marine creatures, they are internal fertilizers, meaning their larvae gestate inside an adult’s body, allowing them to mature in relative safety from predators. They are protandrous hermaphrodites—born male and then maturing into hermaphrodites—that can sometimes even self-fertilize, and adults can release tens of thousands of larvae over the course of a lifetime. All of this allows new mollusks to be born right into the same wooden structures their parents occupy instead of braving the currents and hoping they land on a new food source. “Ideally, it can be just one animal,” says Distel, “one larvum settling on the wood is enough to start a new population.” And those populations can grow fast.

On February 6, 1921, the San Francisco Chronicle noted, seemingly with grudging admiration, the worms’ ability to fill 100 square feet of wood with more than 100,000 tenants—that’s 1,000 individuals per square foot. “Menacing all unprotected and untreated timber structures throughout San Francisco bay,” wrote the Chronicle, “the teredo sallies forth on its errand of destruction against pilings, docks, ferry slips and wharves. These worms, some of which are two or three feet in length, are so active in their work that it is possible to hear the rasping of their tools on the wood by placing the ear against the exposed top of the pile.”

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Distel can confirm that the boring is indeed audible, the sound of shells “covered with tiny teeth” drilling incessantly away at an unlucky pile. The shells, he explains, have openings that allow each worm to stick its foot out of one end and the rest of its body out of the other. Using its foot like a “suction cup” on the wood, the worm then proceeds to rock the two halves of its shell “back and forth in a kind of scissor motion,” scraping away at the wood and grinding it down into edible particles. “They spend a lot of energy chewing,” Distel says with a laugh.

A kind of ingenious, if destructive, engineer in its own right, the shipworm mystified the human engineers deployed to thwart it. Early attempts at managing the borings involved creosote, a poisonous coating that can repel the mollusks. But creosote only penetrates a couple of inches into a pile, leaving the interior vulnerable, and possibly exposed through a crack or untreated area. The Chronicle wondered whether the creosote might just be “an appetizer” for them, and summarized its frustration with a poem: “you may dope, you may paint the piles as you will, but the teeth of the shipworm will gnaw at them still.”

Enter H.L. Demeritt, an engineer with the U.S. War Department, whose alternative for dealing with shipworms was dynamite. He oversaw experiments in Carquinez Strait that attempted to blow the worms out of the water, one blast of 60 percent nitroglycerine powder at a time. The results were predictably negligible. Demeritt was part of the San Francisco Bay Marine Piling Committee, which in 1927 published a mammoth report on its shipworm research and claimed to have surveyed roughly 90 percent of the area’s 250,000 piles. All told, the committee tested some 45 chemical compounds, and eventually established creosoting and construction guidelines that finally helped to stymie the shipworms, and downgrade the situation from a crisis of “epidemic severity” to a major, if manageable, nuisance.

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This all means that this battle has never truly ended. Bruce Lanham, who worked with the Port of San Francisco’s pile-driving crew for over 25 years before retiring in 2016, recalls encountering piles with damaged coatings or tiny cracks: “Oh God,” he says, “these little devils would just—they were just insidious, they would just go to work.” Once, Lanham says, he was about to label a pile 80 percent stable when his index finger fell into a tiny hole. The log turned out to be nearly hollow. It looked right, Lanham says, but “Man, this thing was gone.”

Toxic creosote has never been a perfect option, even when it works. Lanham says the chemical routinely caused his skin to peel—not an ideal effect for something being placed in a major body of water. Creosote has not been applied to pilings since the 1960s, says Carol Bach, who does environmental work for the Port of San Francisco, but the stuff is still leaking from older wooden structures all around the bay. While newer piles tend to be made of concrete, Bach says that a total overhaul is impossible, as much of the Port now falls within the protected Embarcadero historic district. (Some mollusks can damage concrete, too, though not so severely.) So instead, the Port deploys divers to swathe piles in protective plastic wraps that both spurn borers and contain chemicals. It’s the best, most environmentally conscious thing to do at the moment, and the shipworms aren't going anywhere. “The dive crew at the Port of San Francisco’s got job security that just won’t quit,” Lanham explains.

Soon other places, once thought beyond the reach of T. navalis, are going to face the same challenges. The Baltic Sea, for example, has in recent years seen a curious influx of shipworms, possibly due to climate change and increased salinity. There aren't so many wooden ships any more, but the Baltic's cold water has preserved thousands of historic shipwrecks that had so far been spared the depredations of the bivalves. It’s like the shipworms, ever restless, are planning to make up for lost time by going after ships they missed on the first go-round.

The Pyrotechnic Ice-Cream Parades of the Nobel Prize Banquet

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Once, there was even an official ice cream.

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Each year on December 1o, Nobel laureates gather at Stockholm's City Hall to feast. Receiving a Nobel prize, whether for literature, science, or advances toward world peace, comes with a significant monetary prize, as well as a gold medal bearing the face of Albert Nobel, the explosives tycoon whose will established the awards. But the Nobel banquet, which has been described as "the greatest dinner party on earth," is its own reward. You might assume that the highlight is the laureates receiving their prizes. But the dessert course is equally climactic: It's presented with grand sparklers and a parade. For decades, it featured official Nobel ice cream, too.

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Nobel banquets have been held since 1901, and each year, the menu is exquisite. That's to be expected: Some of the world's most lauded people, not to mention Swedish royalty and dignitaries, are in attendance. In the first few years, the food was mostly French-style, the cuisine of the elite. Only later in the century did Swedish dishes and ingredients take center stage, with filet of sole being replaced by filet of reindeer. But until recently, there was one constant: For dessert, dozens of waiters descended the grand staircase with trays of Nobel ice cream and sparklers, a fitting accompaniment to the Nobel Prize's explosive origins.

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The ice cream did vary from parade to parade. But starting in the 1970s, an ice cream bombe became standard (another strangely appropriate choice considering Albert Nobel's career). This Nobel ice cream typically entailed layers of ice cream and fruit sorbet, decorated with spun sugar and an edible "N" for Nobel, and it was served every year at banquets until the early 2000s. Though the flavors could vary, from raspberry and vanilla to kiwi and passionfruit, Nobel ice cream became a tradition. One documenter of the Nobel banquets called changing the dessert "unthinkable." But change it did.

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After 1998, chefs tapped to make the Nobel meals were allowed to eschew tradition. According to Nobel Foundation representative Jonna Petterson, this "let a pastry chef create a new dessert for each year with a modern touch." Since then, Nobel diners have enjoyed their coffee and special Nobel tea blend with ice cream-less desserts such as "Chocolate silhouette with nougat and sea buckthorn explosion." Thankfully, the pyrotechnic parade continues to this day.

Though hundreds of guests enjoy the banquet each year, the rest of us can only hungrily watch. Even the menu is kept secret until December 10, supposedly to stop restaurants from throwing their own Nobel banquets on the same day. But below Stockholm's City Hall, the restaurant Stadshuskällaren will sell customers Nobel banquet meals from any year, on any day other than December 10. Or, if you don't have Nobel Prize money to drop on a lavish dinner, stop by the Nobel Museum. There, the Bistro Nobel serves Nobel ice cream: a berry and vanilla bombe, with spun sugar and a cloudberry, accompanied by one tiny, foil-wrapped Nobel medal, made of dark chocolate.

Found: A Rare Viking Boat Buried in a Flat Field

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The whole place was once a monumental graveyard.

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A field in Norway has been hiding an archaeological treasure.

In Østfold County, there’s a flat, seemingly unremarkable field, long since plowed over many times. But right next to it stands an unusual hill known as Jell mound. The hill is a type of manmade burial monument that dates back to the time of the Vikings.

Recently, a team of archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) used a high-resolution georadar, mounted on a tractor of sorts, to scan the field. The farmer who worked it wanted to put in drainage ditches, which meant he needed an archaeological evaluation first. Already, the presence of Jell mound indicated there might be more archaeological finds beneath the surface.

When they investigated, the archaeologists found that the whole area had once been rounded with burial mounds—at least eight that had been previously unknown to science. And underneath one of them, the radar found the shape of a ship.

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It’s unusual to find a boat burial. Boats were valuable, and they were buried only when leaders, warriors, or other people of high status died. There have been only three found previously in all of Norway, and this is the first one to be found in recent years.

"Boat burials are only rarely investigated by archaeologists but this, being a large ship, is nothing short of unique," says Lars Gustavsen, the project’s lead archaeologist.

Based on comparable burials, the archaeologists believe this is a Viking ship, likely dating to the period between the years 500 and 1000. Since the mound above was long ago flattened, the boat is only about 1.6 feet below the surface. It’s a little under 66 feet long, and the radar indicates that its keels and floorboards are preserved.

The archaeologists intend to investigate further using non-invasive tools; if need be, they will excavate.

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“The ship burial does not exist in isolation, but forms part of a cemetery which is clearly designed to display power and influence,” Gustavsen said in a statement. By exploring this flat field further, he and his colleagues can better understand the practices of the people who lived here long ago.

This post has been updated with additional information.

Here Are the Mediterranean Sites That Will Be Swallowed By the Sea

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Coastal erosion and flooding are bad news for these ancient places.

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As waters rise across the world, they will swamp and destroy the things we humans have made. Bones will be disinterred from graveyards; buildings will rot and fall; ancient settlements will vanish. While researchers are already scrambling to buffer some of these sites and shore them up against insistent wind and waves, not everything can be saved. And when a site’s currency is tied to its geography, it’s not easy to pick it up and move it to higher ground. So how do you prioritize your efforts—and figure out which sites are in desperate need of lifelines?

In a new paper in Nature Communications, a team led by Lena Reimann, a geographer at Germany’s Kiel University, let data lead the way. They mapped the potential threat that flooding and erosion caused by sea-level rise could wreck by the year 2100 on 49 UNESCO heritage sites across the Mediterranean. The researchers modeled four different scenarios for sea-level rise and coastal erosion across Italy, Croatia, Greece, Tunisia, and more, based on different levels of greenhouse gas concentrations. Then they ranked how dire the situation would be for each heritage site.

What are these places up against? Even in the most conservative conditions that the authors modeled, the future doesn't look good—and, moreover, the authors also found that many of these sites facing future threats are already in a danger zone. Under current conditions, more than 90 percent of these sites are at risk. Only the hundreds of mosques, monuments, and fountains of Medina of Tunis and the ancient Lycian archaeological site of Xanthos-Letoon dodged the threats of both erosion and flooding.

According to these models, the situation will only get worse. Steep topography often constrained settlements to areas close to the water’s edge, almost flush with sea level. Under the high erosion scenario, erosion will bring these sites even closer to the coast—in the model's worst-case scenario, the average distance from the water drops by 90 percent.

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The highest erosion risk is at the Phoenician city of Tyre, which has a perfect storm of vulnerabilities, including proximity to the coast, a profusion of sandy material, and high waves. In the highest flood scenario, the worst repercussions will be felt in Venice, where the famous lagoons will be a liability. During storm surges, up to 98 percent of Venice and the lagoon may be deluged, Reimann says in an email interview. That water may recede—but depending on the amount of sea-level rise, Reimann adds, “certain parts of the [site] are likely to be submerged permanently in the future if no adaptation takes place.”

Putting a price tag on history understandably makes some people a little squirmy. (The authors describe it as “ethically questionable.”) After all, how do you do measure value without implying that one history is more important than others? “However, if appropriate local-scale data are available,” the authors write, “it may be possible to assess the tangible costs of coastal flooding and erosion by accounting for, for example, loss of revenue or cost of repairs.”

The authors champion strategies for raising awareness among the public and lawmakers, as well as covert adaptation strategies, such as submerged floodgates that will rise against high waters in the Venice lagoon. This is an expensive intervention and has stirred local controversy, Reimann says. There are fears, on one hand, that it's too speculative, and, on the other, that it won't be enough to curb the flooding. It’s also probably among the earliest of many efforts in the same vein. “Generally, I would expect that innovative adaptation measures will need to be pursued to preserve our common heritage,” Reimann adds.

Some of these adaptations are nothing to write home about, aesthetically—the Venetian gates look like half-sunken construction barricades. In areas that depend on tourist eyeballs, appearances do matter. But maybe visitors will come to expect and embrace more-visible signs of adapting to a more-watery world. Maybe these could even be a little reassuring—a reminder that there are tangible steps that can be taken to help these sites stick around a little while longer.

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