But he did not get the quiet death he was seeking.
At three in the morning on a cold winter’s night—October 28, 1910 to be exact—Countess Sophia Berss woke to thumping of footsteps. Her husband, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, arguably the nation’s most famous writer, was restlessly pacing in the next room at their home estate, Yasnaya Polyana, about 100 miles south of Moscow. He told her he had taken some medicine, asked her to go back to sleep, and shut the door behind her. When she woke again the next morning, her husband was gone.
Accompanied by his physician, Dr. Makovetsky, and dressed in rough peasant garb, Leo Tolstoy had boarded a third-class train carriage and taken off to live out his last days.
Tolstoy left behind a letter addressed to his wife, in which he wrote: “Do not seek me. I feel that I must retire from the trouble of life. Perpetual guests, perpetual visits and visitors, perpetual cinematograph operators, beset me at Yasnaya Polyana, and poison my life. I want to recover from the trouble of the world. It is necessary for my soul and my body which have lived 82 years upon this earth.”
Tolstoy had been born at the large aristocratic estate, the name of which translates to “bright glade,” but it had come to feel like a trap over the years. Soon after publishing Anna Karenina in 1877, Tolstoy had experienced a “conversion.”
“He’s a patriarch, he’s got this estate in the Russian countryside in a village that he basically owns and he goes from that to denouncing wealth—basically he has a midlife crisis, and because he’s Tolstoy, he goes, ‘I’m going to solve this,’” says Ani Kokobobo, editor of the Tolstoy Studies Journal and author of the forthcoming book Sage of Sex: Tolstoy Theorizes Gender, Identity, and Intercourse.
In the 1890s, Tolstoy retranslated and reinterpreted the Gospels of the New Testament and denounced their interpretation by the Russian Orthodox Church. “He decides you’ve got to live your life in a way that’s not very attached to the body, individuality, wealth, or sex,” says Kokobobo. So in 1901, he was excommunicated. Though still a nobleman, he began attempting to shrug off the trappings of privilege. He moved into a homely peasant’s hut on his estate, began “partaking only of the simple peasant’s food, and wearing the peasant’s costume—a rough blouse, wide trousers tucked into high cowhide boots, a leather belt, and fur cap,” according to a report in The New York Times on November 13, 1910, on his scandalous exit. He founded soup kitchens and a school for peasant children on his land, was farming, and was negotiating to release his books without copyright. He also promoted sexual abstinence, although he didn’t successfully practice what he preached on that one. In the meantime, Sophia—to whom he’d been married for 48 years and who had borne him 13 (!) children—had other ideas.
“You read their diaries side by side and they’re kind of living in different worlds,” Kokobobo says. "You can imagine how his wife is like—'We have 13 kids and now you’re this prophet of anti-sex?'"
Tolstoy had been contemplating his death for years, but at Yasnaya Polanya he could not escape an onslaught of responsibilities as a patriarch and public figure. Even during this final journey by train, newspapers tracked his every move, presenting him as a madman all the while. He took the Kausani Railroad first, to the Shamardino Convent, where his favorite sister Maria was a nun. When his visit there was publicized, he moved on, ostensibly hoping to make it to the Caucasus. But on November 15, scarcely two weeks after leaving home, he fell ill and was taken into the train station in the little town of Astapovo. His wife rushed to his side, but was not allowed to see him until his final moments, five days later. Surrounded by press and detractors who thought him mad, it was hardly the quiet death he had longed for.
One Times article judged him rather harshly even as he was dying: “Once Tolstoy was a notable artist in the field of letters, a writer with a clear vision, remarkable powers of observation, a coherent style. Latterly he has been obviously deranged … he has gone off to die in the wilderness like a wild animal … Obvious jests will be avoided. It is very sad.”
Kokobobo sees his death as a rational extension of the spiritual ideology he had been cultivating for decades. “The irony, of course, is [Sophia] took care of him, she was his partner, she enabled his life,” she says. He had left her and his home, spiritually and physically, but he could not survive apart. “Nobody understood him and cared for him as intimately as she did. The moment he’s out of her sphere, he dies.”
And it's sitting on the shelves at several university libraries.
What would a book look like if it were a work of art? The artists’ books collection at the University of Michigan offers almost a thousand answers: It could be a brown paper chrysalis than unfolds to reveal a small, circular book within, or eight wedge-shaped booklets printed to look like cherry pie and stored together in a clear plastic takeout container.
It could even be made of American cheese.
Last summer, University of Michigan art and design librarian Jamie Lausch Vander Broek acquired 20 Slices—a squat, square volume composed of 20 plastic-wrapped Kraft singles sandwiched between bright yellow covers. “For me, a lot of the purpose of the collection is engaging with people who usually have never seen an artist’s book before,” she explains. “So I have tailored my selections away from subtlety. It’s really important to me that people get excited about the work that I buy, and that it happens quickly.”
On that front, 20 Slices—the work of New York-based artist (and book cover designer) Ben Denzer—has been a home run. According to Vander Broek, it’s sparked more discussion than any other book she’s acquired. It even riled up librarians and cataloguers, she says, who reacted to the purchase on Twitter with comments ranging from “That’s an insult to books” to “I could do that!”
“It engaged this part of people that has a really developed, but probably not conscious, sense of what a book is and should be,” Vander Broek says. “There’s almost a morality associated with the physical nature of a book, and this was an aberration. And I thought, ‘Wow, if it can make people who talk about books every day feel like that, then this is perfect.’”
Some of her pupils have been more open-minded. “One student was like, ‘Well, you know, I think the cheese was already a book,’ and I thought that was a really astute observation,” Vander Broek says. “I think that what [Denzer] is doing is elevating things that already want to be books because they formally exhibit the characteristics of a book. There's so much there to talk about that really gets at the nuance of ‘What is a book, exactly?’”
It’s a question Denzer has been considering since college. At Princeton, he became fascinated by books and the way their content tends to overshadow the fact that they are also objects. His senior art show featured books with wheels, books nailed shut, books repurposed into shelves, and other alterations that emphasized their physical properties over their meaning.
After graduation, he designed book covers at Penguin. For fun, he enrolled in a class at New York’s Center for Book Arts and toyed around with creating his own books. "Books take a long time to produce,” he says, “so one thing I started to think about was how to fill a book with content that wouldn’t take that long.” He experimented with napkins, fortunes, even one-dollar bills—items highlighting the fact that book pages are themselves objects. 20 Slices was his first edible creation. He’s gone on to make a book of Splenda packets, a copy of which is in the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Earlier this month, he launched a limited edition of 50 books with pages made from ketchup packets, available at the Whitney Museum’s gift shop.
Food pairs well with books, he says, because both are familiar objects with familiar uses. “Ice cream, American cheese slices, and ketchup packets are all part of a shared culture. It's a way to have some understanding of an audience, to play around with expectations and norms.” For instance: When Vander Broek went to pick up 20 Slices from the cataloguers' office, she found it stored in their mini fridge alongside several sandwiches.
Her purchase created something of a ripple effect, set off by an article she published in Saveur. Baylor University librarian Sha Towers, who curates the school’s collection of artists’ books, was emailed by a half-dozen colleagues about the “cheese book,” and, to their surprise, he ordered it. A cataloguer working at Tufts University showed the article to Darin Murphy, head of the library’s fine arts branch, who ended up purchasing several of Denzer’s books.
20 Slices has been similarly effective for Towers and Murphy in inciting conversation amongst students. “They're like ‘What? You spent my tuition money on cheese? How much did you pay for it? How much did you pay for it by slice?’” says Murphy. “It's a great teaching tool because it is so provocative.”
(For those curious about the economics: A box of 24 slices of Kraft American cheese slices sells for about $3.50—roughly 15 cents a slice. 20 Slices sold for $200, or a whopping 6567% markup per single.)
“I am not in any way suggesting that 20 Slices is a one-liner,” Murphy continues. “But it has that initial impact. It shocks people.” For his part, Towers wonders if the library should have purchased a second copy and transformed it into a performance art piece, where students actually consumed the cheese rather than simply paging through it.
One of the biggest questions the book has raised is how to store it. Michigan’s head of conservation informed Vander Broek that Kraft singles are shelf stable, so she keeps it in a plastic container with silica gel packets that she occasionally swaps out. Until last week, Murphy was storing it on the shelf in his office to monitor its condition at room temperature. Now it’s been transferred to a gallon-size Ziploc to deter critters looking for a snack.
Despite American cheese’s durability, the book probably won’t last forever. That is an important part of the work, says Vander Broek. “You get information from feeling the squishy pages and from worrying about it decaying.” She compares it to 17th-century Dutch still lifes—exquisitely detailed paintings that often show fruit and meat in various stages of rot. “They make you think about death. How often do you worry that a book is going to die?” It seems that 20 Slices has brought the concept of “shelf life” to a different set of shelves.
Thousands were cast into the waves in the 1960s, and one turned up in Texas decades later.
Candy Duke and her husband, Jim, spend their weekends combing for treasure. They bring a lunch and make a day of it at the Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, keeping their eyes peeled for shells, sea glass, and bottles—some green, some brown, some barnacled, some clear and wave-beaten. Candy estimates that they’ve stumbled across at least 100 little glass vessels, plus hydraulic jacks, trash cans, and “I can’t tell you how many nets that have come off of who knows what.” Some of the haul goes straight into the trash—just to get it up off the sand—but they salvage their favorites and arrange them across their yard in Corpus Christi.
One recent Saturday, Jim came across a bottle with something to say.
Through the scuffed glass, they could make out a yellowing piece of paper—almost the color of the sand. It was wound into a tight scroll, and it bore an instruction scribbled in big, capital letters: “BREAK BOTTLE.”
But, Candy says, the couple had no plans to do that. They figured, they collect bottles—they don’t bust them. So she and Jim set out to free the thing inside without destroying the rest of it.
The couple took the bottle home and got to work, broadcasting their efforts on Facebook Live. Jim went at it with a standard wine bottle opener, while Candy's brood of birds—several dozen parakeets, lovebirds, cockatiels, finches, and canaries that she raises for a local pet store—chirped loudly in the background, and their deaf rescue cat, Handsome, preened, disinterestedly, on a chair. “It’s a real hard rubber cork,” Jim said, as Candy filmed. He needed to put more muscle into it, and stood up to get more leverage. “By George, it may be coming,” he said, cranking his wrist. He grunted a bit. The thing didn’t budge. “Come on, baby,” Jim muttered to the cork, scrunching up his face as he tried to wriggle it free. “Thank goodness there’s no wine in there,” Candy said. “We’d all be crying at this point.”
They finally speared it with an ice pick. With a little shimmy, the stopper came loose. Since the paper had been shoved all the way down to the bottom, they needed to use tweezers to fish it out. As they reached for it, Candy and Jim wondered if they’d won something—a cruise, maybe, or free tacos?
Not quite. When they liberated the paper and unrolled it, they discovered that it was a postcard—still nice and dry—to be filled it out and mailed back to the U. S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. Whoever found the bottle was supposed to jot down the date and place they’d encountered it, because the office was trying to track the effect of surface currents on young shrimp moving from “offshore spawning grounds to inshore nursery grounds.” Anyone who returned the postcard would receive 50 cents for their trouble.
On the Facebook video, Candy seemed a little let down. The couple signed off quickly, and maybe a little sheepishly. It was no cruise, or even a plate of tacos. "It was kind of like we had built up all this drama, and it was just this thing—50 cents," Candy says now. But, off camera, she filled the postcard out anyway, made a keepsake photocopy, and sent the original on its way to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which inherited many of the duties of the old bureau.
She soon heard from Matthew Johnson, the acting lab director at NOAA’s Galveston Laboratory Southeast Fisheries Science Center, who shed more light on what she’d found. This little bottle had taken a long swim. It been in the water since 1962 or 1963, one of 7,863 that had been released in clusters across the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico. Of these, 12 percent were recovered within 30 days of being set adrift, according to a 1979 NOAA report. “A lot of that stuff disappears into the abyss,” Johnson says.
It turned out that Candy and Jim had happened upon the legacy of a citizen science project that wrapped up decades ago. At the time, unleashing a school of bottles and asking people to report their sighting "was a cutting-edge way to figure out what’s going on and relate back ocean currents to animal abundance," Johnson says. It was a way of retracing the buoyant journey from point A to point B. Johnson has worked at NOAA for four years, and his wife has been there for 20, and this find was definitely out of the ordinary. “We have not seen one of these recovered at all in a long time,” Johnson says.
This new data wasn’t useful, really, so many decades after the project was over—but a deal was a deal, and Johnson offered Candy the 50 cents anyway. (She declined.) The bottle is still a treasure, though, and she plans to store it in a shadowbox, safely away from the waves.
Her escape was documented in the margins of a medieval manuscript.
In the 14th century, York was the most important city in England, next to London. This northern hotspot was a center for international trade, particularly in the wool industry. Around the city, it wasn’t hard to find clothing merchants, butchers, artisans, and tanners selling their goods. This period in the city’s history is often described as the “Golden Age of York.” Yes, York was indeed a bustling hub of medieval city life—a life perhaps too tempting for a young nun.
While scouring through a selection of registers from 1304 to 1405, a team of researchers at the University of York found a small note written in the margins of one of the manuscripts. The Latin letters were penned by Archbishop William Melton, alerting the Dean of Beverly that a nun by the name of Joan of Leeds had faked her own death and escaped the house of St. Clement.
“Melton described it as a 'scandalous rumor’—and I cannot do better than that. In a semi-literate society, rumor and reputation were very important,” says Sarah Rees Jones, a professor and principal investigator on the project, via email. Rees Jones and her team are analyzing this particular set of documents, in which local archbishops detailed their affairs, to better understand Melton's life and 14th-century England at the onset of the plague.
In his note, Melton’s fury about the rouse cascades off the parchment. He writes, “Out of a malicious mind simulating a bodily illness, she pretended to be dead, not dreading for the health of her soul...” He then goes on to explain exactly how the members of the convent were duped: “and with the help of numerous of her accomplices, evildoers, with malice aforethought crafted a dummy in the likeness of her body in order to mislead the devoted faithful and she had no shame in procuring its burial in a sacred space amongst the religious of that place.”
During the medieval era, many women entered convents while still teenagers. As HISTORY reports, families both rich and poor would often choose a daughter to become a nun, at least in part as an alternative to finding her a husband. Finding work as a woman during this period was also extremely difficult. Life in a convent provided comparatively better living conditions in many situations.
But a life of celibacy and restraint wasn’t for everyone. As Rees Jones notes in her email, “a dislike of the monotony of the religious life,” could’ve caused Joan to skedaddle, or perhaps money was involved. Rees Jones explains that leaving the religious life would have allowed Joan to inherit any money left behind by relatives, which was not allowed under the vow of poverty.
But for now, this is all simply speculation. “In this case, we simply do not know,” says Rees Jones. We also don’t know whether Joan was ever found or if she returned to the convent. That answer may reside scribbled between the fading margins of another register.
Soon, the Garden of the Finzi-Continis may no longer be a fiction.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is not a real place. We should say that first. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it is, and you wouldn’t be alone. It was invented in Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 historical novel of the same name, and in the 1970 Oscar-winning movie adaptation. It is a place of young love, refuge, and tennis, a place so carefully and lovingly described in the book that many devoted readers are certain it must be there, somewhere in the city of Ferrara, in Italy’s northeastern province of Emilia Romagna. And so thanks to literary imagination, countless travelers and tourists have made a secular pilgrimage to Ferrara’s wide avenues.
“There are hundreds of people every week. Some people came from the Mississippi Valley three days ago, from St. Louis, Missouri. ‘But where’s the garden? We want to see the garden,’” says Portia Prebys, Bassani’s longtime companion, from the city’s Center for Bassani Studies. “People come all the time and they’ll ask in the hotels, ‘But where is the garden?’ They think it really exists, you see.”
In the story the garden is the patrician home of the Finzi-Continis, an aloof Jewish family whose estate if off-limits to outsiders—until the shadow of anti-Semitism looms over the city. It’s 1938 when the heart of the story begins, and a group of Ferrara’s bright Jewish youths go to the garden as a haven from the new fascist Racial Laws. Its allure, as a place of both mystery and safety, has weathered decades, even though no guidebook or mapping service can offer its location. Bassani’s novel does actually offer directions, with real landmarks along the way, which has convinced studious tourists that it will be there. But, to a person, they are disappointed. However, in a strange twist, the constant search for the garden may lead to its creation.
“Ferrara is perfectly described [by Bassani], so many tourists come after reading the book and are surprised when I explain the garden isn’t really there,” says Emanuela Mari, a city guide who has been leading people to the sites of Bassani’s fictions since 1995. “Generally I make clear before their arrival that the garden doesn't really exist.”
This absence, Mari contends, does not preclude the search, or its possible rewards. “When you walk through the main street, Corso Ercole I d'Este, you go to ‘the infinite,’ Bassani tell us that,” she says. “The garden is at the end of it.” Wandering the Renaissance infinite does sound like a rewarding, if fruitless, way to spend a morning.
The Corso traverses Ferrara northward from its center, like a timeline that traces the peak and decline of the dynasty that oversaw the city’s golden age. Its mossy cobblestones date back to the 15th century, when Ercole I, of the Dukes of Este, commissioned architect Biaggio Rosseti to create a feat of urban planning. Known as the Herculean Addition, the project doubled Ferrara’s size and molded it into an “ideal city” of the Renaissance. The medieval constriction of the town’s oldest districts gave way to the harmony and decorum of straight, wide streets, rational lines, and “infinite” perspectives lined by palaces and brick walls. The Corso runs from the Estes’ castle to the Gate of Angels, through the city walls. It is said that heirless Cesare d’Este, the last duke, departed the city for the final time through this gate in 1598, when his lands were taken by rival Papal states.
There is, just down the Corso from the Diamanti Palace—sheathed in diamond-shaped marble and now home to city’s the National Painting Gallery—a fence in front of an trimmed, empty green space. On the fence, at 25 Corso Ercole I d'Este, hangs a weatherbeaten sign that reads (in Italian): “The garden that isn’t there.” The site was long abandoned and overgrown. The sign and others like it around the city are the work of a local cultural organization and are related to a proposed art installation with the same name—an indication of just how important the garden has become to the city’s identity and Europe’s 20th-century history.
“TheGarden of the Finzi-Continis is a story that marked my city, it is a story in which the city is the protagonist,” mayor Tiziano Tagliani stated this June, when the novel was included in the city’s graduation exam that all students take to complete their secondary education. The choice was inspired partly by last year’s 80th anniversary of the adoption of the Italian Racial Laws—Mussolini’s 1938 answer to Hitler’s earlier anti-Semitic legislation—the shadow that looms over both Bassani’s life and his masterpiece.
The word “ghetto” is thought to have originated in Italy, in reference to the site where Venice forced its Jewish residents to live in 1516. Under the rule of the Estes, there had been no such place in Ferrara. They had maintained their city as a haven, which contributed to the city’s cultural bloom. But when their rule ended at the end of the 16th century, a triangle of blocks off the city’s main square became the Jewish ghetto, and its gates were locked at night. They seemed to swing open permanently in 1860, during Italian Unification, and Jews appeared to become full members of the nascent country.
By the 1920s, many Jewish residents of Ferrara had become members of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the country’s fascist party. From 1926 to 1938, the city’s podestà, the local representative of the fascist regime, was Jewish politician Renzo Ravenna. Bassani’s father was a member as well. But the ideology soon curdled with anti-Semitism.
Bassani, then a bright student in his early 20s, was expelled from the local tennis club, and later he was only allowed to teach at the Jewish school in the former ghetto. There were no locked gates anymore, but the barriers set by law established a ghetto without boundaries. Bassani had rejected fascism even before this and in 1943 he spent three months in jail for his views. By the fall, Italian Jews were being transported to death camps. He had to leave the city he loved.
“He was forced to leave to save his neck, and he never returned to live in Ferrara,” Prebys explains. “He couldn’t go back, it could never be the same.” Bassani went into hiding in Florence then established himself in Rome until his death in 2000. Only then did he return—to the Jewish cemetery.
In 1956, Bassani had published Within the Walls, the first of six books collectively known as The Novel of Ferrara. The works, including the third volume, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, established and then cemented Bassani as one of the greatest Italian writers of the century. In the books, he recreates the city and community he’d left behind, an act that some people did not appreciate. “It was the time of silence, of shame, of opportunism,” Silvana Onofri, director of Giorgio Bassani Foundation, explains. “The bourgeoisie, be it Jewish or Catholic, had not stirred the Shoah, it had only removed the fascist past.” In the process of defying the city’s collective amnesia, Bassani created a memorable garden.
Today, along the pathway on the old city walls, visitors can be seen peering down, in the hopes of seeing where the story begins. At the outset of the novel, somewhere below the ramparts, a girl named Micòl Finzi-Contini stands on a ladder propped against her garden wall, and invites a boy to climb in. Years pass before they finally meet inside, as young adults singled out by the Racial Laws. The garden is a great park around the aristocratic family’s home, and provides—temporarily, at least—a refuge from the darkness beginning to envelope the city. There, the main characters have a final season of love and dreams and tennis. It’s an idyll that begins and ends by climbing a ladder over the wall, like an inverted escape or illegal migration, not out of a ghetto but into a safe place. Cast away from Ferrara, Bassani invented his own Eden, there, in its heart.
“The garden is an ideal, it's like getting back to paradise. What Giorgio is denied by the Racial Laws, he can have it back in this ideal place,” the guide Mari says.
“A place where he could withdraw to,” Prebys calls it. “It looks as if you could go there today, because he was so precise in his description.”
The safety was, of course, an illusion. Afterwards, Bassani writes, the Finzi-Continis were “deported in Germany in 1943, and no one knows if they have any grave at all.” The only memorial to this fictitious family is the fictitious garden he made for them—a memorial without a place. But that could soon change.
“In a few months, an Israeli sculptor named Karavan is going to do an installation,” Prebys says. “As soon as it goes up, people will believe that this is where the garden was. The search for the garden will stop.”
From his studio in Paris, Dani Karavan remembers the moment the idea came to him, in the 1970s. It was in the course of his studies in Italy, during a visit to Ferrara. “When the film came out I saw a Pullman bus with American tourists coming to Ferrara to see the Garden of Finzi-Continis. ‘But it doesn’t exist,’ I thought. ‘Only in the book.’ So I had the idea to do a project, The Garden That Doesn’t Exist.”
Nearly half a century later, now aged 88, Karavan has brought his idea back to the place that inspired it. His work was recently shown in Ferrara’s National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah—at the site of the prison where Bassani was once held. Among the pieces was Karavan’s model for the garden, planned over the last 15 years and closer than ever being built—if he can get the funding.
Of course, this memorial will not be the garden of so many people’s imaginations. Karavan describes a structure at the crossroads of sculpture and architecture: large walls of glass covered in passages from the book in multiple languages, with an opening in it like a garden gate. Railway tracks interrupt it, evoking the deportations to death camps. Around the wall will be green grass, and inside only sand. And against the wall will rest a ladder, like the one used by the novel’s characters.
It’s perhaps different enough that it will welcome both those who value the garden as a symbol of hope, and those who simply want a place to go to pay their respects to Bassani.
The toxic flurries are a product of Russia's coal pits.
When you think of Siberia, it’s not hard to conjure images of permafrost valleys or picturesque frosty mountain tops. It’s ideal imagery for the cover of a postcard. But in the cities of in Prokopyevsk, Kiselyovsk, and Leninsk-Kuznetskyin in the Kuzbass region, the snowy landscapes now resemble a scene from a dystopian novel instead.
Also known as the Kemerovo Oblast, the Kuzbass region is located in the western part of Siberia, and is home to more than 2.5 million people. Between the months of November and March, the average daily high temperatures in the region are often below 23 degrees Fahrenheit, so residents expect to deal with harsh arctic conditions and heavy snowfall.
What isn’t expected is for the snow to be black in color and littered with toxins. The region accounts for more than half of all Russian coal production with valuable coal deposits spanning for more than 10,000 square miles. According to The Guardian, activists in the region say that coal dust from open-pit mines is causing the problem. Once these particles hit the air, they mingle with the snow creating its black hue.
“There is a lot of coal dust in the air all the time. When snow falls, it just becomes visible,” said Vladimir Slivyak, a member of the Ecodefense environmental group, to The Guardian. The black snow, along with the open pits, are putting the residents living in the Kuzbass at serious risk.
Coal dust particles contain a murderer’s row of harmful agents, such as lead, mercury, nickel, tin, cadmium, mercury, antimony, and arsenic, to name a few. Tuberculosis rates in the Kuzbass region are almost twice the national average. Kuzbass is also home to some of the highest child cerebral palsy rates in Russia. For years, activists have pointed to the pits and factories as the source of these problems, but they say the government has shown little concern. In fact, in December 2018, after a similar sighting of black snow, several reports emerged from the Kemerovo region of residents finding snow that had been painted white by Russian officials.
And evidence for how the massive stones were removed.
In 1923, British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas published a now-infamous study on Stonehenge, in which he claimed to know the precise location where the prehistoric architects had quarried the stones used in the massive monument. Turns out he was way off.
In a recently released study published in Antiquity, a team of archaeologists and geologists have reported the exact location of two of these quarries in western Wales. Stonehenge is made up of several different types of rocks collectively called “bluestones,” which have long been known to have come from somewhere in the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire. However, the researchers (who have been excavating the area for eight years) now know believe they know more precisely where this megalith quarrying took place 5,000 years ago, and how it was done.
The radiocarbon dates from charcoal from both quarries show that the stones were extracted around 3000 B.C., which lines up with the first stage of Stonehenge’s construction (when bluestones were erected in the Aubrey Holes) and with previously found dates for when people were buried near the Neolithic monument. Additionally, researchers found tools such as sharp hammer stones and stone wedges that appear to illustrate how the quarrying was performed. In a stroke of early engineering genius, the stone wedges were likely used to maneuver naturally occuring vertical pillars off of the parent rock by creating space between “joints.”
These quarries sit about 180 miles away from Stonehenge, which is much farther than initially reported by Thomas in 1923. Mike Parker Pearson, who studies British prehistory at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, and led the project, says that this “shows an unusual degree of connectivity and unity between different tribal groups in the west and east of southern Britain, uniting to build Stonehenge despite their geographical distance apart.” Previously, scientists flirted with the idea that the early builders may have transported the bluestones south to Milford Haven and then brought them to Stonehenge’s location by water. But now, since both quarries are located on the hills’ north side, Pearson and his team think that people probably carried them east over land instead. “It is making us think that this was part of a coordinated and unified operation that extended across southern Britain and that Stonehenge's purpose was to unify the two cultures (east and west) of Neolithic Britain,” he says.
Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales is one of the two geologists involved in the study, and his work contributed greatly to pinning down the exact quarry locations. Based on his findings, he says, it’s likely that the “bluestones were first erected to form a henge by a Neolithic population in Pembrokeshire, and then as that population migrated to Salisbury Plain they literally took their henge with them.”
One quarry site, Carn Goedog, is what principally produced dolerite (diorite) bluestones, a blue-green igneous rock with white spots. Craig Rhos-y-felin, the other quarry, is responsible for the rhyolite bluestones found at Stonehenge. Rhyolite is a similarly “hard” rock, but lighter blue in color. Though both quarry sites produced rocks that made their way to Stonehenge, Bevins says, they don’t have much in common beyond that. Rocks from both locations are “very well-jointed,” he says, “so extracting a 'pillar-sized' monolith would be a relatively easy task.” Bevins and his fellow geologist, Rob Ixer of University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, performed “detailed whole rock chemical analysis as well as detailed mineral chemistry analysis”—specifically involving flecks of zircons in the stone, which he calls “an innovative approach.” This analysis indicated a match between the rocks at Craig Rhos-y-felin and at least one type of rhyolite at Stonehenge.
The only other known megalith quarry in Neolithic Europe is one on the Orkney Islands, where the slabs lay horizontally, not vertically. Moving forward, the team plans to look for a dismantled bluestone circle close to theoe quarries. Depending on what they find, it may suggest whether Bevins is right, and Stonehenge once stood elsewhere before it was dismantled and moved, stone-by-stone, to the familiar Salisbury Plain.
Just under the surface of the Salar de Atacama in Chile is the world’s largest and purest active reserve of lithium. Surrounded by volcanoes, the salar, or dry lake salt flat, is the “literally the driest place in the world,” says United States Geological Survey (USGS) mineral commodity specialist Brian Jaskula. Andean flamingos touch down periodically as they migrate between their breeding grounds in Chile and Argentine wetlands, but there is no full-time life visible there—not even insects. That aridity makes it the hottest spot for lithium extraction in the world.
From above, as in this photo recently released from NASA and the USGS's Landsat-8 satellite, it looks like a mosaic of rectangular oases. Swimming-pool blues and hot whites, and greens that range from dark and lawn-like to Mountain Dew–hued pattern a flat umber backdrop, representing different stages in the 18-month lithium-mining process. The blues are brine freshly drawn from as few as 15 feet below the salar floor, containing 0.02 percent lithium, a concentration that seems small but is about 100 times higher than commercial lithium sites elsewhere in the world.
Until 2003, lithium was a relatively minor commodity, used to stabilize fluctuating moods and temperatures—in pill or solution form and in glassware such as Pyrex—and as a hydroxide to grease car door hinges and wheels through hot days and frigid winters. Now, lithium greases the wheels of modern life, in the form of lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones, laptops, and, increasingly, electric vehicles.
“Rain is the enemy of a brine operation like this,” says Jaskula. With a high initial lithium concentration below and a lot of sun and hot wind to do the drying work once its above ground, the Salar de Atacama contains the perfect characteristics for lithium extraction. The goal is to evaporate water and remove adulterating elements such as magnesium, boron, and salt from the brine until it reaches a lithium concentration of six percent—in the chartreuse pools—at which point it can be trucked away to processing plants where it is separated and shipped all around the world.
While electric vehicles promise to improve upon the environmental degradation caused by fossil fuels, the appetite for lithium might not be so sustainable either. The International Energy Agency predicts that more than 120 million new electric cars will be on the road over the next 20 years, requiring a significant quantity of lithium. Just yesterday, a new lithium-mining prospector in the region dropped its project due to protests from the Atacama indigenous community, and it was quickly swallowed up by Chilean SQM–one of two companies that dominate the lithium business in Chile (the other is American Albermarle). While lithium looks like a climate change oasis from above, its future is still not so clear.
How do you feed eight billion people during a nuclear winter?
David Denkenberger wants to build a system to feed eight billion people in a world without sunlight. His inspiration: the humble mushroom. In 2011, Denkenberger was reading a scientific paper that suggested that after such a catastrophe, humans would die out, while mushrooms would thrive in the dark. According to Denkenberger, his reaction was, "Well, why don’t we just eat the mushrooms and not go extinct?”
A sunless future is more possible than you might think. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists calls the world’s current risk of nuclear war “urgent.” Massive supervolcano eruptions, though rare, have threatened life on earth before. In both scenarios, the biggest threat to human survival comes not from the original explosion, but from the resulting blanket of soot that would cover the earth, blocking all or most sunlight. Without the ability to engage in conventional agriculture, common wisdom holds, billions of people would starve. Yet according to Denkenberger’s estimates, with proper planning, technological development, and international cooperation, up to 80% of the world’s current population could survive in a world without sun.
To make this preparation a reality, Denkenberger, an engineer and assistant professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, co-founded the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). Their focus on alternative food sources has led them to leaves and wood that would be left from dying forests, protein-rich single-cell bacteria that could be farmed in methane, and “weird” deep-ocean fish that would survive from nutrients in the water.
Some of the needed technologies already exist. New methods of producing biofuel turn inedible corn leaves into sugar, then use that sugar to make ethanol. But when resources are scarce, that sugar could be used for food. A factory in France is already extracting nutritious protein concentrate from otherwise-inedible green leaves at an industrial scale. (Decaying leaves would be a food source in many apocalyptic scenarios.) Other disaster-proof foods, such as protein-rich insects, have been part of traditional diets for millennia. Meanwhile, since sheep, cows, and goats can eat dead grass and leaves that humans can’t, meat and dairy would remain part of our diet in nuclear winter, says Denkenberger.
Technology alone won’t save us if society breaks down and violence reigns. With the exception of food stocks that would only last a few months, Denkenberger says, countries currently have no official plans for surviving a disaster of this scale. Absent this framework, Denkenberger fears a massive disaster would likely result in bloody conflict, as countries battle over scarce resources. That’s why ALLFED is lobbying countries to invest in alternative food research and create official protocols for addressing these extreme conditions now. While some policymakers have dismissed ALLFED's mission in favor of a focus on present-day food insecurity, says Denkenberger, several university groups have gotten on board.
This post-apocalyptic food shouldn’t just be hardy—it should also taste good. “We’re interested in how to make these alternate foods appealing to people,” Denkenberger says. He’s personally sampled several of the foods in ALLFED’s arsenal, including insects and spirulina, a single-cell organism similar to the protein-rich bacteria ALLFED proposes to grow. So how will the sunless bacterial superfoods of the future taste? “Kind of like spinach,” Denkenberger says.
According to KnowYourMeme, the repository of information about internet trends and slang, the phrase “recorded with a potato,” in various forms, dates back to 2009. Or maybe 2010. Or earlier. It’s hard to tell. But the phrase had a moment among gamers, YouTube commenters, and forum users: If someone posted something lousy or of poor quality, like a dark and blurry photo, users might reply, “did you take this with a potato?” The response got so ubiquitous that someone even made a potato into a camera. (The photos it took are pretty great.)
That use spun outward. People, especially very online people who do not speak English as a first language, sometimes apologize for their “potato English.”
This is just the latest in a very long line of potato-isms. Across the world and throughout history, the potato has been used linguistically nearly as much as it has been used culinarily, with similarly varied results. Hot potato, small potatoes, couch potato, meat and potatoes. And that’s just in modern American English! Why is the potato seemingly the most idiom-friendly foodstuff?
The potato is native to the Andes Mountains, where by the time Europeans arrived, it had become the staple crop for an empire as large and probably grander than any in Europe. “It was like bread in France, or rice in southern China,” says Charles C. Mann, the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. In the Andes there are thousands of varieties of potatoes, and many preparation methods that are still essentially unknown elsewhere, even though the potato is now a global crop. (One of those is chuños, which are frozen potatoes that have the moisture driven out of them. They end up freeze-dried, which gives them a shelf-life of decades.)
Such staple foods become so ubiquitous that they have a high likelihood of finding their way into the lexicon in the form of phrases and sayings. The reason is pretty obvious; these foods are the sustaining lifeforce for much of a population, and anything that important is bound to have a linguistic impact. A standard greeting in Thailand, for example, is “Gin khao reuyang?” which literally translates as “Have you eaten rice yet?” In Western Europe and North America, “bread” is synonymous with “money,” a sort of grim capitalistic equating of life and cash.
The records of the pre-Columbian and immediately post-contact Andes are not particularly good, but we do have some records that suggest that the potato had such a place in the Quechuan languages of the mountain population. According to a 17th-century Jesuit priest who spent time in these communities, the time a potato takes to cook was used as a shorthand division of time, so one might say that it took someone three pots of potatoes to build a roof. That continues to this day. According to the book Food, Power, and Resistance in the Andes: Exploring Quechua Verbal and Visual Narratives, by Alison Krögel, referring to potatoes can be used to cut a local down to size. If someone from the mountain region begins to put on the airs of a coastal resident of big-city Lima, a friend might say that they are “tan Cusqueño como la papa wayru,” meaning that they’re actually no more cosmopolitan than a local mountain potato.
European explorers/conquerors were completely baffled by the potato when they encountered it. Most of their world’s staple crops were cereal grains—wheat and barley, for example, and rice had been around Europe for a few hundred years. But an underground staple? Europe had carrots, beets, and turnips, sure, but nothing like the potato. Of the world’s major root staple crops, most—including the potato, sweet potato, and cassava—are native to the Americas. (The others are taro from South and Southeast Asia and the yam from, probably, Africa.)
We might as well address the actual word “potato.” It is … wrong, an anglicization of the Spanish patata, itself is a corruption of batata, which means “sweet potato” in the Taíno dialect the Spanish explorers encountered in the Caribbean. The Spanish, having never seen anything quite like either the sweet potato or the potato, simply used the same word for both, even though the plants are barely related. The Quechua word for potato is papa, which has mostly remained the go-to word for “potato” in Latin America.
Anyway! The thing about the potato is that it’s a really, truly amazing crop, and that’s part of the reason it has a toehold in idiomatic language around the world. It’s capable of growing almost anywhere, and it thrives in lousy, sandy, and/or acidic soil. It grows particularly well on rocky hillsides and mountainsides, where cereal crops don’t do so well. It requires basically no equipment to store or prepare, unlike the vast grain silos, mills, and community ovens used until recently to make bread from wheat in Europe. It keeps for weeks on end, longer if kept in a cool, dry place like a cellar. It’s easy to grow, and extremely efficient: Mann says that small farmers in Northern Europe got four times as many calories per acre of potatoes compared with cereal grains.
The timing could not have been better for the introduction of the potato to Northern Europe. The planet underwent what’s usually called the Little Ice Age from about the 16th to the 19th centuries. The climate was cooler than it was before, during the medieval period, or after, in the modern era. Europe was also heavily rural and very poor, and the rural poor, especially in places such as Ireland, did not have access to the best land. What they were left with was cold weather, hilly and unforgiving farmland, and hunger. The potato was the solution.
Still, it took some time—a hundred years or so in Central Europe, a little longer to the West—for the potato to catch on, partly because it was so unfamiliar, and partly because there was a myth that it was toxic. (To be fair, the leaves actually are.) But hunger and war are powerful forces, and by the 1700s many European governments were actively promoting the potato to their peasantry, as fuel for potential low-cost armies.
In the Andes, potatoes were a significant part of the diet of the poor as well—the elite got to eat maize, which is harder to grow in the region—but potatoes were not a stigmatized food. In Great Britain, though, the potato was closely associated with the northern poor. “It's associated with cheap, with poor. We're not talking caviar, here,” says Andrew Smith, author of Potato: A Global History. And that stigma showed up in the language.
“Small potatoes” are something worthless. A “couch potato”—a phrase apparently coined by a guy in Pasadena in the 1970s—is lazy, stationary, lumpy. Same with the newer version, “mouse potato,” referring to a person seemingly permanently attached to a computer mouse. (That one could probably use another update.) “Meat and potatoes” can be positive or negative depending on the situation; it might mean stolid and efficient, or it could mean boring, uninspiring, pedestrian—the latter qualities historically associated with the poor. In Spain, “potato” can be used to describe something low-quality; check out the comment on this post describing a car as “una patata de coche,” a “potato of a car.”
But there are also plenty of terms, in English and other languages, that are either neutral or positive toward the tuber. A mostly extinct phrase, once popular in Australia and New Zealand, is “not quite the clean potato,” meaning something or someone not without fault. “Hot potato” is pretty literal and neutral. In Cajun and Quebec French, you might hear “Lâche pas la patate”—literally, “Don’t let go of the potato,” but really meaning, “Don’t give up.” In France, there’s “avoir la patate,” which you might say if you’re having a good day. The literal translation: you “have the potato.”
When Russians talk about going to a dacha, a summer getaway home, they’ll say they’re going “na kartoshku,” or “to the potatoes,” since many summer experiences heavily involve gardening. Concepts are sometimes compared to potatoes, too. In 2005, then–Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said, “Democracy is not a potato that you can transplant from one garden to another.” A Russian adage holds that “Love is not a potato; you cannot just throw it out the window.”
There’s just something evocative about the potato. It grows underground, and is covered in dirt. It can be lumpy and ugly, at least when compared with something like a shiny perfect apple, a tasseled and golden ear of corn, or a vibrant, full-to-bursting tomato. It asks little of its tender. But it can sustain many, easily and efficiently. It’s the food of the people. And it’s in the language we potato-eaters speak, too.
Many of the eateries Atlas Obscura readers (and staff!) recommended are said to have been the favorite hangouts of influential historical figures, such as George Washington or Karl Marx. Some have evolved into popular tourist attractions, while others have managed to keep quietly plugging along, serving up much the same fare as they did well over a century ago.
Check out some of our community members' favorite historically significant restaurants and bars below, and if you have one of your own to share, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going.
Claim to Fame: It's the oldest restaurant in London.
“Rules was established by Thomas Rule in 1798 making it the oldest restaurant in London, be sure to go upstairs first for a drink before dinner…” — Luxurious_Nomad
Claim to Fame: Opened in 1886, it may be the oldest café in Paris.
“I suggest going early in the evening so you can roam around looking at the different rooms and paintings without scandalizing any French diners!” — Alex_Mayyasi
Claim to Fame: Favorite café of a number of writers, politicians, and thinkers.
“I kick myself for not getting to Café Landtmann in Vienna when I was there. That was the spot to sit around and argue politics in the early 20th century. And considering everyone from Stalin to Trotsky to Freud to Mahler to Klimt to Hitler lived within two miles of it at the same time, they may very well have all convened there.” — tralfamadore
Claim to Fame: Opened in the early 1700s, it's one of the oldest bars in the U.S.
“A bar, not a restaurant, in New Orleans. Pirates got in fights there, and it looks like it. They have the original bar, which dips in the middle from years of glasses being slammed down on it.” — tralfamadore
Claim to Fame: They may have invented the French dip sandwich.
“How could you go to L.A. for historic and old restaurants and not go to Philippe’s (founded in 1908), and home to the great french dip sandwich? It is right next to Union Station and Chinatown, so if you are taking the train, this stop is a must. Close to City Hall too, so you will see a lot of local politicians, workers, police officers, etc. eating there.” — kld123
Claim to Fame: Washington's "first saloon," which has hosted many important figures from American history.
“The knock against this place is that it has moved locations a few times, but the history is still compelling. Many important people in U.S. history ate, drank, or stayed at the boarding house. Back before the days of intensive Secret Service details and security protocols, it wasn’t unusual for a president to walk over from the White House for a drink. Several U.S. presidents were regulars. In this day and age it’s hard to imagine walking down to your local bar and seeing a current president of the United States sitting at the bar with a beer.” — Bacon_McBeardy
Claim to Fame: Historic pub that once served Charles Dickens.
“The original name is the New Hall Inn, but it’s called 'The Hole in T’ Wall.' It’s located in Bowness upon Lake Windermere in England. It is a pub opened in 1612 and has been in continuous operation since. Its claim to fame, so to speak, is that Charles Dickens frequented the establishment while staying nearby on his extended trip to Cumbria. It’s a beautiful old pub in its own right, with a colorful history. Originally the pub was separated from the blacksmith’s shop next door by a common brick wall. At some point a hole was knocked in the wall so that the blacksmith could reach through and have a beer while he was working. Hence the pub became known by its moniker.” — Bacon_McBeardy
Claim to Fame: It's the oldest restaurant in Vienna.
“It's a fun one, it’s a little touristy, but only because it’s been visited by some of the world’s greats! Vienna’s oldest tavern has served everyone from Mozart to Mark Twain to Johnny Cash, and those famous guests left their signatures on the walls for ordinary guests like us to see.” — larissa
Claim to Fame: Was once the headquarters of George Washington.
“Founded in 1762, it’s where members of the Continental Congress met, George Washington included. It’s both frequented by locals as well as tourists, and is a great place to stop in if you’re visiting the city. The restaurants on Stone Street (practically hidden from view, but just around the corner) are also well worth checking out, even if they aren’t historically important).” — lyndale
Claim to Fame: Thought to be one of the oldest restaurants in Europe.
“The lore around it is that it’s where Mephistopheles met Faust, which happens to be my last name. We made a reservation when we went there, and when we told them our last name, they kind of rolled their eyes, like, “ha ha… good one.” Anyway, it’s a cool place!” — amykevinalice
Casa de Los Azulejos in Mexico City, Mexico
Claim to Fame: It's a former palace, known for its intricate tile work.
“It was built back when the country was still a colony of Spain. Some time in the 19th century it became a fashionable Sanborn’s restaurant, which it still is to this day. It has a lot of history because it was a gathering place for the pre-revolutionary elite and then for revolutionaries during the Mexican revolution when Zapata’s forces invaded the city. There is also a beautiful mural by the muralist Orozco on one of the walls and the food is excellent.” — Monsieur_Mictlan
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
A new NASA robot is braving extreme temperatures to learn about the Red Planet.
A new NASA mission to the Red Planet will, for the first time, provide a daily weather report from Mars, where things right now are a whole other level of cold. So far, according to the mission’s website, recorded temperatures have maxed out at 15 degrees Fahrenheit and dipped as far as 140 degrees below zero.
So pity the InSight lander, the robot that has to sit there and register these abominable chills. The lander is located at Elysium Planitia, what NASA calls “a flat, smooth plain” just north of the planet’s equator. InSight—which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport—is, according to NASA, the first robot to conduct an in-depth study of Mars's so-called “inner space”: “its crust, mantle, and core.” This research, the agency said, can help establish how Mars and other rocky planets—like Mercury, Venus, and our very own—formed over four billion years ago. Using the tools indicated in its name, the lander will measure the planet’s “vital signs”: its pulse, its reflexes, and its temperature—each of which can teach us about Mars’s composition, and how it compares to Earth’s.
The lander uses a group of sensors called the Auxiliary Payload Subsystem (APSS) to take stock of the planet’s weather, allowing us to follow along with the mission from here on Earth while also helping the scientists sharpen their research. Mars’s temperature swings can distort measurements taken by the lander’s seismometer and heat probe, so continuously tracking things such as air pressure and wind can help scientists determine whether a “marsquake” is actually occurring, or whether the instruments are simply recording “noise” from unrelated changes in the weather. APSS will be measuring the air pressure, air temperature, wind, and magnetic field for every second of every Martian day—known as a sol—for at least two Earth years, allowing enough time to account for seasonal variations. (One sol runs for approximately 24 hours and 39 minutes.)
The air pressure sensors have also proven useful in tracking low-pressure whirlwinds known as “dust devils,” which have left visible streaks on the planet’s surface. While we do see our own dust devils on Earth, the Martian variety are, according to a press release, far more imposing—registering heights of between three and six miles and, sometimes, diameters of more than 300 feet.
This mission does not mark the first time that scientists have taken on the role of Martian meteorologists, but it will provide a newly extensive extraterrestrial weather report that, ultimately, may help us learn more about our own planet, too.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a pair of grape hemispheres exposed to intense microwave radiation will spark, igniting a plasma."
The literature-inclined will notice that the above quote is a riff on the famous first line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. But while sparks may fly between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, that's nothing compared to the gouts of flame that ensue when two halves of a grape get close enough to touch while spinning inside a microwave. The above quote, in fact, is the first line of another great piece of literature, published yesterday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the paper "Linking plasma formation in grapes to microwave resonances of aqueous dimers," physicists Hamza K. Khattak, Pablo Bianucci, and Aaron D. Slepkova deployed many grapes and several microwaves in the name of science. Microwaving a nearly halved grape to watch the middle ignite is a popular, much-documented pastime, and for decades, this fiery parlor trick has been filmed and shared on the internet, where it mystified observers. The researchers set out to solve the mystery.
The leading theory was that when two halves of a grape are microwaved, the skin bridge connecting them acts as an antenna. The current that runs through the antenna heats up until a plasma forms. (Plasma, by the way, is an ionized gas that occurs when atoms are heated to the point that they release their electrons. Lightning is plasma, as is the sun.)
That turned out not to be the case, says study author Pablo Bianucci. A physicist at Concordia University, he's been fielding calls all day from journalists interested in their fiery findings. His fellow researcher, Slepkova, first learned about the grape phenomenon on the internet in 1995, and they began studying it together as a side project in 2015. But it was only when undergraduate Khattak joined the team in 2017, says Biannuci, that the research "pushed forward very quickly." Using rejiggered microwaves that allowed them to take photos, Slepkova and Khattak began microwaving grapes. According to the paper, the team used "thermal-imaging techniques and computer simulations" to examine what was happening.
It turned out that cutting the grapes wasn't necessary, and neither was the bridge of skin. Even two whole peeled grapes side-by-side could induce fireworks. In fact, any grape-like objects, including blueberries, cherry tomatoes, quail eggs, and hydrogel water beads, do the same—a fact the researchers assiduously proved by microwaving each in turn.
This insight led to team to a new theory. In what Bianucci calls "a very lucky coincidence," grapes are mostly made of water, which, as it happens, reduces the wavelengths of microwaves significantly. From around 12 centimeters in the air, they go to around one or two centimeters in water: a bit smaller than your average grape. "Microwaves can get trapped inside the grape," says Bianucci. If a grape is microwaved by itself, a hotspot forms in its center from the trapped microwaves. But when two grapes are close enough, the waves can "hop" from one to the other. "This hopping results in a very strong electromagnectic field in between the grapes," he says. When the field is strong enough to ionize the sodium and potassium ions in the grapes, it results in a tiny fireball.
The team's discovery took several years and resulted in the deaths of 12 microwaves. (Even heavily modified microwaves "don't like to run empty" save for two grapes.) This might seem like lighthearted research, and the paper acknowledges that "observing a piece of fruit burst into flames in a microwave oven is exciting and memorable." But there are also real-world implications. As Bianucci explained to Physics World, these findings could come in handy in the field of nanophotonics (the study of light on a very small scale). Meanwhile, anyone interested in a free light show can microwave away (carefully), secure in the knowledge that we have a better idea of what's happening in there.
Generally, zoos serve an educational purpose, providing kids and the curious with opportunities to see animals up close. But they also conduct field research in some cases, and are frontiers for veterinary care. This week, the ZSL London Zoo released unique images of some of its 18,000 animals that come from these veterinary efforts—X-rays—shared as a part of their Vets in Action program.
The X-ray photos are taken during routine health checks by the on-site veterinarians. During these relatively frequent checkups, animals are weighed and measured and examined in detail, in particular for health issues that are known to visit certain species. Most of the creatures are comfortable during the procedures, thanks in large part to their daily interactions with their caretakers.
Regular zoo-goers know what geckos or armadillos look like from the outside, in their enclosures, but such internal views can be a rare treat for most. “We can tell so much about an animal’s health from looking at an X-ray, from the strength of their bones to how healthy their heart is,” says Heather MacIntosh, ZSL London Zoo veterinary nurse, in a statement. “They’re vital to our work.”
The zoo, which officially opened on April 27, 1828, is the oldest zoo in the world originally intended purely for scientific study. Today it houses 698 different species of animals, from pygmy hippos to the postman butterfly. It has also held some creatures that are not with us any more, from thylacines (known as “Tasmanian tigers”) to quaggas (relatives of the zebra that have since been resurrected through selective zebra breeding).
MacIntosh says her favorite X-rays are of the snakes: “Humans have 33 vertebrae while snakes have between 200 and 400, which is how they’re so incredibly agile,” she says. “It’s amazing to see it on screen.” At first, it may seem surprising that the animals are able to sit still for the scans. But these animals are all born and raised in captivity (and hence cannot be returned to the wild), so they have received extensive daily training to keep both themselves and their keepers safe. The animals are “totally unfazed during simple procedures,” such as X-rays and getting blood drawn from their tails. Unlike some of us.
It had been 40 years since the last sighting in Indonesia's Maluku Islands.
The humid air in the northern Maluku Islands of Indonesia, also known as the Spice Islands, is heavy with nutmeg and clove. These lowland rainforests were the backdrop for the recent rediscovery of a remarkable animal—Wallace’s giant bee, known locally as raja ofu, meaning “king bee,” and with good reason. Wings spread, the largest specimens (who are actually queens) can be the size of an extra large chicken egg, and they sport jaws like pliers.
Wallace’s giant bee—the world’s largest—was first documented by science in 1858, by English entomologist Alfred Russel Wallace, well known for independently arriving at the theory of evolution through natural selection alongside Charles Darwin. Although the insect would later be named after him, Wallace didn’t even identify it as a bee at the time. In a record of his journeys, The Malay Archipelago, he described it as “a large black wasp-like insect with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.” He handed some 100,000 insect, bird, and animal samples—including this single female specimen—to various British research institutions. In 1861, British Museum entomologist Fredereck Smith confirmed not only that Megachile pluto, as he dubbed it, was a bee, but also that it is the very biggest of the world’s 20,000 known species. But it’s been a long time since one has been seen in the wild.
Wallace’s description sparked the curiosity of Clay Bolt, a natural history and conservation photographer who specializes in documenting bees native to North America. “I’d wanted to go [to the Malukus] from the perspective of seeing these species that were integral to the theory of evolution,” he says. Along with his friend, entomologist Eli Wyman, manager of an insect lab at Princeton University, he set off to Indonesia in January 2019 through the nonprofit Global Wildlife Conservation’s “Search for Lost Species” program, which seeks out creatures feared lost because they have not been sighted in a long time.
The last record of a live giant bee was from 1981, by American biologist Adam Messer. It’s not clear why it’s been so long since the bee has been seen last seen. The northern Malukus are difficult to reach, and the bee, unlike many familiar social varieties, is a more solitary sort. They might share a nest with one another, one with a single entry point, like an apartment complex, but females nest alone while potential mates must wait outside. She collects pollen to form a nutritious ball for her offspring, then seals herself inside to protect her single egg.
M. pluto is so rare that less than a year ago, a specimen of sold for over $9,000 on eBay. Bolt and Wyman used Messer’s accounts of his sighting to narrow their search. It helps that 80 percent of the forests in the northern Malukus are still intact. (Elsewhere in Indonesia, palm oil plantations for the production of biofuels have cleared millions upon millions of acres of forest, wiping out wildlife habitat and contributing climate change.)
Wallace’s giant bee nests in termite mounds that grow on trees, and its formidable jaws are used to scrape tree resin, which it uses to line its nest, waterproofing it against the rainforest climate and protecting it from the termites. For a week, Bolt and Wyman peered into about 30 termite mounds. Just as they were beginning to lose hope, Iswan, an Indonesian guide and conservationist, spotted an unusually low mound, about eight feet above the ground. Iswan later said that, tired and hungry, he nearly passed by the mound without mentioning it. But, clambering up an embankment he spotted a perfectly round hole, where he saw something move. Bolt followed with his headlamp, and shone a light on the first bee of its kind to have been seen in nearly 40 years.
In order to photograph her, they gently tickled her with a blade of grass. She walked out of her nest into a box where they could photograph her as she flew around. “The sounds of the wings was absolutely amazing. It was a deep, slow thrum," says Bolt. "I’ll never forget it.” These photographs are the first step toward a larger goal—beginning to work more closely with locals to search for more nests and promote conservation in the region. “Just knowing that this bee’s giant wings go thrumming through this ancient Indonesian forest helps me feel that, in a world of so much loss, hope and wonder still do exist.”
When you gotta go, you gotta go—ideally, without spending too much time thinking about all the butts that perched on that toilet seat before yours landed there.
However unsavory the sights and smells of a communal commode may be, these shared spaces can tell us a lot about people who lived (and peed and pooped) a long time ago. Goofy, bawdy art decorating bathroom walls shows us what some Romans, at least, liked to look at when they knew they’d be sitting for a while; the still-smelly slop inside Renaissance latrines recently helped archaeologists reconstruct a community’s diet. In London, a 900-year-old plank with three roughly carved holes is giving curators a peek at how people took care of business along a tributary of the Thames that has since been rerouted underground.
“The loo was found lying over a cesspit close to the River Fleet,” Kate Sumnall, a curator at the Museum of London, told the U.K.’s Press Association. The 12th-century plank—which could accommodate three derrières at a time—turned up in an excavation in the 1980s, according to The Guardian, but the team didn’t publish or exhibit their find. That’s going to change in May 2019, when it will be on view at the Museum of London Docklands, in an exhibition devoted to London’s lost waterways and the loot hauled from them.
Meanwhile, the researchers think they’ve found a clue about who stopped by the plank most often. They pinpointed the long-ago occupants of the tenement that stood where the plank was found, and suspect that the owners—the capmaker John de Flete and his wife, Cassandra—were the ones “whose bottoms probably sat on it,” Sumnall told The Guardian.
Sumnall also told the Press Association that John and Cassandra may have shared the privy with a pack of neighbors. What, exactly, do people chat about when they’re popping a squat together? Visitors will get a chance to try out a replica—fully clothed, please—when the old wooden throne is on view.
Both the inside and outside spelled out chocolate.
During the classical period of the Maya, from approximately 250 to 900 A.D., chocolate was a cornerstone of daily life. It was currency, a ritual ingredient, and a pleasurable drink. But until recently, the details of Maya life were fairly opaque, largely due to the destruction wrought by the conquering Spanish. In the 1980s, after intense effort by Mayanist scholars, there was breakthrough after breakthrough in deciphering Maya glyphs, the written symbols that survived in codices, stone carvings, and pottery. One milestone was the examination of a remarkable ancient vessel, which was found, by an unlikely party, to contain chocolate.
In 1984, archeologists discovered a pristine Maya tomb in the Río Azul region of Guatemala. Among the royal offerings, they found an exquisite pot. Topped with a twist-top and a handle painted like jaguar skin, it contained an intriguing residue. One member of the excavation told the New York Times that had it been “sold in New York, [it] would bring enough to finance a year's worth of excavations.'' Several Maya glyphs adorned the sides and lid.
It was two of these glyphs that stuck out to Mayanist David Stuart.
Even though he was only a teenager, Stuart was already an old hand. He began studying Maya writing as a young child, and received the MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the “genius grant’) at the age of 18. Now professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, he recalls it as an exciting time in the field. “Everything was kind of breaking open in those years in terms of deciphering,” he says.
But he has a soft spot for the Río Azul vessel. “I was actually the person they brought on to read all of the hieroglyphs that they found in their excavations, which was a pretty cool job to have,” Stuart says. While Stuart only saw photographs of the pot, he was nevertheless struck by it. “Wow, that is one bizarre vessel,” he remembers thinking. Not only did it have an unusual shape, but the glyphs adorning it were remarkably well preserved. “And then it was like, ‘Wait a minute, two of them spell out the word kakaw.’”
Cacao: that is, chocolate. “It's one of the few words we use that's actually Mayan,” Stuart says. The Maya glyph for cacao, as it appears on the Río Azul vessel, looks like a fish. But “it turns out the fish is a phonetic sign,” Stuart says. He recognized that the glyph combining a fish (ka), a comb or fin (ka), and the sign for -w(a) was, of course, kakaw. While Mayanist Floyd Lounsbury was the first to phonetically decipher a cacao glyph a decade prior, deciphering the cacao glyph on a Maya vase was a breakthrough.
Mayanists had long debated the meaning of glyphs upon ceramic vessels from the Classical Maya period. Some believed they had little meaning, while others considered them mostly “prayers, or you know, orations to dead ancestors,” says Stuart. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, if they're talking about chocolate, it's probably not a prayer to the dead.’” Having noticed the same glyph on other vessels, Stuart thought they could be chocolate pots.
The archeologists and anthropologists working on the Río Azul project mused over whom to send the residue to for analysis. “Okay, well, who knows the chemistry of chocolate really well?” Stuart says with a chuckle. So, they called the number on the back of a Hershey’s bar and got in touch with W. Jeffrey Hurst, an analytical chemist at the Hershey Food Corporation Technical Center. The chocolate company had labs full of PhDs, where Hurst and chemist colleague Stanley M. Tarka tested the residue.
Sure enough, says Stuart, “they ran the chemical signatures, and they were spot on.” Hershey chemists found caffeine and theobromine in the residue. “The only plant or organic material in all of ancient America that can produce those two chemical signatures together are cacao.”
The vessel wasn’t adorned with prayers at all. Instead, it and similar containers were emblazoned with the name of who it belonged to, and its usage. “We realized they're not writing esoteric stuff. They're writing down something like ‘This is his cup for chocolate,’” Stuart says. Kings and other elite members of society “were trading them around. They were kind of like souvenir mugs.” The glyphs also reveal that the vessel belonged to K’inich Lakamtuun, an early ruler of Río Azul who likely lived around 400 A.D. Other glyphs refer to two different varieties of chocolate, which perhaps are “long-lost place names that gave particular growing-spots, like our wine varieties,” Stuart notes in an email.
At the time, cacao residue from Río Azul was the earliest discovered chocolate. But that didn’t last long. After Stuart and others published papers on the vessel and its residue, other people started testing ceramics as well. It turned out that cacao was the most common glyph upon Maya ceramics. The Río Azul vessel “jumpstarted a lot of research in the decipherment of what’s written on pots,” Stuart says. Later, Stuart would write that much of the progress in the 1980s and early ‘90s was due to the study of “repetitious and highly formulaic pottery texts.”
While many historians and linguists once doubted that Maya glyphs had much to say, scholars can now read over 90 percent of them, and they have provided historical, political, and anthropological insights. Today, the Río Azul vessel resides in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in Guatemala, having played its own small but sweet role.
The 19th-century device accurately tracks 4,000 years with nine cylinders and a crank.
A very early computer, quite unlike any other, is discreetly hanging in the sacristy of a small chapel in the heart of Turin, the beautiful Italian city at the foot of the Alps. Thousands of people pass by every day along Via Garibaldi, one of the main shopping thoroughfares in town, but hardly anyone knows it is there. That is because the tiny baroque jewel that owns the artifact is hidden in plain sight, and the church only opens on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings for mass. Still, anyone in-the-know or curious enough to find it will be awestruck by the Perpetual Calendar of Giovanni Antonio Amedeo Plana.
Built by the astronomer and mathematician in 1831, the Perpetual Calendar took 10 years to complete, from planning to assembly. The device, which resides in the Chapel of Bankers and Merchants, operates via a simple wooden crank under the adorned golden frame, a crank that hides a stunningly accurate universal mechanical calculator spanning the years 1 to 4,000. Want to know the day of the week that the Western Roman Empire fell to the barbarians, on September 4, 476? The calendar will tell you that it was a Monday. Or maybe the phase of the moon on the day you were born? Or the date of Easter a thousand years from now (April 18, 3019)? All of this information can be accessed by a pre-internet machine made of fragile wood and paper, and communicated through 46,000 little numbers carefully arranged around nine cylinders. Each of these is linked to a central one—the only adjustable part of the device—where the user can input the year. That cylinder synchronously regulates all the others through gears and chains.
The display of the calendar actually looks like a painting, though a visually dense one, and it includes a range of fixed information: a chronology of popes, from St. Peter to Gregory XVI (the pontiff of Plana's time); portraits of Julius Caesar and of Pope Gregory XIII (progenitors of the two main Western calendar systems); and depictions of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and King Charles Albert of Sardinia, two Italian sovereigns who were supporters of science in the 1830s. As for the mechanism, its results appear in windows running down the center of the device. They indicate lunar and solar cycles, moveable Catholic holidays, days of the week and of saints for the year in question.
According to Giovanni Demichelis, a longtime member of the congregation of the Chapel of Bankers and Merchants, "This is the first calculation system run by fixed-program set of codes ever constructed." (That’s not entirely certain, but it's definitely early and anomalous.) Demichelis became an appassionato about Plana's machine some 20 years ago, when a group of Japanese researchers from the Tokyo Polytechnic University came to Turin in order to have a look at how the calendar works.
"They spent a whole morning here studying it and then offered to buy it for their museum of electronic machines, because the concept with which this was built is exactly the same as the one behind the first electronic calculator made after World War II," he says. The chapel did not sell. Demichelis recalls that one members of the Japanese team asked if the calendar does indeed date to the 1830s. Upon confirmation of that, the visitors simply bowed in its direction.
Details of how the device actually works were more or less a secret until very recently. Plana, for all his assiduousness, did not leave any written material describing the mechanism inside. So in 2015 the prestigious Polytechnic University of Turin challenged its students to parse the algorithm that governs the machine. Four teams responded to the call. "This challenge has shown itself a useful way of valorizing the territory, proposing the use of engineering disciplines to improve the fruition of cultural goods," the university’s vice dean of research, Enrico Macii, said in a statement at the time.
The winning team of three students—Meysam Nasiri, Roberto Cappato, and Sergio Spano—spent months unraveling the device’s mysteries. "They came here a few times mainly to take pictures and do experimentations," says Demichelis. "After photographing all the calendar's columns, they have done their research and found the algorithm."
"To decode the mechanism, to perceive by intuition the functioning, almost without being able to touch it, because of its fragility,” Nasiri described the process to local newspaper Corriere della Sera, “going down a path of reverse engineering to go back to the origins, to the logic of that time, to the secrets." Nasiri, originally from Iran, wrote his thesis on the industrial design of the calendar. As part of their project, the three students built a smaller replica of the Perpetual Calendar with modern materials, which now resides alongside the original, as well as a digital version.
They were astounded by the precision of the original. It accounted for the 10 days (of October 1582) obliterated by the conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar (with blank spaces), accounts for leap days (every four years, except for years divisible by 100 and not 400), and tracks the phases of the moon and feast days through all of it. Notably, the calendar stops at the year 4,000. Some think Plana simply got tired of performing calculations, but Demichelis has a different theory.
Around that time in the future, our slightly inaccurate way for accounting for the true length of a year (leap years) will catch up with us—and the calendar will be off by a full day. Demichelis guesses Plana had surmised this and decided to halt the calendar there to maintain its accuracy, just in case. “If true,” he says, “it shows even better the greatness of this scientist.”
Plana was no shy, solitary researcher. From the Piedmont, he was educated at the École Polytechnique in France. He was the head of astronomy at the University of Turin and director of the local observatory. In 1832 he published a book in French, Théorie du mouvement de la lune, in which he describes his formula to calculate the position and cycles of the moon—any day, any year. Plana was famous and received many honors and awards for these contributions (maybe the greatest being the lunar crater later named for him), which impacted religion, for addressing moveable holidays tied to lunar and solar cycles; agriculture, for tracking planting and harvests; and navigation, for calculation of longitude and anticipation of tides. Naturally, commerce, war, and politics were influenced by all of these. The English Royal Navy, the most powerful in the world at the time, asked Plana for a fresh lunar chart every new year. His device, certainly, cut down on calculation time.
"I think his wife might have said to him, ‘You spend all night at the observatory and all day making calculations,” Demichelis guesses, laughing. “Do something out of it." As to how the device ended up in the Chapel of Bankers and Merchants, it is believed that a relative may have donated it upon becoming a member of the congregation around 1845 or 1850. Demichelis says that at the time, people thought the device an intriguing mechanical curiosity, rather than a landmark in the history of a technology that would change the world. Now we know better.
What else are you going to do with all those yolks?
“Did you know that our churches are made from eggs?” asks April Evangelista, a local food guide, as we walk through the towering doorway of the Philippines’ Holy Rosary Church in Angeles City. “That’s how they’ve survived typhoons and volcanic eruptions."
The Holy Rosary Church dates back to 1877 and the Spanish colonial era, a period when, Evangelista explains, “Local churches were built with egg whites.” As evangelizing Spanish colonists built churches across the islands, laborers used egg whites as an emulsifier in the concrete. “Food is in the foundations here,” Evangelista adds.
As the well-attended Holy Rosary Church attests, this had a lasting influence on the country’s architecture and spiritual life. But its legacy is also on display in Filipino bakeries and home kitchens. Because what else is there to do with millions of leftover egg yolks but bake delicious desserts?
Just outside of Angeles, local chef Atching Lillian is hosting a historical cooking class. Her recipes date from the 16th century, and the most prominent ingredient is egg yolk. This curious relationship between egg whites, desserts, and Filipino churches can be traced back to the arrival of the first Spaniards, who brought not only Christianity but cooking techniques too.
Pia Lim-Castillo, a culinary historian from the Philippines, emphasizes that after the arrival from New Spain of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in 1565, who later became the first governor of the Spanish Philippines, religious orders such as the Augustinians, Franciscans, and Jesuits were quick to follow. These religious orders built grand stone churches across the islands, as the Spanish looked to impose their religious beliefs across the archipelago.
The Spanish presence was a heavy one. For the Spanish Empire, the Philippines were an important trading center, connecting Chinese ports, the Spice Islands, and other parts of Asia to Spain through its territory in Mexico. The Spanish colonial era lasted from 1521 to 1898—time enough to build plenty of churches. “Taking into account all the churches built then,” writes Lim-Castillo, “the number of eggs used ran into the millions.”
The egg whites were needed to form a sort of mortar, known as argamasa, which binded and protected the building materials used to construct the churches. Egg whites were meant to make the mixture “more durable,” and historical records attest to this widespread practice.
“Records show that the dome of the Manila Cathedral was sealed in 1780 with a layer of lime, powdered brick, duck eggs, and bamboo sap,” Lim-Castillo notes in a paper titled “Eggs in Philippines Church Architecture and its Cuisine.” “Friar Mariano Gomes of Cavite listed duck eggs for the mortar in his expense list from 1824; his predecessor in 1808 also used duck eggs.”
It wasn’t just duck eggs, though. “Oral tradition tells us that … eggs from chickens and other poultry were solicited from the community,” writes Michelle Sotaridona Eusebio of the University of the Philippines Diliman, and “combined with lime, sand, water, and some special ingredients to make mortars.”
Across the Philippines, priests generally paid townspeople to provide labor and materials outside of planting and harvest times. The scene, as described by Regalado Trota Jose, author of Simbahan: Church Art in Colonial Philippines, was that “the menfolk hauled logs from the forest while women and children carried eggs and sand to the construction site.”
It is this history that Atching Lillian is helping to preserve in her kitchen, which is a treasure trove of historical artifacts and traditional cooking equipment. “I used to work as a chef in a five-star hotel,” she tells me as she prepares the dough for Pan de San Nicolas, a traditional biscuit dedicated to Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of bakers. But she tired of preparing foreign dishes and decided to instead preserve local recipes and history.
Before the Spanish arrived in the Philippines, the islands’ sweet tooth looked very different. “During pre-Hispanic times, the dessert or panghimagas of the Filipinos were just fruits served fresh,” writes Lim-Castillo, “like banana, coconut, watermelon, mango, guava, melon, and other tropical fruits.” She notes that her country’s fondness for sweets and desserts developed under Spanish colonialism. Lillian’s Pan de San Nicolas is just one example of cherished desserts introduced by the Spanish.
To make the San Nicolas cookies, Lillian shapes the dough using heavy wooden moulds, some of which she explains are more than 100 years old. “These were religious cakes,” she explains, “baked by the nuns during the Spanish time.” The moulds imprint the image of San Nicolas on the dough, and then she bakes the cookies in a Kalan, a traditional clay oven.
The primary ingredient for San Nicolas Cookies? Egg yolks of course. A lot of them.
Lillian mentions that she also has a favorite recipe for leche flan, one of the most popular Filipino desserts. This is another egg-centric dish that was brought to the Philippines by the Spanish. And in these and other cases, the availability of egg yolks, leftover from church construction, greased their adoption.
“The extensive use of egg white and eggshells brought about the ingenuity of the Filipino women who saw all these egg yolks being thrown in the river,” writes Lim-Castillo. “Recipes were created to make use of the egg yolks, like pan de San Nicolas, yema, tocino del cielo, leche flan, pastries, and tortas.”
The introduction of concrete in the late-19th century made egg-white construction a thing of the past. But by then, eggy desserts were on a solid foundation. Lim Castillo describes them as “comfort food for Filipinos” that have survived to today, and many have taken on distinctively Filipino adaptations. Perhaps the best example is halo-halo, a frozen Filipino dessert that mixes a rainbow of ingredients and flavors, including leche flan, which often tops the treat.
In her restaurant, Lillian brings out her finished San Nicolas cookies. They are soft, sweet, and almost buttery. She then unveils the leche flan she has been hiding. As I dig into this hearty Filipino dessert, she laughs and says, “You can always taste the egg yolks.”
Atlas Obscura readers recommend their favorite speleological spaces.
Caves! There's nothing like descending into one to remind you just how vast and fascinating our world is. Big, small, deep, shallow, natural or hand-crafted, the best caves are physical manifestations of the spirit of mystery and exploration.
Community members (plus a few members of our staff) told us about Mexican cenotes, Romanian salt mines, Chinese tunnels, and many more underground spaces full of natural and man-made wonders. Take a look at a selection of our favorite submissions below, and then head over the forums and tell us about your own favorite cave! Let's get subterranean.
“A conical and strange mountain in the north of Spain completely pierced with plenty of caves. There you can find some of the most ancient paintings made by human beings.” — Luis_Morato
“Wanna feel what it's like to be inside a mountain at 272 meters underground? Friouato Cave is the place to explore. It’s a unique adventure that made me feel like Lara Croft for about three hours.” — ggramsmith
“Can I put a cavelike tunnel in here? I always loved walking through Jhaishan Tunnel. Watching the sea water go back and forth, and listening to the classical music they pipe in (no, really), was always peaceful.” — Anne_Ewbank
“Škocjan Caves in Slovenia are the most dramatic and breathtaking I have ever seen. Visitors are in for such a treat! There are two routes… try for both, but if you only have time for one, do the route that is mostly within the cave system rather than outside.” — Hrvatska
“If you’ve never been to Marianna caverns located about an hour outside of Tallahassee, Florida, you are truly missing out! I guess the official name is Florida State Caverns but we’ve always known it as Marianna Caverns.” — jmork
“Exploring Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belize is a surreal experience for sure. It holds Mayan skeletons and broken bits of pottery within its depths. Plus, exploring the cave (via a guided tour) is a ton of fun.” — Kerry_Wolfe
“Ohio Caverns is not technically a cave, but I’ve loved it all my life. It’s located in West Liberty Ohio, open year round naturally (pardon the pun), and home of the ‘Crystal King.’ [...] Their guides are very friendly, and once when I took my kids during a slow day they took us on tour of a section that was closed off to their usual tours, which was awesome. I also love their gift shop, which has a great selection of items for rock and gem hounds at fairly decent prices. It’s a great place to spend some time.” — hickles1985
Sistema Sac Actun
Quintana Roo, Mexico
“Being from Kentucky, one would expect me to say ‘Mammoth Cave,’ but no. While Mammoth is a great cave, my favorite is Sac Actun, in Quintana Roo, Mexico (near Tulum). This cave has been linked with several others (Dos Ojos and Nahoch Na Chich) and is now considered to be the longest underwater cave system in the world. It was much smaller when we dove it back in 1996, but damn, was it beautiful. One must realize that this cave was dry during the ice age and was heavily decorated with stalactites and stalagmites at that time, but with the thaw at the end of the Ice Age, the caves were flooded and since (mostly) certified cave divers can enter, the cave has not suffered the damage people do to unflooded caves.” — desmoprem
“I have enjoyed visiting the Kartchner Caverns near Tucson, AZ, partially because they are pristine and unmarred by graffiti and other damage from tourists.” — kld123
“A lava tube almost a mile long where you are scrambling over and around lava boulders. It has no lighting except what you bring with you.” — candysrider
“The place is called Cave Stream Scenic Reserve and the cave is accessible at all times for free, but do check the warnings, as it can flood in wet weather. Follow the signs on the downhill path to the cave’s exit (you ascend against the stream—it’s safest that way). You’ll need a good torch and a change of clothes, as you’re likely to get soaked up to the waist as you ascend the waterfalls (that’s the best bit!). I took my 7-year-old daughter through, and she coped just fine!” — gedmaybury23
“While it lacks the spectacle of mineral deposits in limestone caves, and while there is no life to speak of within the cave except for lichen and fungus, the truly astonishing qualities of Viðgelmir are due to the fact that the cave is not changing, with a few man-made exceptions. It’s essentially a time capsule that has been immobilized by volcanic processes that finally came to rest over a thousand years ago and haven’t stirred since. As far as lava tubes go, it is the longest yet discovered in Iceland, and lies within the Hallmundarhraun lava field, not far from Surtsellir, the largest lava tube by volume in all of Iceland!” — N_Thrainn
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
