Like Babe or Wilbur before it, one brave pig recently took to pondering its place in the world, and decided to take action, escaping from a truck that was taking it to auction. Although its freedom was short-lived.
As the Associated Press is reporting, the large pig loosed the shackles of its doomed fate, and jumped from a trailer on Interstate 5, leaping right into potentially lethal traffic. Luckily for the fugitive pig, a group of passing drivers stopped, and herded the animal behind some roadside barriers. The pig appeared unhurt.
Highway patrolmen arrived on the scene to take care of the animal, and one officer took a picture that spread on Twitter, showing an animal looking—a bit forlornly, perhaps—across the gridlocked highway at a waterpark on the other side.
Within an hour the driver of the trailer realized that he’d left the pig behind, and returned to collect it, taking it to an uncertain future at auction. As is the fate of so many, the pig was defeated by the impassible obstacles and crushing gears of this, our modern dystopia. The waterpark, alas, remained a dream.
In Whistler, British Columbia, about 50 miles north of Vancouver, there is a body of water known as Lost Lake, where tens of thousands of tiny, dime-sized toads breed every year. Known as western toads, the amphibians then migrate from the lake to surrounding forests. There are an awful lot of hiking and biking trails in their way—each one a fresh, harrowing hazard to life and limb.
In recent years—including this year—authorities have been blocking off trails and even closing an entire road in an attempt to protect the little hoppers. The migration is long, though, beginning in late July and ending in August or even September, meaning that authorities' best efforts don't always work.
"On the busy holiday weekend, many trail users were observed not obeying the signs—even with volunteers standing nearby—and blew by gates on their bikes," the CBCreported Monday.
The toads are extraordinarily exposed to danger from humans. Their sensitive skin that can be damaged by the oils in one's hands, and they are so tiny that one is not likely even to notice one underfoot (or under tire, for that matter).
But they do have numbers on their side and most of the toads are expected to survive the journey. The species is considered vulnerable but not endangered, and has been getting bigger in recent years. A record number of breeding pairs were spotted this year.
"The toads," the municipality of Whistler said on its website last month, "are on the move!"
The year 1895 gave us many great works of literature—The Importance of Being Earnest; Jude the Obscure; H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. But among these is an underrated masterwork: Pussy and Her Language, a 150-page pamphlet, self-published by one Marvin R. Clark, about how (and why) to talk to your cat.
Clark's motivations were pure: he was a cat-lover in a time when most saw the animals as nothing more than haughty mousers. (Even Webster's Dictionary, a supposedly neutral authority, defined cats as "a deceitful animal" and "extremely spiteful" in its 1828 edition). "One of a million dogs gets a bad name, while not one out of a million Cats gets a good one," he wrote, and he hoped that his work would be able to change that.
His methods, though, were a little strange. In an effort to convince readers of his views, he seems to have invented several scientists, whom he both quoted and impersonated. One of them, introduced as "the great French naturalist Alphonse Leon Grimaldi, F.R.S., F.G.S., M.O.S., D.H. du C., M.F.A. S., M.F.A., et al.," supposedly "wrote" about half of the book.
All this for arguments that, as we shall see, barely needed boosting. The following are 20 lessons gleaned from Pussy and Her Language, as applicable now as they were a century ago.
1. Cats could, at any moment, ruin international diplomacy
"In the grand capitol buildings at Washington, and penetrating, without hindrance, into the very secret Cabinet meetings at the White House, and almost everywhere throughout the whole inhabitable globe, there exists a spy upon whose ears fall the secrets of a nation, which, if breathed at some inopportune moment, might be its ruin."
2. Cats can predict the weather
"When a Cat washes herself in the ordinary manner, we may be sure of bright, sun-shiny weather, but when she licks herself against the grain of her fur or washes herself with her paw over her ear… there will be a storm."
3. Napoleon hated cats
"Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have hated a Cat with as great a fervor as was expressed by him for his Austrian and Russian foes."
4. Despite this, there was (maybe?) a cat hospital in France
"In the city of Paris, France, is a very extensive establishment called Hospice du Chats, whose name is an indication of its object… this building, covering a very large space of land, is two stories in height and expensively built for the exclusive purpose of sheltering the Cats of France… rooms are assigned to the sexes and different nationalities, halls and chambers are warmed by steam, meals are served with religious regularity, and the institution is run with the same regard to decorum and preciseness in every detail as is manifested in a well-regulated hotel."
5. Sir Isaac Newton may have used his cats to study the laws of physics
"It is said of Sir Isaac Newton that he cut a large hole in his barn for his old cat and a smaller one, beside it, for the young kittens."
6. Indeed, all the cool people love cats
"Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Moore, Talleyrand, Edgar Allen Poe, Chateaubriand, Robert Southey, Dr. Johnson, Benjamin Franklin, Julius Caesar, Thomas Gray, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Walter Raleigh, Cardinal Wolsey, Rousseau, Lord Chesterfield, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, Plutarch, and thousands of others have expressed their admiration of my favorite."
7. Cats and their allies are definitely feuding with Noah Webster
"Your Noah Webster, who padded your dictionary in order to make a formidable book… says that animals are not possessed of reasoning powers. The intelligent man admits that animals not only have minds, but that they reason also."
8. Cat language comes from God
"I am of the opinion that language is of Divine origin, and that it was put into the mouth of the Cat, the same as it was put into the mouth of Adam, by the Almighty. In this opinion I am encouraged by many of your most prominent writers."
"Cases have been given of… cats and dogs living together, in the same kennel, of which there have been innumerable instances."
10. Cat language is fairly robust
"In the word part of the language of the Cat there are, probably, not more than six hundred fundamental words."
11. There are 17 vital cat vocabulary words
12. Cats have French accents
"The word 'purrieu'... is a note of self-satisfaction and content… give attention to the number of vowels and the Frenchman's roll of the liquid 'r,' so that it comes to the ear like 'pur-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rieu,' with a gradually ascending inflection."
13. Cats can get very mad
"The word 'yew,' when uttered as an explosive, is the Cat's strongest expression of hatred, and a declaration of war... The word 'yow' means extermination from the face of the earth."
14. Cats use more consonants than most give them credit for
"The disposition of the Cat to mouth her words has given the impression to many who have studied her utterances to conclude that most, if not all of her words begin with the sound of the letter 'm,' and this is an error which cost me months of wasted time."
15. Cats have variously intuitive words for body parts
"The word 'pad' means 'foot,' and 'leo' signifies 'head.' 'Pro' is the feline for 'nail or claw,' and 'tut' for 'limb,' while the body is called 'papoo' and the fur 'oolie.'"
16. Cats care about money
"The word 'zule' means 'millions,' and a millionaire in the Cat language is a 'zuluaim.'"
17. They really are so sarcastic about Noah Webster
"Noah Webster… was, I have no doubt, a very good and erudite man, but one subject to strong temptations."
18. Cat grammar involves nouns first, verbs later
"According to the primal order of speech and the manner of the construction of sentences in the Cat language, you will hear such utterances as these: 'Milk give me,' 'Meat I want,' 'Mary I love,' 'Going out, my mistress?' 'Sick I am,' 'Happy are my babies.'
19. When speaking cat, body language is important
"There is the language of the ear, the tail, the limb, the body, the facial, including the mouth, the nose, the eye, the brow, the chin, the lip and the whiskers, the motion of the whole and the significant general appearance, as in the carriage while in motion, and the form when at rest."
20. It's very nice to speak cat
"I do not know of any sounds more soothing to the nerves of man as musical, or as musically correct in rhythm, intonation or melody, as the song of the Cat when at peace with all the world."
Art and science are often treated as distinct realms, but sometimes they overlap in unexpected ways. A neuroscientist, for example, creates a chart based on how an animal’s brain responds to rewards. The chart is informative to scientists who can interpret it—but it is also a compelling, monochrome image reminiscent of an iconic album cover. That neuroscientist is named Sean Cavanagh, of University College London, and his artwork based on the neural responses of rhesus macaques, called Unknown Variability, won the 2017 Art of Neuroscience competition.
This competition has been held each year since 2011 by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). NIN has existed in one form or another since the early 1900s and carries out research into brain function. Recently, the competition has opened up to include artists and their own interpretations of the brain.
We know a great deal more about how the mind works than we did when NIN was founded, but there are still gaps in our understanding. Artificial intelligence is being taught to appreciate, and even create, art, for example, but the biological nature of creativity remains at the edge of our knowledge. This competition both provides scientists with the opportunity to tap into their inner Dalí, Miró, or Pollock, and offers a visual representation of research into the mysteries of thought and behavior. For the nonscientist, it might be difficult to understand "somato-dendritic morphology," but it’s easy to appreciate its beauty when it is represented as a multicolored mosaic.
The artwork featured in the competition is strangely absorbing. Starry Night shows iridescent blue sparks dancing across a dark background, like bioluminescent sea creatures or distant galaxies. But the image was created by neuroscientist Christophe Leterrier of the NICN Institute in France, as part of a study of hippocampal neurons. In other images, branches of a Purkinje neuron glow like lightning, or a cross-section of a spinal cord creates an autumnal landscape.
Cavanagh's winning entry, in a further cross-pollination of art and science, was created to resemble the cover Joy Division’s 1979 debut album Unknown Pleasures—which is a depiction of radio waves taken from an image in the 1977 Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy.
Like the study of astronomy, the brain also represents a "final frontier." The pioneering research of neuroscientists enhances our knowledge of the brain and can potentially help in the treatment and prevention of neurological disorders. Atlas Obscura has compiled a selection of images from the Art of Neuroscience.
The Great American Eclipse of 2017 is coming up fast, and we still have questions! Exactly how did people predict eclipses before computers? Where and when was the longest eclipse? Do fish react when an eclipse passes over the ocean?
You probably still have questions too, and we'd like to help you answer them. Send in your eclipse questions, no matter how in-depth, silly, or simple, and we’ll do our best to answer them next week.
Fill out the form below to submit your question and help us shine a light on your favorite occultation mystery.
Police came to the door of Joe Orton, the man who would one day be one of the most famous playwrights in the United Kingdom, and his partner Kenneth Halliwell’s one-bedroom apartment at 9 a.m. on 28 April, 1962. It was a Saturday, the cooling end of the first warm week of the year, and the men had been up for hours, customarily getting up with the sunrise.
“We are police officers,” one said, “and I have a warrant to search your flat as I have reason to believe you have a number of stolen library books.” Orton replied: “Oh dear.”
A search warrant might seem excessive for library book hoarding—but Halliwell and Orton were no ordinary library pilferers. For over two years, Orton and Halliwell had been smuggling books out of their local libraries, the magnificent Art Nouveau Islington Central Library on London’s Holloway Road and nearby red-brick Essex Road Library—and then returning them.
Orton hid books in a satchel; Halliwell, six-and-a-half years older, used a gas mask case. They would take them home, redo their covers and dust-jackets, and then slip them back onto the shelves.
Sometimes, these alterations were obscene: a reader scanning a relatively tame Dorothy Sayers whodunit would find themselves confronted with a mystery even before they opened the book. The blurb now described some missing knickers and a seven-inch phallus, and concluded: “READ THIS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS! And have a good s*** while you are reading!” Meanwhile, the collected plays of Emlyn Williams, a Welsh dramatist, suddenly included “Knickers Must Fall,” “Olivia Prude,” “Up The Front,” and “Up The Back.”
The collages on the covers were no less subdued, and often overtly queer. On the cover of a book of John Betjeman poetry, a middle-aged man glowers in scanty black briefs. His body is covered entirely in tattoos. A now mostly forgotten romance novel, Queen’s Favourite, was redone with two men wrestling, naked to their navels.
Years later, once he’d become a famous playwright, Orton recalled: “I used to stand in corners after I’d smuggled the doctored books back into the library and then watch people read them. It was very funny, very interesting.”
At that time, Orton and Halliwell were nobodies: having graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where they met, they had vacillated between short stretches of employment and living off unemployment benefits and the money Halliwell had been left by his parents.
Orton moved in with Halliwell barely three weeks after meeting him, in 1951. His diary entries for the first three days that they lived together are a single word each: “Well!”; “Well!!”, “Well!!!”.
Cloistered in the one-bedroom apartment, with its two single beds, they lived below a collage Halliwell had made from thousands of stolen pictures. Another 1,650-odd pictures were stashed around the apartment, ready to be put to use. Mythical beasts jostled for space with tabloid headlines and Renaissance high art: a grotesque ape-horse hybrid wore a map of Australia as its tutu.
The two spent every moment together, reading, writing, and living cheaply off brown bread and baked beans. Halliwell was older, middle-class and better educated; Orton his handsome young protégé, given the foundations of a classical education from the confines of their apartment, with its yellow-and-pink checkered linoleum floor. They shunned electric light to save money, sometimes going to bed at 9:30pm, and lived a puritanical, even hermetic, life.
They had been lovers, friends and co-conspirators for over a decade when they began doctoring the library books, using stolen pictures and their Adler Tippa typewriter.
Other covers showed a monkey, gazing astonishedly from the middle of a flower, on the Collins Guide to Roses, and giant cats on an Agatha Christie novel. On the cover of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, the king, who was the first person to introduce a law in England criminalizing sodomy and making it punishable by death, has had his arms cut off at the elbow, while his army swarms away from him. “A challenge to his authority,” writes Emma Parker, of the University of Leicester, “constitutes an act of queer as well as class protest.”
Some celebrated same-sex desire in subtle ways—on the cover of Othello, Othello looks past the naked Desdemona, whose hand hovers suggestively above her crotch. Behind him a man points an arrow at his backside. “The columns, Othello’s long sword and [a long staff] render the image emphatically phallic,” says Parker.
These covers had a message that went beyond scurrilous vandalism or, as they would later be called in court, “malicious damage.” Unbeknown to Orton and Halliwell, a full-scale plot to bring them down had been afoot for months.
Readers, distressed or concerned, had begun to complain to the library. The branch was small and, as a librarian later noted in the Library Association Record write-up, “it was possible to observe individual readers more closely and to notice which possible culprits had been in the library before ‘finds’ were made.” The head librarian’s attention quickly fell on Orton and Halliwell, who were always together and shared an address.
At this point, the investigation had spilled out across the borough. Police suggested disguising staff from other library departments, who would not be recognized, as browsing readers, in the hope that they might catch Halliwell and Orton red-handed replacing books on the shelves. “After several weeks of unproductive observation,” chief librarian Alexander Connell wrote, “we contrived to obtain a sample of typewritten matter.”
Sidney Porrett, the Islington Borough Council legal clerk, had been given the responsibility of doing so. “I had to catch those two monkeys,” he later said. “I had to get results.” It seems likely that Porrett found something ‘queer’ in the case—in the symbiotic relationship between the two men; in the obscenities on the covers; even in the way Orton and Halliwell sought to be disruptive. Whatever it was, Porrett said at the time: “They were a couple of darlings, make no mistake.”
This homophobia fuelled an ingenious and cruel campaign, which began with a falsified letter, written in bureaucratic legalese and addressed to Halliwell. It urged him to reclaim a car apparently in his name.
If Porrett had hoped to aggravate him, he succeeded: Halliwell replied, “Dear sir, I should like to know who provided you with this mysterious information? Whoever they are, they must be a liar or a moron: probably both.” The letter was signed, triumphantly, beneath the salutation: “Yours contemptuously.”
The Adler Tippa had betrayed them. The typewriter’s particular fingerprint, its typeface and idiosyncrasies, matched the doctored dust jackets. After 18 months, the library finally had enough evidence to act. “Suspicion became certainty,” noted Connell.
The Metropolitan Borough of Islington sued Orton and Halliwell for damages: 72 books stolen and many more “mutilated.” The total damage was estimated to be £450—over $12,000 today.
Halliwell and Orton were sentenced initially to six months’ jail time, an unusually savage sentence that reflected the apparent shock of the magistrate, Harold Surge. “Those who think they may be clever enough to write criticisms in other people’s books, public library books, or to deface them or ruin them in this way,” should understand it was “disastrous,” he said in court. What they had done amounted to “sheer malice” toward other library-users.
Orton felt there was another reason for the severity of the sentence. On holiday years later, he told friends“it was really because we were queer.”
In court, their relationship wasn’t discussed. Newspapers described them as friends or roommates. Porrett describes them with malice, even derision: Orton “an overgrown schoolboy who was trying to draw attention to himself,” Halliwell “the dangerous type … Both looked like a couple of silly boys lost.” A probation officer, Stanley Ratcliffe, did observe “there was obviously a very strong emotional relationship between the two.”
But why did they do it at all? Orton would later suggest that it was in protest against libraries and librarians more generally. “I was enraged that there were so many rubbishy novels and rubbishy books. … Libraries might as well not exist.” An early novel co-written by Orton and Halliwell suggests another alternative. In The Boy Hairdresser, one character describes his own library transgressions: “We’re public benefactors in a way. We steal—the shops order more—the publishers are pleased—everyone is happy. We finance literature.”
These more political aspirations seemed to be lost on the court. Ratcliffe claimed it was merely the action of a couple of “frustrated actors and authors,” jealous of the success of others.
Stanley Porrett didn’t think six months in prison was a sufficient punishment for the men’s crimes. On their release in September, he threatened them with a charging order for the remaining £62 of damages they’d not yet paid. This would have given him power of sale over their mortgaged apartment to meet the unsettled debt.
Here too, Porrett’s homophobia seethes beneath the surface: “I wanted to let them know that I was still governor in this matter. I was still that much on top … They paid up like little darlings. I left them financially pretty rocky.”
The £6 a month Orton and Halliwell paid to this came out of their benefits—around a quarter of their income. For a comparatively mild crime, Halliwell wrote to Porrett in December 1962, they had lost their jobs, gone on benefits, spent six months in prison, and “paid practically all our pathetically small bank accounts.”
“Justice has certainly been done,” he wrote. “Some people might think, perhaps, even a little bit more than justice.”
Within a year, Halliwell had tried to slit his wrists.
Orton, on the other hand, channeled his rage into his art, and began pumping out plays. “[Prison] affected my attitude towards society,” he said, later. “Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotten somewhere, prison crystallised this.” First, a radio play for the BBC—then plays performed around London, which attracted the attention and praise of British dramatist Terence Rattigan. Rapidly, he became well known and then quite famous, mingling with celebrities and asked to write a script for a Beatles film.
Halliwell became more introspective, sinking further into misery. They fought bitterly—over Orton’s friends, who didn’t understand the pair’s bond, and household expenses. Orton wrote in his diary: “I said: ‘Are you going to stand in front of the mirror all day?’ He said, ‘I’ve been washing your fucking underpants! That’s why I’ve been at the sink!’”
Sexually, there were other challenges—Orton had a predilection for “cottaging,” or sexual encounters with strangers in public bathrooms. He also had a fondness for teenage boys: in 1967, the two men travelled to Tangier, Morocco, where male prostitution, often of very young men, was common. That year, homosexual acts were decriminalized, though Orton commented to a friend: “It’s only legal over twenty-one … I like boys of fifteen.”
Halliwell was suicidal, popping “purple hearts,” a combined amphetamine-barbiturate marketed as an antidepressant to tired housewives. He complained to Orton of tightness in his chest, likely caused by anxiety, and lashed out at him in front of other people. Friends of Orton’s later said he wanted to leave Halliwell and had met someone else.
On the morning of August 9, 1967, a chauffeur coming to collect Orton and bring him out for lunch with a film producer found the two men’s bodies locked in their flat.
In a frenzy, Halliwell had ploughed a hammer repeatedly into Orton’s head, until blood splattered onto his chest. A later inquest found that Halliwell had taken 22 barbiturates, washed down with grapefruit juice from a tin. Halliwell was completely nude, Orton wearing just a pajama top. He did not appear to have fought off the attacks.
Halliwell had left a note on Orton’s diary: “It’s all in the diary. You’ll find all the answers there.” But the last week of Orton’s diary remains missing, and may never have been written at all.
A neighbor, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, said she’d often seen them sitting together on the steps on fine evenings, reading. “About the only change one has noticed is that the older one seemed to have taken to wearing a toupee recently.” Orton had bought this wig for the egg-bald Halliwell with his very first profits.
There was no ceremony for Halliwell, whose parents were both dead. At Orton’s service, Harold Pinter read aloud. His body was cremated to a recording of The Beatles’ A Day in the Life.
Orton’s plays are still performed, and read as risqué and irreverently as they did when they were first published. The vandalized library books are now celebrated, and housed at the Islington Local History Centre—50 years after the men’s deaths, they’ve most recently been exhibited at London’s Tate Britain, in an exhibition of Queer British Art, 1861 – 1967;Crimes of Passion: The Story of Joe Orton at the National Justice Museum, in Nottingham, and Up Against It: Islington 1967 at the Islington Museum.
With over 2,300,000 views on YouTube alone, the video below, of a solar eclipse recorded from Alaska Airlines Flight 870 in 2016 is easily one of the most popular recordings of an eclipse in history. Between the absolutely otherworldly view of the moon's shadow, which parts the clouds like it’s the end of the world, or the giddy, beaming, voice-cracking narration of the unseen man behind the camera, it's a contender for greatest eclipse video of all time. Here’s how it came together.
The man who can be heard screaming “TOTALITY!” and “PROMINENCES!” in the recording is the amateur astronomer Mike Kentrianakis, a longtime eclipse chaser. In 2016, a colleague told him that a commercial flight from Anchorage to Honolulu might pass right through the shadow of a solar eclipse, which immediately intrigued Kentrianakis. “I’d never seen one from a plane before,” says Kentrianakis.
In 2016, a total solar eclipse took place on March 9, but you can forgive yourself for not noticing: on land, it was only visible from a handful of the islands of Southeast Asia. The majority of the path of totality was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Not ideal for eclipse watchers.
About a year before it was scheduled to occur, Kentrianakis’s friend Joe Rao, himself a meteorologist and umbraphile, figured out that there was an Alaska Airlines flight leaving Anchorage on its way to Honolulu that would come very close to the eclipse’s path of totality over the Pacific. They just had to convince the airline to change the departure time of the flight.
“We went through the gauntlet of questions, and suspicions,” says Kentrianaki. “I think they thought we were a little bit crazy at first, and they really didn’t believe it.” This was actually the second time Rao had advocated for changing a flight schedule to accommodate eclipse viewing. Back in 1990, Trans Air America agreed to delay one of their flights by 41 minutes. This time, in 2016, Alaska Air eventually did agree to change the departure time of the flight, since it was so far in advance. One of the airline's concerns was that passengers would look out the window into the piercing rays of the sun and damage their eyes, but Kentrianakis and Rao were able to convince the airline to go ahead anyhow.
As the 2016 eclipse drew nearer, Kentrianakis’ anticipation grew. But before he could even think about promoting the flight as an eclipse experience, it had already sold out with regular passengers, with only Kentrianakis and a small group of others booked just to see the moon’s shadow. “A dozen of us were there to see the eclipse. And we bought the tickets at regular price.”
Initially Kentrianakis had wanted to have a videographer on the plane to film the event, but after that fell through, he realized he'd have to do the job himself. “I was reluctant, because I just wanted to enjoy this thing.”
The night before the flight, Kentrianakis had dinner with one of the pilots, who he says was just as excited for the experience as he was. Alaska Airlines Flight 870 left Anchorage at 2:15 p.m. on March 9, 2016, just 25 minutes later than it was originally scheduled. It swung out over the Pacific Ocean, and flew right into the shadow of the eclipse, as seen on the video. Kentrianakis can be heard excitedly describing what he was seeing, but even when recounting the experience over a year later, he gets worked up all over again. “I went berserk, because it was just an unbelievable eclipse,” he says. “I’d never seen anything like that. The contrast, the perfection, the symmetry. The clarity of the shadow, the circular form. It really magnified it to see it in a wide-angle view. The shadow was coming straight at us. It was enormous! It looks like doomsday, but yet, there’s no fear.”
Kentrianakis says that the other passengers, who hadn’t come to see the eclipse, were also in awe. “People are interested in eclipses. In the back of their mind, they know that they are something special,” he says.
After the flight, Kentrianakis sent the video around to a few folks, including some old colleagues at CBS News, but he never expected it to achieve the millions of views and shares that it did. “In every language they say, ‘Crazy astronomer loses it at 35,000 feet.’”
Following the success and positive publicity generated by the 2016 flight, Alaska Airlines is offering a special flight through the August 2017 eclipse path. They contacted Kentrianakis about flying once again but he reluctantly declined. He was recently tapped by the American Astronomical Society to act as the overall Project Manager for their run up to the Great American Eclipse on August 21, 2017.
“You can’t be everywhere, as much as you’d love to be,” he says. Kentrianakis plans on viewing the 2017 eclipse from Carbondale, Illinois, which he's been planning for almost two years. But he doesn’t seem to mind having to choose. “That’s sort of what the eclipse is about. Making decisions and having the one shot at things.”
He's hot pink, with a faded pink belly, floppy limbs and ears, and a two-inch tail. He's fuzzy and full of stuffing. He's also extremely well-loved—enough that one of his human friends, Julie Letton, is afraid he might be mistaken for trash.
But that's exactly why he must be found. Sleepy Dog is the constant companion of Julie Letton's young daughter, Phoebe Letton. At least, he was until last week, when he disappeared somewhere in Toronto, during the Letton's family vacation. Now an army of about 1,200 kind Canadians, mobilized through Facebook, is working to reunite the pair.
As the CBC reports, Sleepy Dog joined the Letton family back in 2012, when Phoebe's dad brought him home from a gas station. SD made it through most of this year's vacation just fine, but just before the Lettons had to catch their flight home to the UK, the family realized he was no longer with them.
"Julie and Phoebe retraced their steps, frantically ducking into washrooms and stores" at Eaton Centre, the mall they had recently visited, the CBC reports. But they couldn't find him before their flight departed.
Sleepy dog !! Pink with white legs, tummy and snout. Missing eyes. Call CBC if you find Sleepy Dog in Toronto ... pic.twitter.com/nx1QPAGHbZ
When Julie got home, she wrote a Facebook post about their troubles, figuring crowdsourcing was worth a shot. But even she was surprised by the response—her post was shared 14,000 times. She quickly wrote up a whole page, Sleepy Dog Lost in Toronto.
As of press time, it has 1,200 followers, who congregate on the page to share tips and encouragement, and to report back from attempted rescue trips. The story has also been covered by the CBC, CP24, and oldies radio station 93.5 The Move.
We may not all be young. But many of us have lost a stuffed friend, or the equivalent, and know the joy that would follow this dog's return. "Tell Phoebe there's people in Toronto looking for Sleepy Dog," one seeker wrote yesterday on the Facebook page. Humans may not be hot pink or fuzzy, but at least we're doggone tenacious.
Just days before bulldozers rolled in to destroy a wartime factory in Flintshire, Great Britain, 20,000 lost Second World War aircraft technical drawings were discovered and saved from destruction. The hoard of drawings, which include blueprints for the Mosquito plane, shed new light on how precisely the aircraft was built, as well as detailing a host of variants that never made it off the diagram and into the sky.
The discovery is especially exciting for community group The People’s Mosquito, who are in the process of attempting to restore and fly a version of the night fighter, which crashed in 1949. “It’s incredible to think that [the drawings] might have been lost forever," chairman John Lilley told The Telegraph.
The plane was made from molded pieces of wood, designed to minimize metal use, and proved such a versatile design that it was variously used as a fighter, night fighter, bomber, U-boat hunter and reconnaissance plane. It counted unusual heroes among its designers, too. Aviation whiz Geoffrey de Havilland recruited cabinetmakers, piano makers and other people who were experts at using wood to assemble the plane.
The drawings, said Bill Ramsey, the project's operations director, were a game-changer. "You could actually build any form of Mosquito," he told the BBC, "including one that never actually flew." The plane the group is attempting to fix is one of just 7,781 ever built. If they succeed, it will be the fourth working example in the world, and the only one in Europe. But, while they might now have the plans, the group needs the means: Restoring the plane is estimated to cost $7.8 million, of which only a fraction has been raised so far.
Chemically, wine is just a mixture of water, sugar, alcohol, and a mixture of molecules that give it its unique taste and aroma. The exact molecules are created by factors such as grape variety, weather, soil nutrients, and the aging process. But would wine really be wine if you skipped all the steps and put the same chemicals in a bottle? A startup in California thinks so, and is in the process of developing a line of synthetic wines sans vineyards, according to Wired.
The company's production process doesn't just skip the grape growing—it also skips fermentation. Instead, the chemical components of wine are combined in a lab. Chemicals like diacetyl, ethyl butyrate, and methoxypyrazine lend butter, pineapple, and green bell pepper flavors, respectively, to a blend of ethanol, water, and amino acids. Different varieties of wine can be recreated by tweaking the chemical composition. Even rare wines could be recreated.
The company, Ava Winery, uses tools like mass spectrometry to study the chemical makeup of wines, and then develops recipes for the synthetic versions using chemical compounds produced for use in food. The grape-less wine will be more consistent than traditional wines, unaffected by bad storms or droughts. And while synthetic wine is a novelty now, but it may be a necessity when wine-growing regions shift due to climate change. The first bottles should reach store shelves later this year.
Earlier this month, Mykhailo Doroshenko, a 19-year-old Ukrainian lifeguard, had just finished his shift on the shores of the Black Sea in Lazurne, Ukraine, when he spotted an inflatable trampoline on the beach that someone had left behind. He decided to use it for a nap. When he woke up, he was in open water, far from the shore.
The current had swept Doroshenko out to sea, and he later said that any thoughts of a quick rescue vanished on the second day, when he started to panic.
"I didn't think it was funny any more," Doroshenko told the Russian broadcaster Ren TV, according to the BBC. "I started crying, I was in shock, and tried to cover myself from the sun as best I could."
On the third day, he washed ashore in Russia-controlled Crimea, dehydrated and with sun stroke but generally all right.
“Don’t worry, mum. I’ll be home soon, whole and unharmed. And I’ll think twice before I do things in the future,” Doroshenko told Russian media, according to The Times.
If you walk around the homestead at The Twins cattle ranch in outback Australia, it's hard not to think the people who live there might be a little odd. First, an old bomb shelter gives the impression someone was overly concerned about a Soviet nuclear attack, even though the 4,500-acre property is in one of the least populated areas on earth. Then there are the heads and tails of exploded rockets decorating the garden and lined up against the side of the house.
But Wayne Rankin, who runs the ranch, isn’t odd at all. His property is just on the Woomera Range Complex in South Australia where the British, U.S. and Australian militaries have tested all things that go boom for decades.
The bomb shelter was built for the family by the Australian government in the early 1960s. The Rankin family collection of wayward rockets that landed on the cattle station is evidence that this was not an overreaction.
“I remember as a child when Woomera fired rockets off in the early days, they used to have colored grenades in them,” says Rankin, 66, who grew up on the ranch, which is referred to as a cattle station in Australia. “I used to see a lot of different colors as the rockets went up.”
The Woomera Range Complex is considered the world’s largest military land base. At close to 50,000 square miles, it is about the size of Louisiana. However, much of that arid and flat land is leased to mining companies or pastoralists to run either cattle or sheep. That is why people like the Rankins technically live on the rocket range.
“It has been a good part of our lives, and it never did us any harm,” says Rankin. In the 1960s, when testing seemed to be at its peak, the family would get numerous phone calls from the military notifying them of an impending test. The first warning call would come a week out, then another one the day of and then another 20 minutes out, notifying the family to enter the bomb shelter. Often a plane would fly over the cattle and sheep stations to ensure people were out of the way.
“Sometimes, there might be a test at two in the morning, and we would have to straggle over to the bomb shelter,” says Rankin. As the rocket tests became part of their way of life, many pastoralists set up deck chairs on top of the bomb shelters to watch the light show instead of going in them. “We were all guilty of that,” Rankin says.
Atomic bombs, ballistic missiles and boosters for satellites have all been tested at the range since it opened in 1947, according to Wayne Reynolds, an associate professor of Australian military history. And it hasn’t been without controversy. Even though the government has officially declared the tests sites safe, some question whether the nuclear cleanup went far enough. There have also been accusations that not all indigenous Australians who lived in the area were notified when British atomic bombs were tested, according to anAustralian Geographic article.
The range is still active today with the testing of drones, ground-based weapon systems and explosives, but it doesn’t provide the light show or rocket debris it once did. This year, the U.S. and Australian militaries successfully tested a hypersonic (extremely high speed) glider. Chinese buyers were also blocked from purchasing a large cattle station in the area due, in part, to national security fears.
“If they are letting off bombs, you will see a mushroom cloud come up south of us,” says Colin Greenfield, 45, who holds the lease for the 1.3 million-acre Billa Kalina cattle station. “It does happen in our backyard, it’s just that our backyard is very big.”
A few times a year, the Greenfields are evacuated for hours or days when a test takes place. There are also security checkpoints around the property that intensify during testing. “Because people have to get a permit to come to the area, it stops your average tourist or burglar who is up to no good,” says Greenfield. His bomb shelter also comes in handy as a storage unit.
Tests are generally planned to avoid peak pastoral and farming times such as mustering and sheep-shearing, according to an Australian Defence Force spokesperson. The Woomera range is divided into zones with the defense force having permanent access to what is known as the "red zone" and only accesses other zones when required.
Pastoralists are still finding bits and pieces of rockets, satellites, and weather balloon from those early tests, according to Trevor Wright. He owns a much celebrated pub in the six-person town of William Creek, a few miles outside of rocket range territory. Across the red dust road from the pub, the William Creek Hotel is a display of military and space junk found in the area.
“These rockets would end up head first in dried up lakes like a cartoon,” said Wright. “The cattle stations would go out and collect them, so as a community we decided to put up a display of rocket memorabilia.”
Dinosaurs rock. Almost, but not quite, as hard as ascended heavy metal god, Lemmy Kilmister. So when researchers recently had to give a name to a fearsome prehistoric crocodile, the late Motörhead frontman seemed as fitting an inspiration as any.
According to a release from London’s Natural History Museum, the creature's bones were actually dug up in the early 20th century, but scientists recently reclassified them as a separate species of crocodile that would have lived about 164 million years ago. The scientists dubbed the new variety of giant crocodile the Lemmysuchus, in honor of the baddest bassist to ever live.
Described as “one of the nastiest sea creatures to have ever inhabited the Earth” by the museum’s curator, Lorna Steel, the Lemmysuchus would have measured almost 20 feet long, thanks in part to long, wicked-looking jaws.*
Lemmy died in 2015, and now his name lives on not only in his bone-shaking music, but in the bones of a terrifying monster. Probably just as he’d like it.
*Correction: Previously we mistakenly listed the length of the skull as 20 feet. This has been corrected to being the length of the whole animal.
Most days in 1892, ticketholders at Manhattan's Carnegie Music Hall enjoyed programs of standard entertainment: the New York Philharmonic; a famous speaker; a ragtime show. But starting in February, every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, they got something a little different. As soon as the theater's lights went down, the sun came up again, rising over an onstage lake that rippled just like the real thing. Next, the moon began to rise next to the sun, and gradually, dramatically obscured it. This was Scene #1 of A Trip to the Moon—a perfect rendition of the total solar eclipse of 1887, yanked through time and space and reconstructed inside the theater.
"Audiences had, in a sense, seen it all," writes the media scholar Artemis Willis. But when curtain lifted on A Trip to the Moon's first scene, "their cynicism yielded to wonder." Over the next 90 minutes, viewers were treated to a number of rare and, at the time, impossible sights: lunar landscapes, cosmic nebulae, the earth as viewed from the moon, and more, all produced through an alchemy of stagecraft, lighting, and special effects. By the time they rose from their seats, Willis argues, they had absorbed not only facts and figures, but a whole new way of looking at space.
As Willis details in a recent paper about the show, A Trip to the Moon was first dreamed up in 1889, at the Urania Institute in Berlin. Unlike most observatories at the time, which had their hands full catering to experts, the Institute focused on curious laypeople—what one admirer, the astronomer Edward Holden, described as "that very large and intelligent section of the public which is intensely interested in the results of astronomical observation… but does not care at all for the small details which the special student must attend to."
As part of these efforts, the Institute put together a number of stage presentations, which taught attendees about everything from the geological birth of Earth to the tides and currents of the Arctic Ocean. The shows proved extremely popular, and when word of them reached Andrew Carnegie, he decided to bring one or two over to New York City and stage them in his brand new Music Hall. "Mr. Carnegie's idea is to discover whether there is real demand for such institutes in America, and to assist in founding them, if there is," wrote Holden.
The Berlin version of the show was already a multimedia marvel, but for its own trip to the Music Hall—about seven times the size of the theater at the Urania Institute—A Trip to the Moon got even more gussied up. Larger versions of the set pieces were painted in Berlin and shipped over, and the staging took full advantage of the Music Hall's recent renovations, during which the venue had been outfitted with electrical wiring and lighting.
Every scene involved what Willis calls an "electro-mechanical-theatrical tableau," in which stage lights waxed, waned, and changed colors, magic lanterns projected scenes onto set pieces, and backstage crew members put various props through complex paces. Plus, it was all accurate: "Each move of the moon was charted to accurately reflect the phenomena, and then choreographed behind the scenes," says Willis. "It would be really difficult to pull off such a performance today."
For example, the climactic "Scene #6: Solar Eclipse as Seen from the Moon," involved three celestial bodies, each differently positioned, and all interacting with one another. As illustrated at the top of this article, the moon—the scene's vantage point—was represented by a painted canvas, lit from underneath by electric footlights. The sun was a lightbox sewn into a black drop cloth (which also had holes pricked in, for stars), and the earth was a phosphorescent disk with a ring of red gelatin around it. In the scene, the sun slowly crosses behind the earth, backlighting the gelatin and suffusing the stage with a red glow. The footlights below the canvas then gradually change to red, "transferring" the light of the eclipse to the moon's surface.
A Trip to the Moon premiered on February 10, 1892, to an intrigued audience. But after a week and a half of lukewarm reviews, the production took the step that, in Willis's view, really put it over the top: it went in for a script rewrite. The original narration, written by the Urania Institute's Max Wilhelm Meyer and performed by a wide-eyed actor, "was sort of clunky and romantic," Willis says. "The New York press picked up on that right away."
As one New York Times critic wrote, the "Wagnerian drama" didn't play well with this particular audience: "The lecture is heralded as gravely as if it were a new religion just discovered," they wrote. "The audience is edified so gradually that there is more awe than comfort in it."
The producers went out looking for a script doctor, and settled on Garrett P. Serviss, an astronomy columnist for the New York Sun. Over the course of nine days, Serviss rewrote the narration completely; when the show re-opened, he had taken on hosting duties as well. The result was a Trip to the Moon that, a happier Times critic wrote, was led "by someone who knew the way." Where Meyer had spun grandiose tales, Serviss provided plainspoken explanations, grounded in facts. For example, during Scene #6, Serviss laid out exactly what was going on:
"Such an eclipse would present phenomena far different from those which we behold during a solar eclipse upon the earth. The most remarkable difference would be that arising from the fact that the earth is enveloped in air. The atmosphere of the earth, owing to its refractive property, acts like a lens surrounding the terrestrial globe, and bends the sunlight around its edge.
So, when the sun disappears behind the earth as seen from the moon, a brilliant circle of light girds the earth, and this light… produces a considerable illumination on the moon. The color of the luminous ring encircling the earth, under these circumstances, will be that of the sunrise and sunset sky, because the light has to penetrate the dust and vapor floating in the air, and the red rays most easily accomplish the passage."
Compare this, Willis says, to Meyer's version of the scene, in which the Earth is referred to as "the moon's astral mother," and its light as "the only agency of communication that is still left to her," sent through space "a last greeting to her only daughter, lost so early in death."
A hobbyist astronomer himself, Serviss also made sure to foreground the concerns of actual experts. "He would try to find ways to help his audiences imagine our relation to the cosmos as investigators of it," says Willis. "[He was] encouraging a kind of mind travel, [as with the] 'Spaceship of the Imagination'"—a device Carl Sagan used, in his seminal television show Cosmos, to represent the possibilities of scientific inquiry.
ATrip to the Moon played at the Music Hall for just over two years, and then did a short tour of the East Coast. Its creators went on to successful careers: Serviss began lecturing full-time (and later established himself as a prolific science fiction author), and the show's lighting designer, J. Carl Mayrhofer, started his own company.
But in Willis's reading, the show left another legacy: the ability for ordinary people to look at the heavens with something more than slack-jawed awe. Where earlier astronomical entertainments, including Meyer's original A Trip to the Moon, leaned into astronomy's reputation as "the sublime science"—full of proof of God's limitless power, and humanity's infinite smallness—A Trip to the Moon replaced some of that void-staring with curiosity. "It didn't just say, 'This is God's great work, be afraid of it,'" says Willis. "It described the phenomena in terms that produced wonder."
"The information was as new as possible, and the technology was as new as possible," she says. "That's where I think wonder was produced: in the space between the actual lunar phenomena, and the enactment of them." As with an eclipse, in which the juxtaposition of the sun and the moon makes each more magnificent, A Trip to the Moon made knowledge and its representation dance around each other, equal at last.
Never fear: as usual, your local library has (most likely) got your back. Up until the very moment the moon blacks out the sun, thousands of libraries across the United States are giving out eclipse glasses for free.
Many of the gratis glasses come from the STAR Library Network (or STAR_Net), a nonprofit that helps hook libraries up with science and technology resources. According to their website, "STAR_Net... has distributed over 2.1 million safe eclipse glasses to 7,000 unique locations including public library branches, bookmobiles, tribal libraries, library consortia, and state libraries in all 50 states."
Many BPL locations are handing out glasses either before or on the day of the 8/21 #solareclipse. Call your BPL location for availability. pic.twitter.com/HhcYwuDEvO
If you'd like to find out whether yours is one of them, check out this handy map. (Most libraries suggest you call ahead before coming in, though, in case they're out.)
And if you'd rather get your own, be sure to choose a supplier from the American Astronomical Society's list of reputable solar viewer vendors. It's the only surefire way to avoid eclipse-eyeglass scammers, which are suddenly rampant.
You can trust the libraries, though—they want to keep your eyes safe, so that once all the fun is over, you can get back to books.
Rock-paper-scissors is a useful tool for deciding who has to do the dishes or which sports team goes first. But the game is also great for testing chimpanzee's learning abilities. A new study shows chimps can eventually figure out the circular rules—rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper, and paper beats rock—and children can easily pick up the rules starting around age four.
A team of researchers from Kyoto University used a computer program to teach seven chimpanzees and 38 young children how to play rock-paper-scissors, while also tracking how long it took them all to learn the circular rules of the game. The computer introduced the chimps to the rules step-by-step, and while they grasped the first two, it took five of the chimps about 307 computer trials to understand the third rule and the circular connection between all the rules (two of the chimps never quite got it). Interestingly, the report authors note, rats and pigeons also had a hard time learning the third relationship for similar tasks in other studies.
The human children, on the other hand, figured out the three relationships in about six tries, on average. After the kids were taught the rules, they were given the relationships at random and asked which hand gesture won. Kids older than 50 months (just over age four) remembered the relationships and did better than chance, while younger kids were just randomly guessing. And when the chimps were given the relationships at random, they performed just as well as a human four-year-old.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore.
But when a frozen pizza delivery truck hits a highway overpass, that's a-mess!
A tractor trailer slammed into the Mablevale Overpass on I-30, causing frozen pizzas to cover the interstate, blocking all traffic. @THV11pic.twitter.com/qG4zJ8SqGp
Such was the situation in Little Rock, Arkansas this morning, when an 18-wheeler full of frozen pies sliced itself open on a bridge support and spilled its cargo all over I-30.
According to the Associated Press, Department of Transportation crews shut down several lanes for about four hours to clean up the spill. Helicopter footage shows a large smear of pizza ingredients, cardboard, and diesel extending for hundreds of feet past the crash site.
"There's pizza sauce, there's cheese—you name it, it's out here, all over the interstate," department spokesman Danny Straessle told the AP in a news video (that is very much worth watching), wearing a reflective vest and holding a seemingly unharmed Tombstone pie.
"Fortunately, there weren't any injuries," said Straessle. Now if only there was a standard way to celebrate good news.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Scientists have known for some time that Ice Age humans living in Britain consumed human flesh -- but new research into distinctive zig-zag carvings found on the leftover bones suggests that there may have been a symbolic purpose to their stomach-churning practices.
An analysis of a 15,000-year-old human forearm found at a site at Gough's Cave in England showed unusual patterns engraved into the tissue. These, researchers now say, are not the signs of a butchering process or teeth marks, but instead deliberate marks, which likely had tremendous symbolic meaning. On top of that, it looks as though the victims were not slaughtered or fought, but instead died of natural causes. It's possible that this cannibalism was part of a complicated funeral tradition.
By looking at the marks under a microscope, head researcher Silvia M. Bello was able to deduce that they were made in a single sitting, by one person using a single tool. They make a spiky zigzag along the length of the bone, like a woodcut of a mountain range.
"We can only speculate about the context in which this happened," the authors wrote in the study, published in PLoS One. But, they said, the sequence did suggest "complex ritualistic funerary behavior that has never before been recognized for the Paleolithic period." Still, we can't be sure of what that behavior might mean, nor what the marks are trying to say. One suggested possibility was that the marks told a hieroglyphic "story-tale" that was in some way connected to the deceased.
The highest of high tides, called a spring tide, occurs when the earth, moon, and sun all line up, which they do at each Full Moon and New Moon. This alignment also happens, of course, during a solar eclipse, and the resulting spring tide is one of the more overshadowed aspects of North America's upcoming astronomical rarity.
In general though, spring tides bring about some wonderfully strange natural phenomena, especially in places with the most drastic fluctuations in sea level, including parts of Canada and the United Kingdom. Here are nine wild, watery places to appreciate the extraordinary effects of the moon's tidal force.
In a narrow channel in Norway's Saltstraumen sound is the strongest tidal current in the world. As the tide tries to fill Skjerstad fjord, up to 440 million tons of seawater forces its way through a narrow strait, with water speeds reaching 23 miles per hour. The powerful movement causes a series of whirlpools to form, called maelstroms due to their extraordinary force. When the current is at its strongest, the swirling vortices can reach up to 16 feet deep at the eye of the vortex. The Saltstraumen maelstrom is believed to be the most powerful tidal whirlpool on the planet.
The Bay of Fundy is home to the largest tidal range in the world, with variations between high tide and low tide reaching upwards of 52 feet, roughly the same height as a five-story building. Due to these drastic surges, when the powerful tides come up—some of the highest in the world—it can cause the river waters to reverse course multiple times throughout the day. Remarkably, at the bay's "Reversing Falls," a series of powerful (if squat) waterfalls also change direction with the tidal current.
Britain's Severn river also has an exceptionally large tidal range—the water level difference between low and high tide—which causes one of the world's most spectacular tidal bores, a large wave that flows upstream against the current. On the days when the bore is strongest—like it was during the “super tide” that coincided with the 2015 solar eclipse—surfers and tourists flock from around England to experience the curious wave. In fact, the River Severn is the birthplace of river surfing, a sport that wouldn't exist without tidal bores.
Also known as the "Flowerpot Rocks" due to their unique tapered shape, the Hopewell Rocks are one of the most unique tidal formations in North America. Caused by the ever-moving tide off the Canadian coast, these rocks have spindly bases and arches that continue to be gnawed away at by the sea. The tidal level here is drastic enough that one can walk the beach at the base of the stones one day and be 50 feet underwater the next on the very same spot.
The rising tide coming in from Hangzhou Bay is funneled by the shape of the Qiantang River into the world’s largest tidal bore, a long breaking wave known as the "Silver Dragon," which sometimes reaches 30 feet high. The tidal bore is first seen as a distant stroke of silver on the horizon, then the rushing sound of a great waterfall can be heard growing steadily louder as it approaches at a speed up to 25 miles per hour. Visitors have flocked to view the phenomenon for hundreds of years during the highest tides. Indeed, the regular occurrence of the Silver Dragon produced the oldest known tide table in 1056, to help tourists arrive in time to see the fast-moving wave.
Salt marshes can be found around the world, and are an especially stunning result of the ocean’s ebb and flow. They form along coasts where the tides have flooded part of the land, and the ecosystem has evolved to flourish in the saltwater. Pink salt marshes are more common than you would think, but one that actually has pink flamingos stalking its waters, like you’ll find at Salin Aigues-Mortes in Southern France, is truly something special.
Of all the tidal wetlands around the globe, few can compare to the kaleidoscope of color that brightens the grey landscape of the San Francisco Bay. These configurations of color against the drab shades of the bay are the San Francisco Bay salt ponds. The bright pond pockets of red and green are caused by the organisms or micro-algae living within them. The colors are reactions to salt levels, creating a stunning canvas of vibrant hues.
The largest tidal whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere can be found off the coast of downeast Maine. Called the Old Sow whirlpool, it has been strange site for hundreds of years, caused by the enormous tides and the particular terrain of the ocean floor in the area. While it is one of the largest in the world, with a diameter of around 250 feet, the speed of its vortex does not come close to being the fastest.
This partially submerged lava-ledge sits 20 feet above the sea, but the incoming tidal waves are often twice that height, drowning the rocks before receding to reveal a series of tidal pools in ancient lava formations. The largest and most photogenic of these pools is roughly the size of a hot tub and fills with thrashing sea water before receding back with the tide. Sea life is often caught in the strong tides, getting shoved up through the pools and briefly trapped in the pools.
There's a massive wildfire burning in several spots in Greenland, occupying thousands of acres of land and not far from Kangerlussuaq, in western Greenland, where scientists have a research base.
How it started is a bit of a mystery—some say it could've been started by campers, others say it could've been lightning—but, however it happened, recently-released satellite imagery shows the fire's extent. (Despite the fire's size, most of the rest of the country is still covered in ice.) Here's a GIF created by the European Space Agency, showing three views of the blaze:
According to the ESA, the GIF "uses different combinations of [wavelength] bands to show the fire in natural colour, to highlight the flames and to show the burnt areas."
The fire is believed to be fueled by peat, and it's expected to keep burning for some time. But scientists say that it may be just the beginning.
“Now, we’re going to have to start monitoring Greenland for wildfires," Jessica McCarty, a geography professor at Miami University of Ohio, told Newsweek, "and that’s not something we’d ever really thought about."
