New research says the megaliths may have been dragged to the site with the help of lard.

If you had to lug huge slabs of rock—really, truly immense slabs of rock—across vast distances and stubborn slopes, you might take any help you could get. You might even be game to slather the slabs—or the sledges that pulled them—with rendered pig fat, to help them glide along.

That’s the gist of the “greased sled” theory of how builders hauled the hefty megaliths that form Stonehenge. Researchers know that humans transported some of the one- and two-ton bluestones (smaller than the hulking sarsen stones) more than 140 miles from the Preseli Mountains in Wales before propping them up at the site.

This was a brawny feat, as archaeologists demonstrated in 2016 when they recruited volunteers to huff, puff, and yank a one-ton stone splayed atop a sycamore sleigh and pulled across timbers. Based on their calculations, it would have taken a full hour for a 10-person team to drag a stone a single mile—and the heavier bluestones would have called for more people and more elbow grease.

Researchers who subscribe to the “greased sled” idea would say that it might have involved some literal grease too, smeared on the rocks to reduce friction. In a new paper in the journal Antiquity, Lisa-Marie Shillito, an archaeologist at Newcastle University, serves up some evidence.

Shillito studied fats left behind on some Neolithic pottery sherds found near Stonehenge, in the prehistoric settlement of Durrington Walls. These were previously analyzed by archaeologists on the Feeding Stonehenge project, an effort to study cooking and animals around the site (Shillito worked on that project too).

While prior research interpreted these lipids as leftovers from feasts, Shillito spins them a different way. She points out that pig remains found nearby indicate that the animal was cooked whole on a spit, instead of chopped up and prepared in the vessels. She suggests that these vessels weren’t cooking implements but storage buckets, where the prehistoric workers stashed fat as the animals cooked.

In Shillito’s reading, this fat was later rendered as lard (which she calls “pig ‘tallow’”—a nod to the term for fat that's rendered from cattle and sheep). Worn-out workers, she suggests, might have given things a rub-down with the soft substance to make the surfaces a little slicker.

“This is an interesting way of looking at the lipid results … but it doesn’t quite convince,” writes Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at University College London and director of the Feeding Stonehenge project, in an email. “Tallow wouldn't really have been needed to erect them at nearby Stonehenge, after the journey was over. If it were used by Neolithic stone-haulers, we'd expect tallow to have been employed previously along the route and not at its destination.”

Oliver Craig, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of York who also researched food and animals at Stonehenge, argues that the relative amounts of carbon and nitrogen in the charred deposits still stuck to the sherds suggest that the vessels were used for cooking.

And Harry Robson, a postdoctoral fellow in bioarchaeology at the university, contends that “all but one” of the Durrington Walls samples Shilito studied fall outside of the lipid concentrations that point to tallow.

While Pearson doesn’t disagree that Neolithic people might have produced tallow and "potentially could have employed it it" on the journey to Stonehenge, he’s not convinced that the Durrington Walls evidence proves it.

Shillito, too, is curious about whether traces of lard or tallow may turn up on other bits of pottery discarded between stone quarries and Stonehenge. There's likely much more to learn about what happened along the way, because some suspected ancient pathways were later buried by more modern roads. “What would be interesting is to examine the likely routes of transport to see if there are any intermediate sites where grooved ware pottery is found,” Shillito says. “Campsites, if you like.”

Either way, she noted in a news release, it's a good practice for researchers to stay nimble in their interpretations. “Until now, there has been a general assumption that the traces of animal fat absorbed by these pieces of pottery were related to the cooking and consumption of food, and this steered initial interpretations in that direction," she said. "But there may have been other things going on as well."

Meanwhile, if you roast a pig in 2019, please spare your sewer the indignity and cost of a fatberg and dispose of the excess gloop without pouring it down the drain. If you happen to have some megaliths to move, though—well, it can’t hurt to grease them up.

As waters rise in Morganza, Louisiana, so does disaster tourism.

Read the words “Flooded Fries” on a restaurant menu, and what comes to mind? An image of soupy cheese drowning a plate of fried potatoes? Skinny tater tots topped with sausage gravy?

At the Spillway Café in Morganza, Louisiana, the “Flooded Fries” are named for actual flooding—specifically, the trillions of gallons of dirty Mississippi River water pressing against a nearby flood-control levee called the Morganza Spillway, ready to drown acres and acres of farmland.

“The scarier it gets, the more people come,” says Traci Ewing, owner of the Spillway Café (attached to a La Express gas station) and one of about 600 Morganza residents. “We drive over the spillway every single day. It’s not that big of a deal to us, but it does seem to draw tourists ... We don’t really understand it, but we embrace it.”

For nearly all of 2019, the Mississippi River has remained stuck at dangerously high levels not seen since the Great Flood of 1927. Back then, to save the financial center of New Orleans, a hole was intentionally blown into a levee at Caernarvon, in St. Bernard Parish—a move that inadvertently helped flood a majority of Louisiana and several other states. Soon after, Louisiana built spillway levees that could be manually opened to dump excess river water into surrounding green space, taking some pressure off the Mississippi.

In 2019, for the first time ever, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has opened the state's other spillway, the Bonnet Carre, twice in one year. And yet the river remains dangerously high, gorged with rainwater from this year’s historic storms in valleys north of New Orleans and topped off by several storms near New Orleans, including the city's recent close encounter with Tropical Storm Barry. That means water is pushing up high against the gate of the Morganza Spillway, which hasn't been opened since 2011 (and before that, 1973).

Residents here are ready. Some are even excited. That’s because controlled flooding—even the prospect of controlled flooding—has created its own side-economy. “Whenever they talk about opening the gates,” says Ewing, “then it’s a real tourist attraction."

Step right up and see water diverted—and disaster averted!

The spillway's intricate flood-control system draws campers, hikers, and fishermen to the area, but it isn’t Morganza’s only tourist draw. The town is perhaps best known for its connection to the film Easy Rider. In that cult classic, the hippie-biker heroes eat at a restaurant called Melancon’s, then decide to camp out near the Morganza Spillway. During the night they’re attacked by local rednecks. (Jack Nicholson’s character dies.)

Nowadays a plaque on the ground commemorates the spot where Melancon’s used to be, invisible unless you hover directly over it. Still, says Ewing, it brings “a lot of bikers ... during the summer.” This year there may be more than ever: Morganza will commemorate Easy Rider’s 50th anniversary with a festival on September 28.

The other lure for tourists, besides controlled flooding, is a single bald-eagle nest. Located along the highway near a spillway bay currently full of water, the old oak tree where the eagles reside has been pushed to death’s door by years of flooding. Soon it will fall. The town has built a replacement nest nearby, in hopes that the birds won't depart too, taking tourist dollars with them.

But flooding is the main reason people come here. If you drive up to Morganza from New Orleans, you can stop on the way at the Bonnet Carre Spillway, built in 1931 and now framed as a tourist attraction. The Army Corps had to open this structure roughly every five years in its first several decades. But in the last five years, thanks to climate change and other factors, they’ve opened it four times.

“This year was the first time we’ve opened the Bonnet Carre in back-to-back years ... [and] the first time [we’ve] ever opened it twice in one flood event,” says Matt Roe, an Army Corps PR flack, during my recent free tour of the Bonnet Carre.

The structure is essentially a cement bridge lined with 700 vertical, 8-foot-by-12-foot wooden timbers, which can be lifted with cranes to allow water to pass. Trillions of gallons have pumped out now for a record number of days, with the polluted freshwater making its way across several square miles of public green space, into Lake Pontchartrian, and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. There, it nurtures oxygen-killing algae blooms that could create a “dead zone” the size of Massachusetts this summer.

This nasty freshwater is tentatively suspected of causing more dolphin and turtle deaths than the BP oil spill. It’s also ruined this year for shrimpers and crabbers and fishermen, in Louisiana and beyond.

None of the green space the Bonnet Carre floods is private property. But the same is not true for the Morganza Spillway. Farmer Rickey Rivet, who lives near it, must go to great lengths to move his livestock whenever the water creeps close to his farms, which are in the spillway’s path.

“Army Corps told me they were gonna open it on the 5th of June, then they told me the 9th, then they came back a few days later and said they wasn’t gonna open the Morganza Spillway [at all],” says Rivet “But by the time they called it off, I’d already moved 200 head of cattle onto a friend’s property an hour-and-a-half north in Alexandria.”

If the Morganza Spillway were to open, Rivet would stand to lose a few hundred acres of soybeans and sugarcane. Luckily he’s insured for that. “You gotta have insurance here,” he says. “I can’t farm without it.”

All the farms here are privately owned, but the state retains the right to flood the land whenever it feels the need to. And that won’t change. Rivet had to move his cows eight years ago too, during the flood of 2011. “The first time I moved ’em was in 1973,” he says. “My father owned the cows then, and I was a senior in high school.”

Ewing, the Spillway Café owner, says that flooding bonds her and her Morganza neighbors. “This is a particular community, and in our little economy what affects the farmers affects us all in some way,” she says. “Most of [my neighbors live] on the side where, if the levees broke, we’re in the bowl where we'd be flooded ... It would be nice if they never had to open the spillway, but then we don’t want the levee to break.”

Rivet agrees: “We gotta have somewhere to relieve the Mississippi. We just gotta.”

His wife, Carla, sits on the board of directors at the Morganza Restoration Cultural District, which has some big plans to increase local tourism—in ways that don’t involve flooding.

"We'd love to do an agribusiness tour for people in Morganza, where they can see the spillway, the sugarcane, the soybean fields, and our bald eagle," she says.

The Mississippi River isn’t expected to recede anytime soon. But if it does, Ewing, for one, is ready: Besides the Spillway Café, the town’s only restaurant, her second La Express franchise—seven miles away, on the other side of the spillway—has a deli and a daiquiri stand. She says she needs two different shops to meet the two different states of Morganza: wet and dry.

“When the river’s open and everyone’s out here camping, the daiquiri shop does better,” she says. “But when the water’s up, then we’re a little busier over on this side.”

Her summation of this business predicament also seems to describe living in Morganza—or anywhere along the Mississippi River—in this age of climate change: “There is no best of both worlds.”

Kathleen Drew-Baker’s study of British algae helped rescue Japan's nori industry.

Every year on April 14, the nori farmers of Japan travel to Uto City to celebrate the Mother of the Sea. They assemble by a memorial that overlooks the Ariake Sea, an enormous, fertile bay speckled with the emerald-green grids of seaweed farms. The mother they honor is no celestial figure spun from myth or memory, but rather an unpaid botanist from Manchester. Though she lived halfway across the world, Kathleen Drew-Baker played a monumental role in saving Japan’s multi-billion dollar nori industry.

Nori, the Japanese name for the species of red seaweed known as Porphyra, is used ubiquitously in sushi. Shimmering, crinkly sheets of processed Porphyra are what encircle sushi rolls and cradle onigiri. Porphyra has been a staple of Japanese cuisine for centuries, according to Ruth Kassinger, author of Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us and Just Might Save Us. In the seventh century B.C., people offered seaweeds, including Porphyra, to shrines so that the gods might protect this crucial food source. In the eighth century A.D., fishermen paid their taxes to the emperor in kelp.

Until around 1600, Japanese villagers collected the seaweed simply by picking it from tidal rocks and pools. But in the early-17th century, the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu accidentally catalyzed commercial production. The shogun demanded that fresh fish be delivered to his Edo palace each day, leading fishermen to build fish-holding bamboo pens in Tokyo Bay that proved the perfect breeding ground for Porphyra. After the fishermen realized the algae thrived on bamboo fences, they constructed commercial farms by sinking twigs in tidal waters and harvesting the seaweed that grew on the wood.

This mass production of Porphyra decreased the price and allowed many more people to consume the algae. Villagers began to depend on the algae for their income as well as a primary stand-alone food source in the winter. It wasn’t until the 18th century that cooks, inspired by traditional Japanese papermaking techniques, began shredding and rack-drying Porphyra into the sheets now known as nori.

Despite these developments, nori had a nickname: gambler’s grass. Year after year, there was never any guarantee that the harvest would be good, despite fishermen’s ample efforts to cultivate the crop. Most years, it unfailingly bloomed in seaweed beds ripe for picking. But some fateful years, the nori would be a no-show, plunging fishermen into a hard, hungry winter.

In 1948, shortly after the end of World War II, the nori disappeared. A series of fierce typhoons—coupled with the effects of pollution and industrialization—had ravaged the coast. Unlike past, unlucky years, this time the nori didn’t bounce back the next year. The timing was terrible, Kassinger writes, as 3.5 million civilians and members of the Japanese military had returned to a country wrecked by war. The country needed all the food it could produce. The Japan’s fishing fleet was hard hit by American bombs, and countless fishermen had just lost their only source of income.

But the research needed to revive Japan’s nori had begun 20 years earlier, across the globe in Manchester, England, when Kathleen Drew-Baker was fired. She had been a lecturer in cryptogamic botany at the University of Manchester, but the college did not employ married women. So Drew-Baker was let go after her nuptials in 1928, though the university kept her on as an unpaid research fellow.

At the time, botany was one of the only sciences considered appropriate for women to enter. “Botany was a safe science for women,” Kassinger says. “It was the one that didn’t involve mathematics or cutting things up.” As a cryptogamic botanist, Drew-Baker studied plants that reproduced by spores, such as ferns. “Ferns were a good idea for women to study because they didn’t have flowers and therefore they didn’t seem to involve sex,” Kassinger says.

But Drew-Baker wasn’t interested in ferns, or any other plants a person could find on land. Instead, her obsession lay with the sludgy, slimy weeds that lived under the sea. Known to her friends and colleagues merely as “Drew,” she had a sly wit and approached all her work with an astonishing rigor and zeal. Two phycologists remember a 1923 summer school trip to the Great St. Bernard Pass, during which Drew-Baker rejoiced upon finding a reddish pool in a side valley teeming with unicellular red algae. She promptly filled her thermos with the dusty pink liquid.

By the 1940s, Drew-Baker had devoted her career to red algae, specifically the Welsh Porphyra umbilicalis, a coldwater seaweed known as laver in the United Kingdom. Welsh Porphyra, or laver, was a species related to Japanese Porphyra, or nori. Drew-Baker wanted to solve the mystery of this laver’s strange life cycle, as fishermen had only ever collected the weed in the wild. In hopes of collecting spores, Drew-Baker grew the Welsh Porphyra in a tidal tank in her laboratory. On a whim, she threw some oyster shells to the bottom of the tank. The laver did soon produce spores, but, rather strangely, the oyster shells all developed a pinkish sludge.

Though Drew-Baker first feared her experiment had been contaminated, she soon identified the pink as a species known at the time as Conchocelis rosea. In her experiments, Conchocelis always arrived in the summer months, whereas the Welsh Porphyra popped up in winter months. It didn’t take Drew-Baker long to realize that the two species were actually one.

Drew-Baker published her discovery—"Conchocelis-Phase in the Life-History of Porphyra umbilicalis"—in the 1949 issue of Nature. In the paper, Drew-Baker explained that C. rosea was actually the juvenile sporophyte phase of Porphyra. In the spring, spores from the adult algae did not disappear but sank to the seafloor and settled in the shells of bivalves such as oysters and mussels, soon emerging as pink sludge, or C. rosea. In turn, the pink sludge produced its own spores that settled on bamboo stalks and nets and grew into the familiar, harvestable Porphyra. While the algae’s two-faced life cycle may seem unnecessarily complicated, the C. rosea stage actually allows the juvenile algae to stay protected within shells on the seafloor, safe from rough surf or heat waves. Drew-Baker had no idea of the international implications of her discovery, and continued her research in phycology, or the study of algae.

Luckily, a marine biologist in Japan named Sokichi Segawa picked up the 1949 issue of Nature and was stunned by Drew-Baker’s findings. He realized that Japanese Porphyra likely shared a similar life cycle. During the war, the U.S. military had dropped thousands of underwater mines along the Japanese coastline that obliterated the bivalves dwelling on the seabed, thus denying the young Porphyra sporophytes a home, Kassinger writes. Segawa quickly collaborated with other Japanese marine biologists to replicate a version of Porphyra’s wild home on land, which led to the development of industrial nori production. Gambler’s grass became a guaranteed success, time after time.

With their crop revitalized, the nori fishermen collected enough money to construct a statue of their seaweed savior. But in 1957, before she could travel to sit for the sculptor, Drew-Baker died at the early age of 55. She had never even seen Japan. “She was the first to figure out how this seaweed worked,” Kassinger says. “And without her input, people probably would have died.”

The fishermen, still determined to honor the botanist, instead constructed a memorial for Drew-Baker. It was unveiled on April 14, 1963, writes marine biologist Colin Nash in The History of Aquaculture, in the Sumiyoshi Shuntou Shrine in Uto City. They buried Drew-Baker’s scientific papers under the memorial stone, as well as the university hood and gown she’d worn after her graduation from the University of Manchester. At the unveiling, local fishermen draped the memorial with gifts, including small vases and a hefty daikon. And every year since, nori farmers have graced the memorial with sheets of the year’s nori harvest.

Though much of Drew-Baker’s life remains undocumented, her colleagues remembered her as a generous, groundbreaking woman in a series of obituaries published in the 1958 issue of the European Journal of Phycology. Despite the financial setback she faced as a married female scientist, she managed to raise two children while conducting her own research and training younger botanists. In 1952, she was elected the first president of the British Phycological Society. “Her standards were high, yet her lack of pretension and capacity for friendship ensured that the less gifted or experienced of us never felt frustrated,” wrote J.W.G Lund, the president of the British Phycological Society at the time of Drew-Baker’s passing. “It was enough for her that we too were interested in the algae.”

Though Drew-Baker isn’t widely recognized outside of Japan, two of the microscopes she used in her research are on display at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, England. One is a brass Seibert model from the 1920s, and the other is a more modern binocular model from 1950.

So if you’re in Wales, try some laverbread, the pulpy seaweed paste kneaded from wild laver. And if you’re ever in Uto, stop by Drew-Baker’s memorial, smell the salty, weedy scent of the Ariake, and pay your respects to Japan’s Mother of the Sea.

You might call it a miscommunique.

When war breaks out, it doesn’t usually all break out at once. Widespread conflict is often preceded by scouting sorties and skirmishes, as both sides in a conflict sniff out weak points and make strategic moves. Such was the case for Nazi Germany in World War II, and now, the first telegram of the conflict, sent before war actually began, is up for auction.

On beige stationery, nondescript but for the German lettering at the top, is scribbled a simple message in German: “2 Company crossed frontier about 0100 hours without incident. Herzner.”

The pithy communique is dated August 26, 1939, a week before the typically cited onset of the war. It chronicles a little-known German commando force’s covert mission, assigned by Hitler himself, that was part of a large-scale effort to prepare for the invasion of Poland.

The telegram was sent by Hans-Albrecht Herzner, the leader of the Nazi force of 30 men, according to The New York Times, though estimates of the squad's size vary. Herzner sent the message from Jablonkow, on the other side of a pass through the mountainous region on the German-Polish-Czech border. (It is now in Czechia.) His mission was one of many set to happen along Poland’s border with Germany as the Nazis attempted to seize control of border crossings and other strategic areas in anticipation of their invasion. It was also thought to be a German attempt to conceal their intentions.

“All these attacks, it was felt, had been deliberately organized by Nazis to provoke the Poles to retaliation,” read an August 27 report in The New York Times, “and the skirmishes and clashes would be used by German propaganda as proof of Poland’s aggressiveness.”

But the full invasion didn’t happen that day. The day before, the United Kingdom and Poland signed a treaty assuring British support of Poland, should war arise. On hearing this news, Hitler postponed the invasion by a week. Herzner didn't get the memo.

“The ‘Jablonkow Incident’ was one of numerous German provocations in advance of, and in preparation for, the invasion of Poland, which had been scheduled for September 1,” says Neal Pease, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, via email. “The immediate purpose of the German raid at Jablonkow was to try to capture a strategic rail tunnel.”

All incursions into Polish territory were suspended by Hitler’s order, but Herzner’s men went ahead with their mission.

“They were waiting for their instruction, but they didn't get it,” says Adolf Pilch, a war survivor from Wisla, a small town not far from Jablonkow, in an oral history compiled by the Imperial War Museum. “The Germans didn't want to put [the instructions] through radio because they'd make it clear that they actually started the war!”

Pilch recalls how railroad workers notified the Polish army of the German presence, and Herzner’s ill-fated attack force was forced to retreat. The full-scale invasion would go forward as planned on September 1.

Alexander Historical Auctions in Maryland will be offering up this curiosity to bidders on July 30, 2019.

It's a long shot—but if you're keen to look, here's how to start.

From Earth, space can seem vague and distant—endless specks of light, a planet or star or far-off galaxy, mostly static unless you’re watching for a while. Maybe that’s why shooting stars—dynamic, fleeting, and fast—capture the imagination. They remind us that in the vastness of space, things are whizzing around. And these things sometimes come to visit us on Earth.

NASA estimates that some 48.5 tons of natural extraterrestrial material, such as dust or small chunks of asteroids, rain down toward our planet each day. Before these space rocks reach our atmosphere, they’re called meteoroids. When they enter our atmosphere, they become meteors—and many burn up, with that telltale shooting trail across the sky. When objects survive to fall to Earth, they’re known as meteorites. Sometimes, with smart sleuthing and a lot of luck, they can be found.

But that’s a long shot: The Meteoritical Society records only 1,824 confirmed meteorites found in the United States between 1807 and July 10, 2019. If you want to go for it, though, here’s how you can raise your odds.

Know where and how to look.

There are at least two factors to consider when deciding where to focus your search: where meteorites fall, and where you’re most likely to be able to spot them amidst other rocks, plants, and visual background noise.

Meteorites have been dropping from the sky for ages, and have landed all over the place, but to start, it might help to follow the trail of fairly recent falls. Marc Fries, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, has compiled a list of ways to keep tabs on meteorites by consulting weather radar for their distinctive reflectivity and velocity, among other characteristics.

This might give you a rough sense of where fragments landed—very rough. And even if you suspect that the space rock might still be there, undisturbed by construction or anything else—some sites are bound to be frustrating. How are you supposed to pick out what is likely to be an extraordinary small, brownish rock under vegetation, or in a sea of countless others that look a lot like it?

That’s what David (Duck) Mittlefehldt, another planetary scientist at NASA Johnson Space Center, found when he traveled to southern Israel in pursuit of meteorites and came back empty-handed. Meteorites are often dark, and the desert he scoured is freckled with dark-colored rocks with more local origins. “The meteorites, if they were there, would not have stood out like the beacons that you see when you're in Antarctica, scooting across the bare ice,” he explained on the Johnson Space Center’s podcast, “Houston We Have a Podcast,” in January 2018. In Antarctica, on the other hand, he added, “you can find a black rock a couple of centimeters across from a great distance,” because it pops against the snow or pale blue ice. The same is true in paler-hued deserts such as Chile’s Atacama. More generally, “for those without access to arid deserts or continental glaciers, perhaps the best place to do meteorite hunting is in freshly plowed farmer’s fields, especially following a recent rain,” suggests the American Meteor Society.

It’s probably unlikely that you’ll be in a place where a meteorite is just going to leap out at you, or in the immediate vicinity of a known fall. You may try a different approach by looking for micrometeorites, or specks of extraterrestrial dust just a few millimeters or micrometers wide. Amateur scientist Jon Larsen is convinced that these little nuggets of metallic rock blanket our cities, and Popular Science abridged Larsen’s instructions about how to hunt for them. Before you start your sweep with a plastic-swathed magnet, you might also take some cues from the reporters at The Verge, who gave it a try on a New York City rooftop. Scientific American suggests that the ground around a drainpipe might be another fruitful place to look, since flowing water might leave these dense bits behind (the same way a sluice box can help isolate bits of gold in a stream).

If you do come across something eye-catching and larger than dust, NASA recommends collecting it with gloves or tongs, wrapping it in aluminum foil, and storing it in a baggie, possibly nestled against a desiccant packet to help keep things dry. This isn't to isolate you from anything dangerous on the surface—it's to protect the maybe-meteorite from humidity and the oil and microbes on your hands.

Study the outside.

Finding a good candidate for a meteorite is only the beginning. The next thing you need to do is take a close look at the surface. (In the case of micrometeorites, you may need a magnifying glass or microscope.)

Meteorites often have a thin, shiny, black coating, known as a fusion crust. This develops as the rock barrels through the atmosphere, generating enough heat to melt the surface a little. Be careful not to confuse this with desert varnish, a reddish brown coating that grows when clay, iron, manganese, and microbes build up on terrestrial rocks.

Other hallmarks of a meteorite include regmaglypts, or thumbprint shapes in the surface, as though someone had picked up wet clay and pressed a little too hard. (Then again, the longer a rock sits around on Earth, prone to weathering, the more likely it is to lose some of these more subtle signs.) Meteorites tend not to be perfectly round, either—so spherical pebbles aren’t good candidates for further examination.

Take a look inside.

This won’t work for your tiniest samples, but to really get to know a potential meteorite, you’ve got to see inside it. Saw or file off a small chunk. You’re looking for the presence of some things and the absence of others.

There are three main types of meteorites (stony, iron, and stony-iron), and lots of finer distinctions. If you do find a meteorite, it’s most likely to be a stony one, and specifically a chondrite, made up of the oldest debris in the solar system. The insides of chondrites are distinctively freckled with chondrules, little spherical mineral grains. (A cross-section will look a little like a mottled slice of mortadella, with the grains usually smaller than 1/25 of an inch across.) You’ll also find a smattering of shiny metal grains—especially iron and nickel.

But if you see bubbles, you’re probably not looking at a meteorite. These little cavities are known as vesicles, and they generally form in igneous rocks when gas expands as magma cools and hardens, which means they come from a place with volcanic activity—namely, Earth. Yes, both the Moon and Mars once had volcanic activity, but neither place is the source of very many meteorites. Most of the stuff that lands on Earth from space started off as a part of an asteroid. Though vesicles can also form when asteroids collide, this is really unusual. When you hear hoofbeats, expect horses, not zebras. “Bottom line: If you have a vesicular rock, then it’s not a meteorite,” writes lunar geochemist Randy L. Korotev, retired from Washington University in St. Louis. “Such rocks are very common on Earth but are exceedingly rare among meteorites.”

Weigh it.

Meteorites tend to be heftier than other similarly-sized rocks due to their high metal content. Even so, “It’s not enough to say your rock is heavy,” according to the Meteorite Museum at the University of New Mexico. You need to quantify the density, which is mass divided by volume. "Iron meteorites are 3.5 times as heavy as ordinary Earth rocks of the same size, while stony meteorites are about 1.5 times as heavy," the museum notes. Consult the museum’s meteorite ID guide to see how your rock’s density stacks up against others—and if you’re anywhere near Albuquerque, call ahead to schedule a tour of their collection.

Grab a magnet.

Because chondrites, the most common type of stony meteorite, are rich in iron and nickel, they are magnetic. No need for anything fancy—a cheap, run-of-the-mill drugstore magnet will provide some pull.

Remember: That doesn’t make them magnets themselves. If paper clips or staples stick to your rock, you might have a piece of the mineral magnetite on your hands, instead, as Jim Holstein, collection manager of physical geology at the Field Museum in Chicago, demonstrates in this video.

One more caveat: Some of the rarest meteorites, including achondrites, lunar meteorites, and Martian meteorites, contain very little metal and aren’t magnetic. Since these are all superlatively uncommon, though, there’s probably no need to worry about ever finding one.

It’s tricky to know if your suspected meteorite (or the dust you picked up from the roof) is the real deal. If you’re still stumped, it may help to consult this “meteorite or meteorwrong” flow chart made by researchers at Brazil’s Museo Nacional. (Their wide-ranging collection, badly damaged by a catastrophic fire in 2018, includes the 11,600-pound Bendegó meteorite, discovered in Bahia in 1784. The rock, as you can imagine, survived intact.) For a definitive diagnosis, you might need to enlist the help of a lab that can run a chemical analysis.

Okay, so maybe—probably—you didn’t find something that literally dropped in from somewhere beyond this world. But now you’re a geological investigator and there’s no telling what else you might find out there.

The tiny pellets used to make plastic products are washing up everywhere, posing a huge environmental threat.

Last September, Jace Tunnell discovered a layer of tiny, round plastic pellets covering a beach on Padre Island off the southern coast of Texas. There were “millions of them,” he recalled, “and it went on for miles.” Tunnell, a marine biologist, knew exactly what the pellets were, but says he had never actually seen them before.

They’re called nurdles, and they’re the pre-production building blocks for nearly all plastic goods, from soft drink bottles to oil pipelines. But as essential as they are for consumer products, nurdles that become lost during transit or manufacturing are also an environmental hazard. In the ocean and along coastal waterways, they absorb toxic chemicals and are often mistaken for food by animals. They also wash up by the millions on beaches, leaving coastal communities to deal with the ramifications.

Researchers say nurdles—which weigh approximately 20 milligrams each—are found virtually everywhere. It is estimated that more than 250,000 tons enter the ocean annually. In February, Fidra, an environmental group based in Scotland, reported nurdle pollution in 28 of the 32 countries they surveyed, from Ecuador to South Africa.

“Pellets have been around and have been lost since plastic started to be produced,” says Madeleine Berg, a project manager for Fidra, which is working to reduce plastic waste and chemical pollution. And as plastic production continues to rise, researchers worry that the threat to beaches and coastal regions is growing worse.

The Gulf Coast of Texas, where several nurdle spills have occurred since last fall, is particularly vulnerable to marine debris. Most of the year, a longshore current heads south along the northern Gulf and another current heads north along the southern coast. “So it just pushes everything up on shore,” says Tunnell, who is director for the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve. This results in “some crazy amount of debris showing up.”

According to a study published in February by Tunnell’s colleague Kathleen Swanson and other researchers, accumulation rates of plastic pollution are 10 times higher in Texas than other Gulf Coast states sampled over a year-and-a-half period.

Texas is also a major producer of plastic pellets. According to a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality document obtained by Tunnell, there are 46 companies in Texas with permits to manufacture plastics materials and synthetic resins; many are on the Texas coast.

In a place like Padre Island, an important ecosystem for nearly 200 species of fish and almost 400 species of birds, including some endangered, nurdle pollution is a serious concern. Research shows that nurdles can absorb chemicals like DDT, a now widely-banned insecticide; PCBs, a group of manmade industrial chemicals; and mercury. And if marine animals like turtles ingest the plastic instead of the food they need, it can clog their digestive systems and eventually cause them to starve to death.

Surprised at the sheer number of nurdles on Padre Island last fall, Tunnell organized a local citizen scientist group called Nurdle Patrol, in which volunteers survey a beach or coastal area for 10 minutes and collect as many pellets as they see. They then send the location, date, and count, along with pictures, to Tunnell, who has been mapping out the surveys. Since November, more than 200 volunteers who have collected nearly 700 samples.

Tunnell’s map of Nurdle Patrol samples shows that the locations of plastic pellet manufacturers overlap with the largest amount of nurdles found on the coast, in the town of Port Lavaca and the Houston area.

In Point Comfort, just around 100 miles north of Padre Island, residents have sued Formosa Plastics, a known nurdle polluter, for violating the Clean Water Act and its Texas Commission on Environmental Quality permit. They want Formosa to pay $184 million in penalties, the maximum allowed by the Clean Water Act. For more than three years, Diane Wilson and two other local volunteers have collected more than 2,400 samples of nurdles and pellet powder discharged illegally by Formosa’s 2,500-acre Port Lavaca facility.

Although the company has been fined several times by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for violating state and federal environmental laws, Wilson alleges the extent of illegal discharges far exceeds the fines the company has received.

In a creek next to the facility, where the small white beads stand out against the darkness of the sediment, nurdle pollution is obvious. “I think a lot of the pellets or ‘the nurdles’ get caught in the vegetation,” Wilson said. When she bends down to grab a sample of soil — used as evidence in the lawsuit — hundreds of nurdles come up with it.

Wilson’s suit went to trial in March, and last week, a federal judge ruled that “Formosa had historically and continues to violate” the Clean Water Act and its discharge permit. As the Texas Tribune reported, the judge also said Formosa has failed to report violations to authorities since 2016, which is a separate violation, and that TCEQ has failed to bring Formosa into compliance.

Attorneys will argue in July how much Formosa should be fined, and Wilson says a decision will be announced in August or September.

Often, however, there are few repercussions for polluters, given the challenges of tracing the nurdles back to their origin and tracking down offenders. There is also no database of manufacturers who make plastic pellets and where they ship.

Even so, researchers can generally tell if nurdles are from a new spill. Resin, the core ingredient of plastic, turns yellow in the sun over time, so dark, dingy pellets are typically older than white ones. This can help determine whether a new spill has occurred or whether nurdles that have been out in the ocean for a while are simply washing up on shore.

Evidence can be tricky to gather, however, depending on where the pollution takes place. Within days of the arrival of white-colored nurdles in September on Mustang and Padre Island beaches, which are drivable and also regularly graded, most had been covered up or pushed up against the dunes. And even when nurdles can be traced to a single spill, manufacturer, or location, there is seemingly little to no legal framework for regulating plastic pellet production.

In 2007, California passed a law intended to prevent the discharge of nurdles into waterways across the state. But more typically, laws that regulate pollutant discharge apply to pollutants like solid waste in general, not nurdles specifically.

Under the federal Clean Water Act, manufacturers can still discharge a certain amount of pollutants into waterways as long as they have a permit. “[Even that] actually allows them to release a reasonable amount,” Tunnell said.

In addition, it is often unclear who is responsible when pollution crosses international borders. In 2017, for example, a storm caused containers filled with roughly 54 tons of nurdles to fall from a ship in Durban, South Africa. By the time the South African authorities began their cleanup attempts, the nurdles had already begun making their way to Australia, and were estimated to arrive about 450 days after the spill, according to Harriet Paterson, a professor at the University of Western Australia who is studying plastics in the aquatic environment.

“For the last 60 years, nurdles have been spilled into the ocean, but we don’t know who the polluter has been or where the pollution has happened,” she said. “So, the significant thing about the [Durban] spill is we know the point source of the pollution and the size of the spill.”

As for cleanup efforts, there is no effective way of removing large numbers of nurdles once they’re out in the environment, says Berg of Fidra. “You’re talking about billions and trillions of pellets,” she said. “If you were trying to collect those up, you would probably be collecting a huge amount of [natural debris], which would include a lot of, you know, sea creatures that you don’t want to be removing, lots of organic material,” Berg cautioned. Even when cleanup efforts are successful, Berg added, “what we find is that often they end up being replaced by more pellets, quite soon after.”

Nurdles can be lost at any point during the production and shipping stages. The pellets are manufactured by petrochemical companies and transported by train, ship, or truck to facilities where they are melted and shaped into a final plastic product. “They tend to kind of ping everywhere and get blown easily by the wind,” Berg said. “And if they’re not very well managed… then that can easily lead to leaks into the environment.”

Through an industry-led program called Operation Clean Sweep, manufacturers can opt to follow guidelines and best practices to achieve zero pellet, flake and powder loss. But the program is voluntary and there is no external check to make sure companies are complying.

Meanwhile, experts say the demand for plastic production, now estimated at 335 million tons annually, is growing, which means the demand for nurdles is also on the rise. “More companies have best practices in places than they used to,” Berg said. “But at the same time, we’re still massively increasing the amount of plastic that we use, produce, manufacture, every year.”

Tunnell is bracing for what that could mean locally. A dozen new U.S. facilities or expansions—nearly all of them in Texas—are expected within the next three years, according to information obtained by Tunnell from ICIS, a petrochemical market research company. “Seventy-five percent of the facilities that are either expanding or new are in Texas, out of the whole country,” he said, adding that at some point, there will inevitably be a spill that can be traced back to its source.

Because of that potential, education has been a crucial part of citizen scientist projects like Tunnell’s. In addition to presentations to his local community, Tunnell visited all five Gulf states in May to collect samples and expand his Nurdle Patrol program.

“Hopefully this is creating some awareness, not only with the typical environmental people,” Tunnell said, but also “the folks that work at the industry, the people that are making decisions, the city folks, the folks that are up in Austin making decisions for us.

“Look, there’s a problem that needs to change,” he added, “and it’s been going on for decades.”

"Insurance covers" were meant to provide for their families in the event of disaster.

Fifty years ago this week, three men stepped into a small capsule perched atop a nearly 400-foot-tall rocket. They were to travel 238,900 miles, through a crushing vacuum, at thousands of miles per hour, land delicately on a barren, airless rock—and then make the trip home. Survival was not assured.

The three Apollo 11 astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins—knew they might not make it back. Just two years earlier, during an Apollo 1 launch rehearsal, a similar capsule had caught fire, killing the entire crew. Things could go wrong; they had before.

All three had families, though, who had to share in their risks, so the astronauts tried to find some measure of security for their wives and children should the worst happen beyond the surly bonds of Earth. They did so in a very American way: by capitalizing on their fame. In the weeks before the launch, all three men autographed hundreds of envelopes, each with a special design commemorating the mission and a postage stamp celebrating a previous Apollo mission. These envelopes were to be postmarked on launch day or Moon-landing day, ideally increasing their value as collectibles. If the astronauts didn’t return, their families could sell these “insurance covers,” as they were known, to stay afloat.

“It was driven by the fact that, given the nature of the astronauts’ livelihood, they were not able to secure much life insurance,” says Howard C. Weinberger, a collector and author who has written extensively about the Apollo program.

NASA had its own insurance program, but it “originally did not cover astronauts when flying—it was considered high risk and experimental,” according Brandi Dean, a spokesperson for NASA’s Johnson Space Center. That left the most dangerous and defining part of the astronauts’ job uninsured by their employer. It’s not true, Weinberger says, that no one would insure the astronauts during the mission. They were able to get private insurance—it just wasn’t enough. “Since we were unable to obtain adequate life insurance due to the high risk nature of being an astronaut,” Buzz Aldrin later wrote on the certificate of authenticity that accompanies his insurance covers, “we signed this group of covers and evenly distributed them to our families for safe keeping while we performed our mission.”

Weinberger says it’s unclear where the idea to do covers or envelopes originated, but stamp collecting was very big at the time, and the astronauts had become friendly with a group of Houston philatelists who’d been producing envelopes celebrating the space program. That group designed some of the Apollo 11 envelopes, which the crew then signed during their weeks-long preflight quarantine. (Weinberger notes that insurance covers have nicer, more careful signatures than many other space collectibles.) An astronaut not on the launch then got them postmarked in Houston. Because the project was not officially sanctioned, there are no NASA records for it; Weinberger estimates that between them, the astronauts signed between 500 and 1,000 of them.

Of course, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins did make it safely back, and went on to sign many, many more autographs over the years. In the morbid way of collectibles, that should have made the insurance covers less valuable—there are plenty of other ways to get an Apollo 11 autograph. But Robert Pearlman, editor of collectSPACE, says the insurance covers “had a great story behind them. Collectors like that.”

“The appeal of a cover is that it had to be there,” Pearlman says. “If you wanted to have that connection to the date and place, you had to go there.” The postmark is a time-stamp that captures a moment of uncertainty, when no one knew if the man who signed it would be alive in a few days.

The practice of creating insurance covers continued through Apollo 16. (Apollo 15 was mired in scandal after returning astronauts sold covers they’d taken with them to the moon; NASA banned the crew from ever flying in space again.) Aldrin began selling them from the beginning, Weinberger says, and more and more slowly made their way to collectors. As interest in space memorabilia really started to take hold in the 2000s, the market price for insurance covers has stayed pretty consistent, starting at about $5,000 a piece. But that didn’t include Armstrong’s—his collection, which he closely held while he was alive and which passed to his family after his death in 2012, didn’t begin to become available on the market until now. These covers have begun fetching higher prices.

Most often, though, insurance covers are near the lower end of the space collectibles hierarchy. As Pearlman explains, they’re not among the rare objects that have actually been in space, or the even more rarefied objects that have been on the Moon, such as the lunar landing manual used by Armstrong and Aldrin to make their descent (which did not sell in a recent Christie's auction, with an estimate in the millions). They’re not one-of-kind Earth-bound objects such as the mission control recording of the landing or Neil Armstrong’s gold medallion. But as human reminders of just what those astronauts risked to get to the Moon—and what might have been running through their minds and the minds of their families—they tell a hell of a story.

Specialties that are disappearing back home still thrive in "New Iceland."

In a kitchen adjacent to her general store, Donna Austfjord mixes allspice, cloves, salt, pepper and tender quick meat cure, then spreads the mixture between pounded pieces of lamb flank. She is fixing rúllupylsa, a traditionally Icelandic dish. She will not smoke the meat and press it between two boards, like Icelandic fishwives once did, and her spices only approximate the old recipe’s herbs such as arctic thyme and yarrow. But it’s still remarkable. After all, the Italy-based Slow Food Foundation has listed rúllupylsa as endangered, citing the declining number of Icelandic producers and farm families making it.

Austfjord, though, does not live in Iceland. She lives in New Iceland: a remote region in Canada where, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, rúllupylsa is relatively abundant. In Gimli, the biggest town (population 4,000), the local branch of a national grocery chain sells it. When a Thai family took over another general store, they made a point of learning to make rúllupylsa. They sell it alongside pad Thai.

It’s one of many Icelandic specialties easily found in the area. Brennivin, a potent Icelandic liqueur, flows freely at bars, and the local pizza joint is named Brennivin's Pizza Hüs. An ice cream stand sells sundaes named after the ice-covered Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. The shelves of Austfjord's General Store are stocked with Icelandic dried fish, Lakkris (licorice candy that Icelanders love), and homemade slátur (a kind of Icelandic haggis) and crepe-like pönnukökur. When I visit, Austfjord is preparing skyr by straining buttermilk whey through a cotton bag she’s sewn—all according to a recipe handed down from her mother. It tastes velvety, rich, and tangy.

Iceland is aware of New Iceland. Last summer, Austfjord reckons five busloads of Icelandic visitors stopped by her store. She also met the new Prime Minister of Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir who was in the area visiting.

The origins of this delicious diaspora are explosive. Following a volcanic eruption in 1875 that starved livestock, crippled the economy, and punctuated an ongoing series of hardships, Sigtryggur Jonasson, who had recently arrived in Canada, traveled home with a booklet titled Nýja Ísland I Kanada, or New Iceland In Canada, which Canadian officials wanted to distribute as part of an effort to attract immigrants to the lightly populated area. Over the next few decades, some 20% of Iceland’s population emigrated to North America, mainly to Canada. Jonasson became known as the Father of New Iceland, and Icelanders eventually settled, by being towed on flat boats, on Lake Winnipeg, where they hoped to fish and govern themselves in the remote territory. They named the capital of New Iceland Gimli, Icelandic for “paradise.”

But it wasn't quite. Even hardened Icelanders weren't prepared for the cold winters, and many died from scurvy and a smallpox epidemic during the first years. According to Stefan Jonasson, a Winnipeg-based New Iceland historian and editor of the community newspaper Lögberg-Heimskringla, at least one setter stored bodies in cold sheds until spring thaw when they could be buried. The newcomers survived in large part thanks to First Nations people, who taught these ocean-fishing immigrants how to set a net four feet under the frozen lake’s ice. The bond formed between First Nations and Icelanders persists today—intermarriage was common, as well as culinary exchanges. Many nearby First Nations families still make Icelandic dishes.

“First Nations also taught New Icelanders how to smoke goldeye fish (an iconic Manitoba dlsh) wrapped in birch,” says Jonasson. “If you’ve ever eaten unsmoked goldeye, it’s unpalatable.” Aid from the First Nations helped the Icelanders go on to found Gimli's great fishing community. Today, they export the mild, sweet-flesh walleye fish, colloquially known as pickerel, worldwide.

The immigrants were determined to create a New Iceland. As a child growing up in Winnipeg, I learned in class that they formed their own republic, a myth later dispelled. But they penned their own constitution and lived by it for several years until the young Dominion of Canada began administering the area. Still, they certainly succeeded in creating a de facto New Iceland. Even today, Icelandic flags are everywhere, and homes and summer residences have Icelandic-blue name signs. Even non-Icelandic cottage owners, with names like the Greenbergs or the O'Neals, have joined in by putting up blue signs.

Reciprocally, people in Iceland endearingly insist on calling people in this part of Manitoba Western Icelanders. The prime minister of Iceland makes a point of flying over for the Icelandic festival held in Gimli every August, which swells the town’s population to 50,000, most of them Icelandic diaspora visitors wearing t-shirts with names ending in -dóttir or -sson to advertise their Icelandic clan.

Despite this strong connection, Gimli residents don’t live just like their peers in Iceland. At the New Iceland Heritage Museum, I stumble upon a young woman telling the sales clerk about her trouble finding vínarterta in Iceland. Like rúllupylsa, this multi-layered prune jam and cardamom cake is Icelandic, but much easier to find in parts of Canada: Every amma (grandma) in the region bakes vínarterta, and the museum gift shop sells a version from the excellent Sugar Me Cookie bakery in town. From rolled lamb flank to prune cake, New Iceland’s food culture feels trapped in amber, stuck at a point in time closer to their volcanic emigration than to modern Iceland.

According to Laurie Bertram, a history professor at the University of Toronto and author of the upcoming book The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans, this disconnect is because the New Icelanders became something of a lost tribe. After World War II, Iceland entered into a long relationship with NATO and the U.S. that modernized the country very quickly. "We have this funny relationship with Iceland overseas, because in a way we don’t recognize each other," Bertram explains. "They immigrated from that Iceland, an old Iceland."

One chapter of Bertram's book is devoted to vínarterta, which was the subject of her doctoral thesis. The cake was at the height of fashion, she says, in 1875, when the first wave of immigrants arrived to Lake Winnipeg (more recent arrivals included the “cash and ash" émigrés, named after a 2010 volcanic eruption and the Icelandic banking crisis), and that's one reason why it's such an important marker of culture in New Iceland. "For them, vínarterta, was a symbol of success, prosperity, and fashionability. It's a survivor of that Iceland. That’s why it’s really taboo to, for example, try chocolate instead of prunes. That’s not what that’s for. It’s symbolic for having not changed."

Another way they refused to change? Coffee. Icelanders wouldn’t accept the tea that the dominant Anglo-Protestant society had made the norm. “Coffee was at the heart of Icelandic social life,” says Bertram. “So they started roasting their own beans, and they kind of changed the coffee market in Manitoba by creating a loyal and ferocious demand for coffee.” A few years ago, Bertram's uncle, Nelson Gerrard, who raises Icelandic sheep in the area as a hobby, started a project to revive the homestead built by Sigtryggur Jónasson, as an information center for visiting Icelanders and a rural coffee house like those that dot Iceland's countryside. He is funding the project through a line of Icelandic coffee he sells around town and online. “It's such an Icelandic thing to do. To raise money to protect a heritage site through coffee," Bertram says.

Back in the kitchen, Donna Austfjord, who is spooning out skyr and rolling out pönnukökur, tells me she is doing this for future generations, whose interest in Icelandic heritage seems as keyed up as ever—thanks in part to the popularity of Iceland as a travel destination, the Game of Thrones factor, and hip music acts such as Björk and Sigur Rós. Meanwhile, New Iceland is a growing curiosity for Icelanders, who are visiting in growing numbers.

"There's a definite link between us,” the Icelandic president, Guðni Jóhannesson, said on a recent visit to Gimli. It’s a love affair that Donna Austfjord and others around Gimli will keep feeding.

Chicks born by artificial insemination offer new hope for the endangered kākāpō.

It’s hard out there for a kākāpō. These famously adorable and unusual parrots—chunky, flightless, nocturnal—are one of the many critically endangered species in New Zealand, but efforts to increase their population have been slow-going.

Kākāpōs once had no natural predators, but now must deal with rats, cats, stoats, and possums. The country is trying to eradicate these predators and help the unusual bird come back from its mid-1990s low of just 52 individuals, but encouraging kākāpōs to breed is an uphill battle. The birds mate only every several years, with the fruiting of the rimu, a native tree. On top of that, they’re plagued with defective sperm and high rates of infertility. Now, for the first time in a decade, the country’s Kākāpō Recovery Team announced successful artificial insemination (of three female birds, resulting in two chicks), a major breakthrough in staving off extinction.

Even though scientists have the genomes of every known individual, which helps them match up suitable breeding pairs, kākāpōs just don’t seem like they’re on board with the plan.

“Females are quite choosy. They want the best males with the best genes,” says Nicolas Dussex, a researcher with Stockholm University’s zoology department. “So you can't force them to mate with a less than ideal male.”

It’s reasonable for female kākāpō to want the best, but this means that just a few males dominate the reproductive market—so every generation loses genetic diversity. The genetic similarities among the surviving individuals reduces their fitness, and means that they’re at greater risk of a pathogen wiping them all out in one fell swoop. The answer to this is to manage who mates with whom—giving some of those less desirable males a chance to pass on their genes.

“Because the species is at risk of losing genetic diversity, artificial insemination can help maintain the genetic heritage of some males who would otherwise have no chance to mate due to strong competition with other males,” says Dussex.

Artificial insemination also has the effect of increasing the chance that a female kākāpō’s eggs will be fertile. “We use it to improve egg fertility,” writes Andrew Digby, a research scientist with the Kākāpō Recovery Team, in a Twitter post, “since the more times a female mates the more likely her eggs are to be fertile.”

Digby’s team is also working to stave off a recent epidemic of aspergillosis, a lung disease that claimed the lives of seven kākāpō since April and is currently infecting 13 chicks, though some appear to be showing signs of recovery. One of the affected chicks—and one spawned by artificial insemination—is the offspring of 21-year-old Sinbad, who carries the rare genetic material of the Fiordland kākāpō lineage. Sinbad, who had never been a father before this year, is a descendant of Richard Henry, the last Fiordland kākāpō, who was thought to be around 80 years old when he died in 2010.

All of these efforts are supported by Ngāi Tahu, the Maōri people of southern New Zealand, along with the country’s Department of Conservation and Meridian Energy.

"The existing kākāpō population has a very limited stream of whakapapa [a Maōri term for genetic lineage] to produce offspring from,” says Tane Davis, the Ngāi Tahu representative on the Kākāpō Recovery Team, in a release. “The joining of Matauranga [traditional wisdom] and western science perspectives are needed to maintain the kākāpō population, and ultimately enhances the Mauri [life force] of kākāpō.”

Following this breeding season, the grand kākāpō total stands at 142 adults and 72 chicks.

Now some of the iconic American painter’s work is headed to the Smithsonian.

Somewhere off Route 50 in Herndon, Virginia, next to a LabCorp and across the street from a dentist’s office, there is a warehouse that houses almost every painting ever painted by one of the most recognizable painters in America: Bob Ross. They’re not on display, but are stacked carefully in numbered cardboard boxes; landscape upon landscape, snow-capped peak upon snow-capped peak, happy little tree upon happy little tree.

Ross’s instructional television show, The Joy of Painting, ran on PBS for 31 seasons, from 1983 to 1994, each containing 13 episodes, for which Ross would make three versions of the same painting—one as an initial reference, one that he painted on TV, and a last, more painstaking version to be included in his books. Over his PBS tenure, Ross crafted some 1,143 paintings (there were sometimes guest hosts), according to a recent video from The New York Times. The majority of those landscapes—and they are all landscapes—are housed in the warehouses of Bob Ross Inc., the company that sells his signature how-to books, art supplies, and memorabilia. We’d wager there are enough mountains, lakes, and happy little trees to designate Bob Ross Inc. a national park.

Though Bob Ross Inc. operates out of Virginia—run by Ross’s longtime business partner Annette Kowalski—Ross himself was a Florida man. He was born in Daytona Beach in 1942, and grew up in Orlando. When Ross turned 18, he enlisted in the United States Air Force and was eventually stationed at a base near Fairbanks, Alaska. There, Ross saw snow and mountains for the first time—staples of the landscapes now stacked in heaps in Virginia.

A warehouse is not a gallery, so visitors aren’t encouraged. It’s a fully functional office, Sarah Strohl, the executive assistant of Bob Ross Inc. writes in an email. But many of Ross’s paintings pepper the walls, alongside larger-than-life photos of him holding a baby raccoon, one of his many treasured woodland creatures. “The paintings in the halls are paintings that have hung up in the Bob Ross Inc. offices since the ’90s,” Strohl says. “There are quite a few.”

As one might expect from his 30-minute-episode-friendly style, there is no one Ross that stands out as a magnum opus. Describe one and you might describe a dozen: a waterfall, a stand of trees, a small cabin overlooking a lake. But as a collection, the oeuvre is rather impressive, a testament to consistency, replicability, and dedication.

So when the Smithsonian National Museum of American History set out to acquire some of Ross’s work, they searched for an example that was representative, according to Eric Jentsch, curator and deputy chair of the division of culture and arts at the museum. Jentsch worked with Bob Ross Inc. to select four paintings. He briefly considered acquiring Shades of Gray, a striking grayscale painting Ross made upon request from a colorblind fan (season 2, episode 4), but opted for more quintessential examples of the painter’s typical themes and wet-on-wet style: the book version of Blue Ridge Falls (season 30, episode 13) and all three versions of On a Clear Day (season 14, episode 8).

“There are differences between the paintings, as each had a very particular purpose,” Jentsch says. “The basic concept is the same, but if you look closely, there are differences in the lakefront, there’s more detail.” Jentsch and the museum also acquired a variety of Ross-adjacent memorabilia, including a stepstool he turned into an easel, a palette, brushes he stored in an old ammunition box, fan letters, production notebooks, a Funko Pop figure, and bobbleheads. The Smithsonian has yet to set a date to display Ross’s work, but Jentsch says they hope to soon.

Ross, who died in 1995 of lymphoma, was less concerned with his physical legacy than he was with inspiring a generation of people to pick up a paintbrush. “He was not selling himself as an artist, but selling that other people could be artists as well,” Jentsch says. Fittingly, none of the paintings in Bob Ross Inc. are for sale. In fact, the notion never even occurred to the Kowalskis, according to The New York Times.

“Well, we show people that anybody can paint a picture that they're proud of,” Ross told the Orlando Sentinel in 1990. “It may never hang in the Smithsonian, but it will certainly be something that they'll hang in their home and be proud of. And that's what it's all about."

It's only the latest phase of a global phenomenon.

Future historians will no doubt ponder the origins of the Sheffield Staplings of 2019. What motivated ordinary people to affix their hard-won bread to trees around the central English city? Was it an act of political resistance? A ritual expression of religious belief? A cryptic calling card for a secret society devoted to all things baked and arboreal?

Whatever the case, Reddit user flight0fthenavigator would like people to know that it “is NOT a cult. The Sheffield Staplings have probably led some people to believe this, but it’s not.” (Locals were, indeed, wondering.)

Sheffield, in truth, is only the most recent locale to become the focus of the subreddit “BreadStapledToTrees,” or BSTT, in which people post and discuss photos of their staplings. The forum was actually launched in 2017 by a user who has since deleted his Reddit account. Nevertheless, the subreddit has accumulated some 213,000 members. According to prominent BSTT member I_Say_Fool_Of_A_Took (real name Andy Chamberlain), the founding user and his friend had originally envisioned a subreddit about “whole wheat bread stapled to trees,” before they ultimately decided that was too specific. Soon, they opened the floor to...any kind of bread stapled to trees.

As for why the subreddit exists, “I honestly don’t know,” the founder answered in an archived post. And indeed, members have taken the forum in all kinds of directions. One user captioned their work as “art” and encouraged others to upvote it, so it would appear in Google searches for “art.” Another redesigned the Reddit logo to resemble bread stapled to a tree. Inevitably, a courageous and creative rebel figured out a way to “staple trees to bread.”

Chamberlain, 18 and far from Sheffield in Washington State, admits in a Reddit direct message that “it seems pointless.” But he’s completed five separate staplings, and even made a BSTT music video because “it brings joy.” He’s echoed by the user FluxOrbit, who wrote in a post that “people do it because it is random and weird, and for the fun of doing something so ridiculous and pointless.” User localblackandred, who recently completed her first staple, says in a direct message that she got involved simply because she “thought it was so funny." She doesn’t much care that her mom and friends don’t get it.

Who knows which community BSTT will next take over, after it leaves Sheffield? Until then, the city is an apt choice for BSTT-ers. The Sheffield Tree Action Groups (STAG) report that 5,500 of the city’s trees have been chopped down in the last five years, with thousands more slated to follow. Perhaps the new doughy decorations could bring attention to the plight of Sheffield's leafy residents.

“Fallen Astronaut” honors those who died in the Space Race, with a few notable omissions.

Across the many missions to the Moon over the years, countless bits of flotsam and jetsam have been deposited on the lunar surface. From Soviet sensors to a couple of golf balls, there are roughly 800 manmade objects up there. There is, however, one of them that’s different than the others. In 1971, the crew of Apollo 15 left a piece of aluminum, 3.3 inches long, on the lunar surface. It is called Fallen Astronaut, and it is the first (and only) art installation on our closest neighbor. (The Moon Museum, a ceramic wafer etched with drawings by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and others may or not have been snuck aboard Apollo 12.)

In her book Artifacts of Flight, NASA art curator Carolyn Russo writes: “On Apollo 15, the fourth mission to land on the Moon, astronauts David Scott and James Irwin left a memorial on the lunar surface as a tribute to the heroic men of the U.S. and Soviet space programs who had risked and lost their lives.” This small memorial figure, fittingly Space Age in design, was created by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck. “As the final act of the third extravehicular activity on August 2, 1971, they placed a sculpture depicting a ‘fallen astronaut’ in the lunar soil at the Hadley-Apennine landing site,” Russo writes.

The figurine was placed without fanfare—in fact the public wasn't even told it was up there until the launch of Apollo 16 almost a year later. It rests in an open grave of moon dust alongside a plaque bearing the names of 14 men, Soviet and American, who died in the course of their respective nations’ space programs, including Gus Grissom and Yuri Gagarin. Notably, three names are missing: two cosmonauts whose deaths were obscured by the secrecy of the Soviet space program, and Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., who had been trained to be the first black American astronaut and died in a training flight. That said, Fallen Astronaut was designed to be ethnic-, race-, and gender-neutral. The sculpture was also designed to be lightweight enough for easy transit, but sturdy enough to stay put on the celestial body it calls home.

Thanks to the ability of aluminum to weather the Moon’s extreme temperature swings and abrasive dust, the original sculpture is still there, intact. But it’s not the only version that exists. Van Hoeydonck crafted a replica that he donated to National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, in 1972.

We’ve been inspired by each of their proposals, and we think you will be, too.

In celebration of our 10th anniversary, earlier this year Atlas Obscura launched First Journey, a chance for one of our readers to win $15,000 toward a meaningful, once-in-a-lifetime experience. It's a competition inspired by our co-founders, Dylan Thuras and Josh Foer, who both went on transformative journeys in their early adult years.

We invited anyone who has never had the opportunity to take a real journey to propose an ambitious trip with a clear mission, and the response was truly overwhelming. Thousands applied, and it was no easy task to choose from among so many wonderful ideas. Today, we're so pleased to be able announce our five First Journey finalists.

All five finalists proposed spectacular, deeply personal journeys, and we wish we could fund them all. The final decision of the judging panel on the winner of the grand prize—$15,000, logistical support, and the chance to be featured on Atlas Obscura—will be announced on July 31. Each of the four runners-up will receive $500, which we hope can serve as seed money toward making their journeys a reality.

We want to thank each and every person who applied for First Journey, and offer our hearty congratulations to the finalists—read more about their proposed journeys, in their own words, below. And stay tuned for an announcement about the winner on July 31!

Asmarrah Bedford, 39

Joshua Tree, California

The goal of my proposed journey is to lay bare the sources of revenue used to build many of England and Scotland’s houses of the National Trust. This journey would take me and my family to Jamaica, Ghana, England, and Scotland.

Over the course of the 18th century, thousands of British families erected lavish Georgian mansions throughout the United Kingdom with wealth amassed from the transatlantic slave trade. The brass heritage plaques adorning these homes often bury this truth.

For example, William Forbes purchased the Callendar Estate in Falkirk, Scotland, in 1783, but on the estate’s “history” page he is simply listed as the owner of a successful coppersmith business in London. There is no mention of the fact that he made a fortune manufacturing and exporting sugar boiling pans and rum stills to Jamaica, nor is there mention of the dozens of other business links he had with the island.

This journey is especially meaningful to me because I’m Jamaican American, my husband is English, and our twin boys are all of the above. The other thing to know about me is that six years ago, my life was temporarily derailed by a breast cancer diagnosis. I had received my master’s degree from UCLA and was an adjunct history professor with dreams of getting a Ph.D., and then I found a lump. Not long after my last radiation treatment, I then lost my mother, who was the keeper of the stories in my family. In addition to using this journey to get my academic career back on track, I want to honor my ancestors by telling their story—all of it—not to place blame, but to remember so we can continue to move forward, together.

Kris Bradley, 49

Matawan, New Jersey

The goal of this journey would be to follow the path of the painter Vincent Van Gogh’s life, while giving thanks to him for being such an amazing and powerful influence on my son. This journey would take me, my husband, and my son to a variety of destinations in France and the Netherlands.

My son has struggled with mental health issues for much of his young life (he is 20). He’s been through therapists, meds, and a brief stay in the hospital. Through it all, he kept a “diary” of letters written to Van Gogh, who was his one constant confidant who he could tell anything. Writing to Vincent helped him work through his fears, anxieties and, at times, his suicidal thoughts.

In the last few years, he (after having been assigned female at birth) came out as transgender and has been doing really well. He recently had his name legally changed to “Charles Vincent,” as a way to honor the painter. He has worked (and continues to work) so very hard through mental health issues, fears of rejection, the ignorance and hate that way too many people hold towards people who are trans, and just getting up every day trying to live a happy life. Vincent Van Gogh has given him a safe touchstone in his life, a confidant who is always available, who never judges, and who understand mental health struggles. While the conversation is, of course, one sided, we know that this relationship has helped Charles overcome so much.

This trip would mean the world to me on so many levels. Not only is it a trip that I could never afford to gift my son, it’s a way to honor the man who unwittingly helped us keep my son alive through his darkest days. We would be walking his paths, just as he was walking with Charles through his. The culmination of the trip would be to leave flowers on his and his brother Theo's graves in a gesture of thanks for his help through the last few years.

In our family, there is a lot of love for my son and for Van Gogh, and I'm sure there will be much laughter and many, many tears.

Skylar Coleman, 21

Washington, D.C.

It all started with an album. In a class I wasn’t supposed to be sitting in, someone played an old compilation of music from Upper Volta, a country now known as Burkina Faso. What I felt, hearing that music, was nothing less than enchantment. From that moment, I dug into the history of the country and soaked up everything I could, but lack of scholarship and online resources limited my reach.

Having recently completed a B.A. in International Studies, I can tell you more than you’d like to know about Russian history, the South China Sea, or the European Union, but the American academic world falls short when it comes to Africa. In many institutions, if you’re going to learn about the African continent at all, you’re likely going to learn about it in a development context.

My proposed First Journey would take me to at least six countries across Africa (including Nigeria, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Egypt) and serve as a chance for me to learn about and document the doers, makers, and thinkers in these change-making regions. Through the people I meet and interview, I hope to immerse myself in local perspectives on the places I visit. From music that brings people together where artificial borders tore them apart, to organizations saving women from sex trafficking, people are rising to challenges and tapping into a creativity that could only be inspired by the wonders and hardships of the African continent.

For so long, I’ve been someone so good at the structured pace of academia that I tumbled through a bachelor’s degree in 2 1/2 years while working full time. Everyone in my life would like to see me take my next step soon, to start grad school without a moment to pause and think. Eventually, I do hope to get my master’s degree in cultural diplomacy, which would turn much of what I want to do on this trip into a career.

This step has to wait, though, because I can’t fathom spending another second learning about the world on whiteboards. This is a passion project, something that no one is asking me to do. And at 21 years old, this is an opportunity that I may never have the time or flexibility to do again. I know I can take this First Journey, and I’m asking you to believe in me too.

Kaitlyn Schwalje, 31

Portland, Maine

My First Journey proposal is to explore the impact that tsunamis have had on humanity’s collective consciousness, by telling the stories of the artifacts they've left behind.

I am the daughter of a safety engineer. Growing up, worst-case-scenarios landed on my father’s desk in the form of overstuffed manila folders—a slip and fall in the Bahamas, an electrocution in Hawaii, and plenty of dryer fires from all over the U.S. The nature of the work in my family’s business is determining cause and culpability.

That’s a big part of how I became fascinated by disaster, both in trying to understand its cause and its human impact. After reading the stunning and heartbreaking book Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry, I started a kind of dossier of tsunami facts and relevant places: a collection of tsunami clocks all frozen in time at the exact moment the tsunami hit; tsunami survival pods; tsunami museums in Hawaii and Thailand.

I’m fascinated by the idea that objects can hold memory and be elevated from ordinary to extraordinary depending on their history. My First Journey proposal is to document the stories of tsunami artifacts. This journey would take me to Indonesia, Japan, Hawaii, and finally to Seattle, Washington.

By focusing on the objects of tsunamis, I hope to document stories that represent themes of hope, loss, and scientific achievement. This journey will also serve as a meditation on the fickleness of our home planet—a place that sometimes insulates us and sometimes tries to shake us from its surface like a bucking bull.

Jenn Smith, 37

North Adams, Massachusetts

When I think of India, I think of people. The density of the masses, the dialects, the differences in religion, politics, spices, fashions, and passions. The months of August through October in India are packed with festivals, from Independence Day to Diwali. So why just observe culture, when you can join in with the people and celebrate it? My goal is to take part in a dozen festivals in and around India over the course of 90 days.

This journey has been an idea incubating inside me all of my life. I was born in an orphanage in Kolkata, India, and adopted and raised in Western Massachusetts by loving people of Irish-Polish-Lithuanian descent. While I’ve embraced my family’s lineage, I’ve always felt a desire to return to my Motherland and cultivate connections to it.

My childhood bedroom included pink walls, a unicorn wallpaper border, a poster of the Taj Mahal purchased at a yard sale, and a globe with a star inked onto my birth city. Growing up, I would write poetry of India imagined: saris, songs, and brilliant sunsets. I researched and wrote book reports on Indian elephants and the Indian diet.

In college, I took a South Asian studies course and made Indian friends, but I worked multiple jobs during the school year and throughout the summer. I was never able to study abroad or save up for a leisure trip.

A few years ago for my birthday, some dear friends of mine gave me a card and a check—seed money to help me to start saving for the journey I’ve been talking about since high school. For the first time, I was given a blatant nudge into action.

It's time for me to experience this place and people I've longed to know. Most people know the Indian festival of Holi, with color festivals being adapted across the globe, but there are so many festivals and fairs across India that are equally exciting yet less explored. Through my own eager, curious eyes, I hope to come to my own understanding of Indian culture by sharing the stories, sights, sounds, and souls of the cities and villages I visit during these beautiful, bountiful, and boisterous celebrations.

To the tune of a ukelele orchestra, growers face off over gooseberries.

Every August, inside the the bell-topped St. Hedda’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Egton Bridge, England, keen-eyed men stare at a set of antique scales. Adding small metal weights to one side, they carefully calculate the exact heft of local gooseberries. But these aren't just any gooseberries. Toted to the school in everything from elegant wooden boxes to egg cartons, these are massive specimens of what are normally small fruits. At this biggest-is-best yearly competition, a two-ounce berry is a monumental accomplishment.

For the last 218 years, local gooseberry lovers have faced off over their berries at the Egton Bridge Gooseberry Show, using every horticultural trick in the book to triumph. Despite this summer’s sporadic yet heavy rains, around three-dozen growers are likely to bring their fruit to this year’s show on August 6, says Ian Woodcock, secretary for the Egton Bridge Old Gooseberry Society. Competitively growing gooseberries might seem like an impossibly niche hobby. But, as a matter of fact, both the show and society are some of the last vestiges of what was once a vast cohort of gooseberry groups.

For hundreds of years, cultivating the wee fruit was a popular art and science. In the 19th century, Britain was home to around 170 gooseberry-growing societies. Even America had a handful.

Resembling grapes—although they are occasionally fuzzy—gooseberries come in green, red, yellow, and white. They taste grape-like too, but their tartness means they’re often cooked with sugar and added to puddings or other creamy sweets. According to one 1817 gardening book, “The gooseberry is especially a British fruit … in no other country is so much attention paid to its cultivation.” Records of gooseberry cultivation first appeared in the 13th century, and they became a favorite summer treat in Britain.

Eventually, they evolved from a favorite to a fad. “How did this passion for growing giant gooseberries start? Nobody seems to know,” muses the Egton Bridge Old Gooseberry Society website. In the 19th century, farmers and hobbyists grew innumerable varieties, from the red “Roaring Lion” to the green “Hero of the Nile.” A yearly magazine, The Gooseberry Growers’ Register, published the results from berry-growing contests around the country.

When publication of The Gooseberry Growers’ Register halted in the early-20th century, it coincided with the fading popularity of the hobby. Now, the Egton Bridge Gooseberry Show is the oldest surviving event, one that Woodcock estimates has been ongoing since at least 1800. The society boasts around 100 members, and Woodcock readily admits that the average age runs “a little old.” But, he adds, “We do seem to replace the ones that unfortunately die.”

Some things haven’t changed. The Society still uses an ancient system of measurement, measuring berries by dram (1.77 grams) and grain (64.8 milligrams). Such infinitesimal amounts, measured by a super-sensitive 1937 Avery scale that can calculate the weight of a feather, mean that margins can be slim when deciding who gains gooseberry glory. But competitors have several chances to take home a trophy: by growing the heaviest berry in its color class, the heaviest six or 12 berries as a set, or, of course, the heaviest Champion Berry.

In 2009, the Guinness Book of World Records dubbed the Champion Berry the heaviest gooseberry ever recorded. While it’s since been surpassed, Bryan Nellist’s huge Woodpecker gooseberry was bigger than a golf ball and over two ounces. “The two-ounce berry is mythical,” Woodcock says. “It’s a bit like a unicorn, but it does exist.” To put that in context, most gooseberries are less than an inch long.

But some things have changed. As one of the last gooseberry societies, “you get trolled on the Internet,” Woodcock says dourly. “Other times, people go, ‘Oh! Big gooseberries. What else?’”

“That’s it,” he adds. “It’s just big gooseberries.”

Woodcock points out that in Britain, there’s “a weird subculture for growing large vegetables generally,” and gooseberry growers are no exception. Champion gooseberries often come from bushes heartily fertilized with potash, protected from birds and mildew, and shaded with umbrellas from too much sun and rain. Growers even remove most of their bushes’ fruit pre-competition to ensure that only two or three berries get all the plant’s resources.

On competition day, growers drop off their berries throughout the morning to be carefully weighed (burst berries are disqualified) and laid out on a white-cloth covered table to be admired. During the event, the crowd enjoys live music. Once upon a time, it was a brass band. But these days, “we struggle to get a brass band that we can afford,” Woodcock says matter-of-factly. Luckily, a local ukelele orchestra, the “Eskuleles,” are less expensive. So, to the tune of strumming ukuleles, locals catch up over gooseberries. After the prize ceremony, people normally adjourn to the pub, Woodcock says. And the berries, prize-winning or not, end up cooked or on the compost pile.

These days, gooseberries are sometimes referred to as “the forgotten fruit.” Often sour and not capable of ripening after picking, they’re not a common sight in the grocery store. Many 19th-century varieties, Woodcock muses, have even been lost. But some older varieties continue to take home prizes. Woodcock points to the golden “Edith Cavell.” There’s a long history of naming gooseberries after heroes, and Edith Cavell, a British nurse executed by Germany during World War I, certainly fit the bill. Woodcock, who despite years as the society’s secretary calls himself “a very poor competitor,” admits to a soft spot for that particular berry. “Would she be proud she’d been immortalized by a gooseberry?” he wonders. “I think I’d be proud to be immortalized by a gooseberry.”

It’s a dubious honor.

The scaly-foot snail has got a big heart.

It has to, living so close to deep-sea hydrothermal vents starved of oxygen. Only an enormous heart can circulate enough blood to oxygenate the snail and its many microbial passengers. These microbes, called chemoautotrophs, live inside the mollusk’s body, synthesize the chemicals seeping out of the vents, and turn them into food for the snail.

The scaly-foot’s heart comprises a whopping 4 percent of its body volume—proportionally larger than that of any other species in the animal kingdom. (By comparison, the heart occupies just 1.3 percent of a human body.)

But if the scaly-foot snail were to learn about its possible demise from underwater mining, that enormous heart just might break.

We kid, of course—snails don’t have brains, or at least not the kind that could understand the concept of extinction. But the scaly-foot snail recently became the first deep-sea animal to be declared endangered due to the threat of mining, according to Nature. On July 18, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) added the scaly-foot to its global Red List, the international inventory of at-risk species.

This listing comes at a time when mining companies worldwide are scrambling to apply for exploratory deep-sea mining licenses, which would allow them to drill into the seabed in search of the valuable minerals and metals that form near hydrothermal vents. This poses an enormous threat to the scaly-foot snail, which is found in just four isolated populations near vents on the seafloor of the Indian Ocean, according to Julia Sigwart, a deep-sea ecologist at Queen’s University Belfast who submitted the snail’s case for conservation to the IUCN.

The scaly-foot gets its name from its thick fringe of dermal scales, which coat its foot-like shingles and make the snail seem ready for war. While the scales are formed from calcium carbonate—as is common among marine gastropods—they’re also coated with a layer of iron sulfides from the chemicals that erupt from the vents.

In her quest to obtain endangered status for the scaly-foot, Sigwart wanted to give it a cuter name. “We had this long discussion about whether [scaly-foot] sounded cuddly enough, so we gave it a new common name: the sea pangolin,” Sigwart says, referring to the frequently poached, scale-coated mammal that rolls up into a ball when threatened. “But then lots of people pointed out that not enough people know what a pangolin is.” So now the snail has two common names.

Each of the four known snail populations—Sigwart and her colleagues discovered the fourth one after the paper was published in Nature—occupies an area around a vent that’s smaller than a football field and isolated from the other populations by hundreds of miles. Though all of these snails belong to the same species, each one takes on a different color due to the varying levels of iron at each vent site.

One of those vents lies within the territorial waters of Mauritius, which would control any deep-sea mining that could endanger the snail’s habitat. But the other three vents are found in international waters—a region that’s defined as anywhere that’s more than 12 nautical miles from any shore.

No one owns these waters, but they’re governed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an agency established by the United Nations to manage deep-sea benthic resources. The ISA was formed in 1994 in Kingston, Jamaica, and currently has 168 members.

The agency, which approves contracts with mining companies to extract resources from areas of the international seabed, hopes to finalize regulations on sea-bed mining by 2020. Sigwart hopes that the scaly-foot snail’s new IUCN listing will help inform those regulations, by confirming the biodiversity of the deep-sea beds in question.

Yet the ISA’s scope is somewhat unclear, as some major countries—including the United States—have not ratified the convention that established the agency.

Sigwart worries that any amount of mining could wipe out an entire population of the scaly-foot snails. Her colleague Chong Chen, a deep-sea biologist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, told Nature that even a single mining operation could damage the hydrothermal vents, or smother the snails under clouds of sand.

According to ISA terms, exploratory mining allows companies to take “small extractions” from the seabed, and full-scale mining can’t begin until the 2020 regulations are in place. But Sigwart says she’s not sure how much mining has already taken place in the exploratory phase. “How this could be monitored I have no idea,” she says. “The middle of the ocean is a very lonely place.”

Meanwhile, Sigwart and Chen plan to add many more deep-sea species to the IUCN database. They’ve submitted 14 others so far, some of which are not endangered at all or occupy a much broader region than the scaly-foot. But Sigwart wants the ISA to be aware of all the species, endangered or not, that live around areas ripe for deep-sea mining.

As Sigwart points out, the United Nations refers to the seabeds of the world as “the common heritage of mankind.” She hopes it will be protected it as such.

Atlas Obscura readers shared the most remarkable collections of risers and treads that they've ever encountered.

Stairs are good for cardio. They're perfect for avoiding the wait for a slow elevator. And they can be marvels of architectural beauty and wonder. From grand, public thoroughfares such as the Yerevan Cascade in Armenia, to baroque, organic passages such as those in Portugal's Livraria Lello bookstore, stairways bring with them a sense of movement, accomplishment, even triumph—even when you're going down them. All over the world there are incredible staircases just waiting to be discovered, so we recently asked the readers in our Community Forum to tell us about the most amazing staircases they'd ever encountered. The results are wondrous.

Check out some of our favorite submissions below, and if you have an incredible example of your own, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going.

Astoria Column

Astoria, Oregon

“The spiral staircase leading to the top of the 125-foot-tall, 1926 Astoria Column in Astoria, Oregon.” — val

Museum of Islamic Art

Doha, Qatar

“Inside the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. R.I.P. the remarkable designer/architect I.M. Pei who just recently passed.” — mnml

Liège-Guillemins Railway Station

Liège, Belgium

“A train station in Liege, Belgium. Or the Death Star. I can’t remember which?” — mnml

Scărișoara Cave

Apuseni Mountains, Romania

“These steps leading to some kind of underground glacier in Romania.” — phneuromancer

Pozzo di San Patrizio

Orvieto, Italy

“The staircase at the Pozzo di San Patrizio in Orvieto, Italy. This is a double helix staircase built of brick. The double helix means that people don’t bump into each other as they get water. This well gave Orvieto a strategic advantage when under siege—by digging this deep well inside the town, they assured a water supply.” — Pinball_and_Lobster

Neue Rathaus

Munich, Germany

“I found myself wandering around Munich’s Neue Rathaus. Lots of cool little mysterious staircases.” — tralfamadore

Hotel Bristol Palace

Genoa, Italy

— Asta

Herefordshire Beacon

Malvern Hills, United Kingdom

"Glorious walk up to the Malvern Hills in the United Kingdom." — cornockers

Gran Hotel Domine Bilbao

Bilbao, Spain

“This stairway is at one of my favorite hotels, Gran Hotel Domine Bilbao, which is directly across from the amazing Guggenheim.” — randysfo

Quinta da Regaleira

Sintra, Portugal

“Very hard to get a great shot of this staircase. It goes down into the ground like a well. Definitely worth seeing this and all of Regaleira house and grounds.” — calico

Fineview Steps

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“These are the Fineview Steps on the north side of Pittsburgh (north of the Allegheny River). The steps are part of a fitness circuit in Pittsburgh, but really show the ghosts of Pittsburgh’s illustrious past and are reflective of the challenges Pittsburgh continues to face today.” — civan93

Livraria Lello Bookstore

Porto, Portugal

“This set from a bookstore in Porto, Portugal, is one of my all-time favorites.” — mnml

Tiger Cave Temple

Krabi, Thailand

“We loved the climb to the Tiger Cave Temple, a Buddhist temple north-northeast of Krabi, Thailand. You must go early to see the sun rise and climb 1,237 stairs to the top.” — tiapatrol

Palacio Postal

Mexico City, Mexico

“From the first moment I saw the interior of the National Post Office in Mexico City, I was mesmerized. It is also known as the Palacio Postal, or the Palacio de Correos de México, and is located in downtown Mexico City, the most entrancing city on Earth." — rossau

Yerevan Cascade

Yerevan, Armenia

“My favorite stairway encountered on my travels is probably the Cascade in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital city. Constructed from 1971 and inaugurated in 2009, this monster links the central area of the city with Haghtanak Park. [...] The Cascade is divided into a series of levels, each marked by a small central terrace, or landing, between the steps on either side. The terraces are adorned with fountains, flowerbeds, and modern sculptures. For those electing not to walk up the stairway, there is another surprise in store—underneath the steps are a series of seven escalators running along its entire length.” — rwhiting123

Tianmen Shen

Zhangjiajie, China

“It certainly is not a secret stairway, but it is pretty amazing. Several weeks ago I had the opportunity to tour several national parks in China. Heaven’s Gate in Tianmen Mountain National Park was one of my favorites. It’s 999 steps to the top!” — jfleischman

Music Box Steps

Los Angeles, California

“I lived in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, which was built in the early 20th century when Disney, Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett (Keystone Cops!), and other film companies migrated from New York. The Silver Lake itself is a reservoir, and it’s ringed by a number of very lovely, lush hills, with tight, twisting roads and bungalows mixed with mid-century modern, and more recent, homes. My favorite part of the neighborhood was the wonderful number of hidden stairways, some of which are better known and more used than others. The Atlas includes one particular set of these stairs, where Laurel & Hardy filmed a movie.” — Philip_Shane

The Exorcist Steps

Washington, D.C.

“Growing up in Washington, D.C., especially as a kid, these stairs CREEPED ME OUT, especially at night. They lead from the D.C. end of the Key Bridge up, up, up a very steep cliffside to the Georgetown neighborhood. At night they are dimly lit and fer sure totes fulla ghosts.” — Philip_Shane

A rowhouse with a storied history is facing demolition.

Thomas and Harriet Truesdell knew what they were getting into. Like many Brooklynites today, they were transplants, having moved there from Rhode Island, into a small rowhouse on Duffield Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Unlike most Brooklynites today, they arrived in their 60s, having already established themselves as staunch abolitionists by 1841. According to some activists and historians, they may have done more in Brooklyn than merely speak out against slavery and host friends such as noted social reformer William Lloyd Garrison. Some say the Truesdells managed a stop on the Underground Railroad in a network of tunnels below their home.

In the 1850s, much of the North was behind the abolitionist movement. Some states passed legislation to undermine the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which was enacted to facilitate the return of those who had escaped slavery to their owners. Despite being in a free state, New York City teemed with slave catchers and kidnappers, says Eric Foner, a historian of 19th-century America at Columbia University, and these people were known to even grab free African Americans off the city’s streets and sell them into slavery.

“Like all of America, New York City’s relationship to human slavery is more complicated than commonly taught, but the rise of abolition sentiment and activities in the first half of the 19th century was very important to the eventual demise of slavery in our country,” says Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, a nonprofit preservation group that often works with city agencies to establish historic districts. “As a singular reminder of this courageous act of defiance, the Truesdell House at 227 Duffield Street should be protected and preserved so that future generations of New Yorkers can learn the enduring importance of political activism.”

But the survival of this historic home isn’t assured. An application to demolish the home was filed in June, though no date has been set. The Brooklyn Eagle reports that the city’s Landmarks Preservation Committee is currently reviewing an application to recognize and save the building.

Because New York wasn’t entirely safe for African Americans, Underground Railroad stops appeared throughout the city. The Truesdells’ building is now the last residence from the era on Duffield Street, which was conamed Abolitionist Place in 2007 to commemorate the number of anti-slavery advocates who called it home. Since then, building after building on the street has been swallowed up by development, and the house now sits between a high-rise hotel and a lot that will become Willoughby Square Park. Its most recent resident, Joy Chatel, whom everyone called "Mama Joy," led the fight for the building’s preservation for over a decade, notably fending off the city’s claims of eminent domain 12 years ago. Since Chatel died in 2014, local activists, including her daughter, Shawn Lee, and the grantmaking organization the Circle for Justice Innovations, have taken on the task.

Some preservationists think that the Truesdell house should be preserved regardless of any confirmed link to Underground Railroad, because verifying whether homes were ever actually used as stations of the clandestine network is often a matter of teasing truth from legend.

“The level of success of the Underground Railroad was by nature more effective the better it retained its secrecy,” says Jacqueline K. Dace, deputy director of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. “That poses a problem for historians attempting to document the places and spaces that were a part of this system.”

As such, in 2007, a city-contracted archaeological firm, AKRF, did not find “conclusive proof” that 227 Duffield was a stop on the Underground Railroad. According to Brownstoner, AKRF says documents suggest the structure was built between 1848 and 1850, though other records at the Brooklyn Historical Society suggest the Truesdells had a home in Brooklyn as early as 1841. The firm’s report did not stop calls for preserving the structure, which is the last of its kind—associated with the abolitionist movement in any way—on a street named for that work.

“A more complex story can never be told,” says Dace, “if it is not researched and preserved.”

The Buzludzha Memorial House has a polarizing history and an uncertain future.

There’s a remote peak in Bulgaria’s Balkan Mountains, Buzludzha—about 5,000 feet of limestone and granite with a long history. In the 1860s and 1870s it saw battles between rebels and the Ottomans, it was the clandestine site of the first meeting of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party in 1891, and during World War II Bulgarian partisans attacked fascists there. It had grown quite the reputation, but the summit had remained relatively unadorned. In the 1970s, architect Georgi Stoilov sought to change that.

The Bulgarian native designed an imposing concrete monument to socialism that looks like it fell out of the sky. The citizen-funded Buzludzha Memorial House was used for gatherings of the Communist Party for just nine years, from 1981 to 1990, before it was abandoned with the ideology that inspired it. Since then, the brutalist- and futurist-influenced structure has fallen into disrepair. Recently, the Getty Foundation awarded a $185,000 grant to study and preserve Stoilov’s alien masterpiece.

The funding comes at a crucial time, as the monument is currently in ruin, perhaps only a few years from being beyond saving. “The idea of preserving is really now or never … if it was another five or 10 years it wouldn’t be worth it in my opinion,” says preservation advocate and historian of the site Richard Morten. When Morten first saw the monument on a trip in 2007, “There were holes in the ceiling and really aggressive beams of sunlight falling in at different angles, which is very dramatic,” he says. The cold mountain winters have compromised the roof and walls, and architects and preservationists are concerned about “concrete cancer,” when rust develops inside the material and weakens the metal supports within.

Beyond concerns about the integrity of this surreal saucer-and-tower, the monument has also been overrun with graffiti (mostly of the anti-communist sort), while its detailed mosaics, which tell the history of the country and its socialist movement, are slowly dropping away. The Getty’s “Keeping It Modern” grant will go toward assessing the current state of the Buzludzha Monument, as it is now known, and devising a management plan for its future.

“The first step with this Getty grant is to basically [use it as] a planning grant to find out how bad it is. Then, get a plastic sheet on top of it to stop the moisture from going in … do an architectural scan and get the blueprints and update and digitize them,” says Morten. The team plans to create what’s called a Building Information Model—a comprehensive digital database and model—and then sample the concrete itself.

“I don't find it surprising the Getty Foundation got interested to take part in the conservation. It's only natural and I think this is merely the beginning of a much larger initiative to save the Buzludzha Monument,” says Mihail Kondov, a tour guide for the site. “The increased interest in recent years has had downsides as well, unfortunately. Every subsequent visit I made at Buzludzha, I noticed more graffiti appearing, more pieces of the mosaics disappearing, letters from the front facade going missing and various other acts of vandalism."

The Buzludzha Monument’s location in Bulgaria’s rugged, natural landscape—high on a peak—meant it was never a particularly practical choice for a political meeting hall. That will make preservation and ongoing staffing difficult, too. Ideally, the grant will help close these gaps. And there’s local support to save the monument, as well. “You’ve got a lot of people who are nostalgic for that period,” says Morten. Though some Bulgarians are still upset about the government that built the structure, he adds: “Increasingly there’s a trend of people who want to preserve it for non-political reasons.”

Naturally, there’s been some pushback from locals who are uncomfortable with the monument’s initial purpose of celebrating communism. “The ‘C-word’ is a sensitive subject to say the least,” says Kondov. “Some might be afraid restoring it will aim to rekindle the flames of communism.” Kondov counters that there will be many benefits to turning the monument into a proper tourist attraction. “Those shortcomings could be overcome if people are better informed about the benefits as well as having their concerns addressed adequately. Something like a rebranding campaign of sorts can go a very long way to resolve those issues,” he adds. One idea is to convert the monument hall into an objective historical museum, with less emphasis on politics than on the striking absurdity of the architecture.

“I've personally met and spoken to people from as far as Australia, Brazil, and Canada ... they didn't randomly stumble upon it either, they came to Bulgaria specifically to visit Buzludzha,” says Kondov. “Bulgarian government on the other hand is keeping it quiet and no official government tourism bureau advertises it as a tourism destination.

“I think the country and most importantly its officials ought to embrace this difficult past,” he adds, “to learn from it and work toward a better tomorrow.”

A plaque will soon mark the site of Okjökull, one of Iceland’s dearly departed.

Many Icelandic excursions send visitors scrambling or snowmobiling around glaciers. But one tour on the Nordic island-nation imagines something more melancholy: not a trek to enjoy a glacier, but a march to mourn the absence of one.

In August 2019, participants on the Un-Glacier Tour will hold a funeral of sorts for Okjökull, a glacier that once hugged a snow-stuffed crater on Ok, a volcano in west-central Iceland. Participants will tramp up the mountain’s pebbled slope and install a plaque that eulogizes the vanished glacier—and bleats a warning about the others at risk in a warming world.

Creaking and in constant motion, with stripes of rock and dirt offering tangible proof of their path over land, glaciers can feel nearly alive. They smell earthy and mineral, and to describe their anatomy, scientists use terms like “snout” and “tongue”—almost “as though they are creatures,” says Cymene Howe, an anthropologist at Rice University who studies the cultural, social, and political fallout of disappearing ice.

But nothing lives forever, and glaciers, too, are going to their graves. That includes Okjökull.

For a mass to be considered a glacier, “there needs to be enough ice that it’s deforming under its own weight,” says Twila Moon, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. An active mountain glacier accumulates snow and ice; then, as pressure builds, the ice flows slowly, and the whole thing moseys downhill. When melt outpaces accumulation, a glacier retreats. When it shrinks so much that there’s nothing left to move, it’s called other things—a snow field, for instance, or “dead ice.” But at that point it’s no longer a glacier.

At first, it can be hard to tell that a glacier has died. “Usually it is almost impossible to identify the exact time when a glacier ceases to be,” says Oddur Sigurðsson, a glaciologist with the Icelandic Meteorological Office who declared Okjökull officially dead in 2014. Immediately postmortem, a glacier “is probably not going to look too different” than it did in life, Moon says. (It may, for instance, still be studded with the rocks and debris it acquired as it moved along the ground.)

And it would have been easy for Okjökull to have slipped quietly and unceremoniously into the night. Even when it was a glacier, Okjökull was relatively small—a map from the early 20th century shows it spanning a little more than five square miles—and it has since shrunk significantly. As of 2017, the frozen patch was smaller than a half-mile square, according to a report from the University of Iceland.

“Last time I checked, in 2014, there was only dead ice,” Sigurðsson says. Even that, he adds, “may very well be all gone by now.”

But Howe, Sigurðsson, and other collaborators are memorializing Okjökull with a degree of pomp and somber circumstance, in service of telling a bigger story about climate change.

On the Un-Glacier Tour, Sigurðsson, Howe, fellow Rice anthropologist Dominic Boyer, and the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason will mount a copper plaque on Ok, on a stone at an elevation of roughly 3,654 feet (the coordinates, Howe says, are N 64°35.498' W 020°52.253’).

The plaque, written in English and Icelandic, is both homage and warning. It notes that Okjökull vanished, and that in “the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.”

The placard also bears a message to future readers: “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done,” it reads, speaking to an imagined witness who comes across the marker months, years, or centuries from now.

The inscription also includes the month and year and “415 ppm CO2”—the amount of carbon dioxide recorded in the atmosphere in May 2019 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaiʻi. It’s the most recent measurement published from that site, and researchers think it’s the highest concentration in the last 800,000 years, CNN reported. Meanwhile, factoring in averages from around the world, June 2019 was the hottest June on record, according to data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The text on the plaque is Magnason’s. “We wanted the words to come from an Icelander, given that glaciers are an important part of their cultural and natural heritage,” Howe says. “Andri was perfect because he has been working on environmental issues for many years and is also a poet and author.”

Magnason’s words are meant to spur both mourning and mobilization, says Howe, “to encourage people to action.” The whole Un-Glacier Tour concept, Howe adds, is “a play on [adventure tourism], an ironic twist ... that is meant to draw attention to what is occurring, not only in Iceland but globally as glaciers and ice sheets are transformed.”

The stone on Ok that Howe and the team chose for the marker struck them as the perfect place because it’s flanked by other rocks “that serve as natural benches for weary humans,” Howe says. In a warming world—where homes and communities will be swallowed by water, where temperatures will soar, where crops will struggle and diseases will spread—humans will be plenty weary, whether or not their limbs are aching from clambering up an Icelandic volcano.

As glaciers continue to melt away, we also run the risk of never again standing next to something frozen, ancient, and giant. “Nearness to a glacier is a nearness to a dry cold,” Howe says. “Rather otherworldly, I’d say.” Eventually, it could be an experience the world has lost forever.

Too many El Niños have diminished the "diablo rojo."

At the turn of the 21st century, Mexico's Gulf of California was ruled by human-sized cannibal squid. The Humboldt squid weren’t quite giant but they certainly were jumbo, growing up to six feet long and weighing up to 100 pounds. They mobbed those tropical waters, devouring fish, crustaceans, and cephalopods—including other Humboldt squid. Their reign was chaotic underwater and lucrative on land, as they nourished the world’s largest invertebrate fishery. At dusk, you could see them swarm, thousands of tentacle tips breaking the surface and grasping at air, remembers William Gilly, a marine biologist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, whose professional academic headshot is a photo of him cradling a hefty Humboldt like a Madonna with child.

But by 2015, these large marine predators vanished—or rather, they shrank. Squid fishers who had become accustomed to hauling up catches longer than themselves found creatures barely fit for calamari. They were still Humboldt squids, but shrinky-dink versions. “You could catch 20 or 30 of them and not fill up a bucket,” says Tim Frawley, a Stanford research fellow and the lead author of a new study in ICES Journal of Marine Science that finally solves the mystery of Mexico’s missing jumbo squid.

Frawley had been working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and Maine before he fell in love with the thriving squid fishery in the Gulf of California. He saw local fishers lug in mammoth squid, hand over hand, and was hooked. Humboldt squid only surface at twilight, a few hours after dusk, when the light has almost disappeared from the sky. The squid change color, flashing from pale pink to red in syncopated patterns as fast as four times per second. In Mexico, these demonic flashes earned them the nickname diablo rojo. In deep water, the red coloration causes the squid to seemingly disappear, and Frawley remembers watching fishers haul in squid that seemed to blink in and out of existence while hooked on the line. “It was a sight to behold,” he says. “I was all in.”

Frawley joined Gilly’s Stanford lab in 2013 and crafted a PhD project oriented around tagging the squid to build 3D models of their habitat. But as soon as he made it down to Baja, the big squid seemed to have disappeared. Fishers only found those tiny Humboldts, so small you could hold one with just one hand. So Frawley needed a new project, and there was one obvious place to start. He needed to figure out what happened to all those squid.

Luckily, the once-thriving jumbo squid industry had left behind a healthy record of squid size over the prior decade, with the measurements of more than 1,000 individual squid. Frawley dug into the data and compared the squid size timeline with other data, including satellite photos, temperature and salinity readings, shifts in fishery productivity, and observed changes in ocean habitat. The research was far less exciting than hooking these monsters, but also considerably less slimy.

Frawley and the other researchers found a flurry of factors that drove the jumbo squid’s demise. The Gulf of California historically cycled between warm-water El Niño conditions and cool-water La Niña phases. The warm El Niño waters were inhospitable to jumbo squid—more specifically to the squid’s prey—but subsequent La Niñas would allow squid populations to recover. But recent years have seen a drought of La Niñas, resulting in increasingly and more consistently warm waters. Frawley calls it an “oceanographic drought,” and says that conditions like these will become more and more common with climate change. “But saying this specific instance is climate change is more than we can claim in the scope of our work,” he adds. “I’m not willing to make that connection absolutely.”

To cope with warmer waters, the squid have begun reproducing at an incredibly young age. Jumbo squid normally reproduce after 18 months. Now they’re breeding after just five or six months. “The squid says there’s not going to be much food leftover later, so I’m going to reproduce now before there’s no food,” Frawley says. “But how the squid makes this decision I don’t know.”

This ability to shrink is a handy evolutionary strategy that makes squids a unique sentinel of environmental change. But it’s also alarming, and happening worldwide. “This is the equivalent of a bear becoming reproductive as a little cub,” Gilly says. Recently, he’s seen other squid that normally become sexually active when they are around the size of a banana begin to reproduce at half that size. Until water conditions cool down in Mexico, Gilly says, the jumbo squid in the Gulf of California will be anticlimactically small.

It was never easy to catch a jumbo squid when they were actually jumbo. There’s really only one method: Send a weighted, luminescent jig down around 300 feet and then sort of wiggle it around. It’s called jigging, and it sounds simple enough. But when the squid you seek weighs up to 100 pounds, you need a strong line and strong arms to get the beastie on board. “I got yelled at by the guys my first time down there for letting a squid dominate me,” Frawley says, bashful. “It’s like riding a horse. You can’t let the squid take control.” Squid fishers must be constant and forceful, at least until the animal goes slack.

But for the past five years, the equipment the squid fishers use has become comically oversized for the task. “Normally, they use hand lines that can hold 400 pounds, like weed-whacker lines, and big lures that weigh a pound,” Gilly says. “But these lures are so much larger than the squid now.” Now, fishers are resorting to trout rods with line that can handle 10 pounds. It works just fine, but it takes the same amount of time to catch a tiny squid as it did to catch a jumbo one. Frawley says small-scale fishers in Baja have begun to diversify what they catch in order to stay afloat.

While consulting with these fishers for his research, Frawley began to understand that the entire ecosystem of the Gulf of California has begun to shift. With no more jumbo squid, sperm whales that used to feed on them have moved on. So, too, have the sardines, confronted with waters lacking in the nutrients to support their schools.

Gilly expects that the Gulf of California will continue to change in ways nobody will be able to predict. “If you alter a complex system like the Gulf of California for a long enough time, new species will take over and new rules will take over, “ he says. “If you’re a booby and you like eating small squid, you might think this is great.” If you’re a jumbo squid that believes in its name, not so much.