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Sold: A Set of 54 Whisky Bottles, One for Every Playing Card

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Only four such sets are known to exist.

What’s the only thing better than 54 bottles of whisky? 54 bottles of whisky that represent every playing card in a deck.

That’s how Ichiro Akuto, whose grandfather founded Japan’s Hanyu whisky distillery in 1941, decided to honor the company before it permanently emptied its barrels. After Hanyu ceased production and Akuto acquired the company’s equipment, he embarked on a years-long project of matching scores of different leftover whiskies with dozens of card-themed bottles. At 54 in total, one whole set represents a complete deck of cards. Last week, one of only four known complete sets of Ichiro's Card Series sold at Bonhams Hong Kong for more than $917,000—that’s almost $17,000 per bottle, though some would surely challenge the idea that all cards (not to mention whiskies) are worth the same amount.

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To get a sense of the variety in Hanyu’s reserves, let’s go suit-by-suit to look at a few examples of the whiskies auctioned in this lot:

  • The Six of Spades variety matured first in a hogshead cask, second in an Oloroso sherry butt. Distilled in 2000 and bottled in 2011, its alcohol by volume level is 56.8 percent.
  • The Queen of Hearts variety matured first in a hogshead cask, second in a French Oak cognac wood barrel. Distilled in 1990 and bottled in 2006, its alcohol by volume level is 54 percent.
  • The Eight of Clubs variety matured first in a hogshead cask, second in an American Oak puncheon cask. Distilled in 1988 and bottled in 2011, its alcohol by volume level is 57.5 percent.
  • The Ace of Diamonds variety matured first in a hogshead cask, second in a cream sherry butt. Distilled in 1986 and bottled in 2008, its alcohol by volume level is 56.4 percent.

Food & Wine reports that the sale reflects an ongoing trend in which rare wines and spirits are breaking records at auctions. Indeed, this sale broke the price record for a collection of Japanese whisky, just as last year a lone Yamakazi broke the price record for a single bottle of Japanese whisky. (It sold for more than a third of the Ichiro Card Series' price.) Last year too, Bonhams Hong Kong broke the all-time record for sales of single whisky bottles with a 1926 Macallan Valerio Adami that went for more than one million dollars.

It better be really, really good.


14 Dramatic Fountains That Have Very Little Chill

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Atlas Obscura readers recommend their favorite over-the-top water features from across the globe.

During hot summer months, when the pavement is boiling and the air gets thick, a nice big fountain can be a perfect place to chill out and cool down. But at the same time, some of the world's most appealing public fountains are, shall we say, not very chill in terms of design. Dramatic water features—whether they incorporate a mess of baroque statuary, fire streams of water high into the sky, or look like something from the far-off future—are often mesmerizing to behold. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community forums to tell us about the most unforgettable fountains they've ever seen, and the responses were stunning.

Take a look at a selection of our favorite submissions below, and if you have an amazing fountain of your own that you'd like to recommend, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going!


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Occidental College Fountain

Los Angeles, California

“Recognize this bad boy?! Well, you should! It appears in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. It’s called the Gilman fountain, and it’s on Occidental College’s campus in Los Angeles.” Anne_Ewbank


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Changi Airport Indoor Waterfall

Singapore

“I find many fountains around the world are beautiful but for me the prettiest is…” Tibz_Traveller


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Peterhof Palace Fountains

Saint Petersburg, Russia

“The fountains at Peterhof (Petrodvorets), Saint Petersburg, Russia.” jgreen31


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Point State Park Fountain

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Point State Park Fountain, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania marks the beginning of the mighty Ohio River, and is legendarily fed by Pittsburgh’s ‘Fourth’ River.” jgotaskie


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Carnival Fountain

Basel, Switzerland

“The Fasnachts-Brunnen by Jean Tinguely, a kinetic artwork in Basel, Switzerland.” effka


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Witley Court Fountain

Worcestershire, England

“I also love the fountains at Witley Court in England, because they’re in a lovely garden, with a ruined manor house, which equals a magical visit.” myra


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Stravinsky Fountain

Paris, France

“The Stravinsky Fountain, as its name implies, represents the musical work of Igor Stravinsky. I thoroughly enjoyed the whimsical magic of this delightful fountain in Paris next to the Center Pompidou.” psundik


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Longwood Gardens Fountains

Kennett Square, Pennsylvania

“The fountains at Longwood Gardens at Kennett Square, near Philadelphia are amazing. They’re influenced by the great fountains of Europe, built by Pierre DuPont in the 1920s. Longwood and its fountains are a must-see.” sidraisch


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Plaza Venezuela Fountain

Caracas, Venezuela

pgavides


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Water Dome

Lakeland, Florida

“The Water Dome at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. When originally built, the pumps available to Wright weren’t powerful enough to create the dome-like spray he envisioned. It wasn’t until 2007 that the school, which boasts the largest collection of Wright structures, restored the fountain and outfitted it with sufficient equipment to realize Wright’s vision.” jdoddtampa


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Villa d'Este Fountains

Tivoli, Italy

“Do we count Villa d’Este as one? Because it could make a hall-of-fame just by itself.” MisterCustomer


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Aquanura

Kaatsheuvel, Netherlands

“Ever heard of the little town of Kaatsheuvel in The Netherlands? If yes, you will immediately say ‘The Efteling.’ And when visiting this fairytale amusement park, you will remember Aquanura for sure. Built around the Frog King fairy tale, it will leave you speechless.” siejoenl


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J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain

Kansas City, Missouri

“All of the 48 publicly-owned fountains in Kansas City, Missouri! All are beautiful and this is just one example of the many fountains there!” carmen333b


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The Fountain

Fountain Hills, Arizona

"The world’s fourth tallest fountain. It reaches 560 feet." — SirNick

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

When Everyone Wanted to Be the Iceman

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Before refrigeration, New York's ice-delivery men inspired raunchy jokes.

There’s a tasteless wisecrack people sometimes make about kids with a different hair color than their father. “Does the mailman have red hair?” some jokester will inevitably ask. In the 1950s, when the local dairy made home deliveries, the same jokes circulated about the milkman. And before that? Well, in the latter part of the 1890s, it was the iceman who took the blame for leading women astray.

In fact, the idea of the ice-delivery man flirting with stay-at-home wives was such a trope that it inspired a hit song. Composer J. Fred Helf left Kentucky for New York in the 1890s to try his luck as a writer and seller of sheet music. Inspired by the city, he co-authored vaudeville-style comic songs such as “Please Mr. Conductor, Don’t Put Me Off the Train” and “Tillie Tootie the Coney Island Beauty.” In 1899, he scored his first big success with “How’d You Like to Be the Iceman?” It became a pop culture phenomenon—spawning answer songs, movie spin-offs, and merchandise. Soon every New Yorker and American knew the phrase “How’d You Like to Be the Iceman?”

Helf had captured the spirit of the times. Ice delivery was booming in the late 1800s, particularly in big cities, where fresh ice was a necessity. As New York and other urban areas grew, people lived further and further from the sources of their food. Ice kept dairy and meat products fresh, which improved and diversified urban diets and restaurant offerings as fresh fish, ice cream, and other foods became available. New recipes, such as icebox pie, capitalized on the ability to serve chilled dishes. And as cocktail culture was on the rise, ice was essential for cooling city dwellers’ drinks.

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During the summer months, venues such as Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden fed several tons of ice per event into cooling systems that relied on a maze of ductwork, ice blocks, and fans. Even mortuaries relied on ice before electric refrigeration. Manhattan and Brooklyn alone melted their way through at least 1.3 million tons of ice per year—more than 25 percent of the entire country’s usage.

The majority of the city’s ice was harvested directly from lakes and ponds in the Hudson River Valley region, much of it from Rockland Lake, earning it the nickname “The Icehouse of New York City.” Using horses and plows, workers cut through the ice in grids, then sawed it by hand, floated thick blocks (known as “cakes”) to shore via man-made channels, and stored them in insulated icehouses. Men and horses could fall into the icy water and drown, but it was lucrative work. Thousands of men took their chances each winter.

All that ice called for a lot of icemen, and New York City had ‘em. Around 1,500 ice trucks made daily deliveries to businesses and homes. By the 1890s, all but the poorest residents had ice boxes—insulated cabinets made to hold a large block of ice with shelves for food and a drip pan underneath. In an era when men usually worked while wives kept house, it was the woman’s responsibility to alert the iceman to the household’s needs by placing a paper ticket in the window. Using a pair of large tongs, he would sling a cake of ice onto his burlap- or leather-covered shoulder, then haul the ice into the house or apartment.

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An iceman had to be in good physical shape, which made his presence all the more concerning to husbands who were away. Unlike other delivery men, he had to come inside, and ensconcing ice in the box sometimes required chipping away at the block until it fit. It wasn’t unusual, after all that work, for the lady of the house to offer the ice man a drink or snack. It’s no wonder that he came to be perceived as a working-class lothario—sort of a 19th-century version of a buff pool boy.

“How’d You Like to Be the Iceman?” capitalized on the idea that icemen had it made. In the opening verse, the narrator admires a brownstone mansion and asks the servant if Mr. Vanderbilt is in. “I thought it the house of a millionaire,” the song continues, “but he told me the iceman resided there.” Subsequent verses describe the iceman trading ice for kisses at customers’ homes and enjoying free drinks at the cafe. (These are referred to as “tin-roof cocktails,” capitalizing on a joke with a double meaning about tin-roof cocktails being “on the house.”)

There was some truth to the idea. At least one ice-wagon driver was arrested for intoxication and, in court, blamed all the whiskey, beer, and wine that women supplied him along his route. (The title of the newspaper report, of course, was “How’d You Like to Be the Iceman?”) But the majority of icemen lived far less adventurous lives, and one lamented to a reporter that most customers just haggled over prices or called him a thief.

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The public, though, relished the fantasy of an iceman rolling in dollars and dames. It was fueled in no small part by Helf’s song, which burned up vaudeville stages and inspired at least two popular recordings, spoof versions, and one clapback in the form of “All She Gets from the Iceman is Ice.” Had there been a Billboard Hot 100 for Edison wax cylinders, “How’d You Like to Be the Iceman?” would have topped it. Soon the title became a catchphrase printed on everything from saucy newsstand postcards to novelty lapel pins. A coin-in-the-slot peep show version depicted—what else?—an iceman kissing a customer while she pours him a drink.

The iceman jokes declined with the industry itself. Mechanically produced ice, along with concerns about increasingly polluted rivers, diluted the Hudson Valley ice business. After President Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act of 1936 brought electricity to even the most remote farmhouses, demand for natural ice dropped off almost completely. Entrepreneurs repurposed the surviving icehouses along the Hudson River into mushroom farms. By 1950, more than 90% of homes had an electric refrigerator, and America entered the era of the TV dinner. The New York City iceman was out of a job.

The trope endures a bit today, but now it’s the cable guy or the pizza-delivery man that takes the ribbing. The next time you hear one of these throwback jokes, remember that it hearkens back to a time when cocktails had names like Tin-Roof, women named “Tillie” were hot stuff at Coney Island, and everybody wanted to be the iceman.

Between Plagues, Medieval Peasants Enjoyed Bawdiness and Brawling

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To chill like a peasant, attend a farcical play and wrestle with your friends.

This week, we’re remembering historic leisure activities—ways that people kicked back, chilled out, and expressed themselves throughout the centuries. Previously: Ancient hominids painted; the swole women of Sparta wrestled, danced, and drank; ancient Mesoamericans kicked back and hooked up in steam baths; and Vikings hunted on skis skated on bones.

At first glance, the life of a medieval peasant might seem laborious, with long hours spent toiling away in a field from dawn till dusk, interrupted only by the occasional bowl of gruel. But while we may not envy their work conditions—no health care is no joke for a physical laborer—peasants living in the Middle Ages actually had a lot of time to chill.

In stark comparison to the stringently capitalist workweek of the so-called modern era, work patterns in medieval Europe—loosely defined as the years 500–1500—were decidedly more relaxed. For one thing, the calendar back then was stuffed full of religious holidays, writes sociologist Juliet B. Schor in The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, including long vacations at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer. Not to mention the many saints’ and rest days sprinkled throughout the year.

By one estimate drawn from 14th-century manorial records—documents generated by the administration of manors and estates—most servile laborers in England worked 27.7 hours a week. Compare that to the 47 hours a week that most full-time adult workers in the U.S. toil, according to a 2014 Gallup poll.

Blessed with all that extra time and no access to, or concept of, the internet, medieval peasants in Europe developed a number of lo-fi revelries that helped spice up the slow march toward death that unites us all.

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That included a number of games, according to Eleanor Janega, a medieval historian who runs the blog Going Medieval. One was a needlessly complicated dice game called Hazard, beloved in France and England. Written into law in the 13th century by King Alfonso X of Castile, it evolved—in a simplified format—into the game we call craps today. In Great Britain, peasants often played Skittles, an outdoor variant of bowling where players would try to knock down nine pins with a round disk called a cheese.

There were also more physically involved games, including an early Gaelic one that Janega calls “weird wrestling football,” and kolf, an early form of golf that originated in the Netherlands.

Regardless of a game’s particular rules, however, virtually every European medieval amusement ended in a similar kind of chaos. “Everything devolve[d] into wrestling,” Janega says, noting that peasants also considered pure, unadulterated wrestling a worthy pastime in itself.

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In medieval palaces, theater was dominated by religious and morality plays put on by the church (which extolled the virtues of, well, the church). But in medieval villages, theater was dominated by very different themes. “Medieval people thought toilet humor and sex humor were the funniest things around,” Janega says. “These plays just had a ton of fart jokes.”

The medieval equivalent of a sitcom was the farcical play, acted out on small wooden stages in public squares. The bawdiest of these came from France, writes theater historian Jody Enders in "The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries, and chronicled the foibles of the human mind and body—with a heavy emphasis on the latter. Titles in this genre included Playing Doctor, or, Taking the Plunge (The Farce of the Woman Whose Neighbor Gives Her an Enema) and Shit for Brains, or, The Party Pooper-Scooper. (After all, there are only a few letters standing between a farce and a fart.)

One quintessential farcical play called The Ointment Seller hailed from Bohemia, a historical region in what is now the Czech Republic. Its satire does not stand the test of time, as it mocks Jews, Germans, women, and other groups and communities. In the play, a merchant persuades three ladies, all named Mary, to buy his ointments in order to anoint the body of Jesus Christ. The plot soon devolves when Abraham arrives with Isaac’s dead body in tow and asks for an ointment. The seller delivers an “ointment” that is, in fact, just feces, and Abraham thanks him profusely. “Peasants were not into tragedies,” Janega says.

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After seeing a matinee play full of farts, peasants would revel in the opulent bounty of the countryside, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Many of them also took advantage of seasonal gifts, such as gardening in the spring and eating fruits in the summer.

“Peasants were kind of obsessed with spring,” Janega says, referencing the many poems and songs that villagers would write in homage to their favorite season. And when seasonal fruits came to harvest, they binged on berries and drupes. “For a medieval peasant, cherries were really the good stuff,” Janega says.

And, of course, peasants everywhere shared in that one eternal pastime that began long before them—and may outlive us all: drinking. While lords drank wine, peasants drank beer. Many actually brewed beer in their own homes, and made other fermented drinks, like brandy, out of pears or plums.

Ultimately, the peasants of Europe in the Middle Ages loved many of the same things we do today, except with a particular penchant for communal brawls. “It’s wrong to say, ‘Oh, peasants—what a horrible life they led,’” Janega says. “They had really hard work, and life was difficult. But they were also really into having fun.”

Respect the Hammock, One of Humanity’s Greatest Creations

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In praise of an excellent idea with a long, complicated history.

The hammock has become an intrinsic part of vacation iconography, a shorthand for the act of relaxation. It is a symbol, often a performative one, of leisure, of escapism, of a kind of luxury—in environment, if not materials.

This, of course, all comes from the minds of people who live far away from where the hammock was invented. The hammock is, at its core, just an incredibly good idea, one that has spread almost immediately wherever it is introduced. If you see a hammock, you want to tell people about it, and get one for yourself. Yet, like many things with a more or less global reach, it has taken on different meanings over time, not all of them positive.

The early days of the hammock are not well understood, but they certainly did come a long time ago. Woven of organic materials that eventually decompose in tropical environments—where pretty much everything decomposes eventually—hammocks were well established in the Caribbean when the first Europeans landed there. The English word “hammock” derives from the Spanish hamaca, a direct loanword from the Taíno languages of the Caribbean.

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Just about all of the major early European expeditions to the New World talked about the hammock. Columbus described it in his journal: “Their beds and bags for holding things were like nets of cotton.” Bartolomé de las Casas, the first real European historian to go to the Americas, went on at length about them. In his book Historia de las Indias, written between 1527 and 1559, de las Casas described beds “like cotton nets,” with elaborate, well-crafted patterns. The ends, he wrote, were made of a different, hemp-like material, to attach to walls or poles.

The materials used for hammocks at the time of European contact likely varied. Cotton is mentioned in the historical record, and it was probably used, at least sometimes. The other material de las Casas described is almost certainly fique, an extremely hardy, rough textile made from the tough leaves of the maguey plant—a close relative of agave.

De las Casas said that he adored the hammock, because it was so hot and humid that this style of bedding was far preferable to the European options: mattresses filled with straw or wool for the very wealthy, straw pallets for the less wealthy, piles of straw or nothing at all for most people.

By the time Europeans made it to the mainland, hammocks were also fully established in the cultures of Mexico, Central America, and the hotter parts of South America. Their utility is obvious: They elevate the sleeper well above the ground, away from tropical insects and reptiles, and the woven netting maintains airflow—vital in the heat. They’re also incredibly portable. In the Caribbean, de las Casas described hammocks as being fairly stationary, attached to poles within a permanent house, but the form is versatile enough to serve those who live in one place as well as those who sleep somewhere different every night.

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The hammock was likely the first human-created product (as opposed to a crop or mineral) that the European conquerors decided they simply must have. In the Spanish and Taíno War of San Juan–Borikén, or the Taíno Rebellion of 1511, the Spanish often took hammocks as spoils of war. Within 50 years of Columbus’s first journey to the Caribbean, hammocks had become the standard bedding on the ships of both the Spanish and English navies. They’re great at sea, swaying gently much of the time, and fully collapsible to take up as little precious space as possible.

It took a further couple of centuries for the hammock to gain any import other than “great idea from the people we’re destroying.” Its next associations weren’t much better. Soraya Serra-Collazo, of the University of Puerto Rico, documented the strange journey of the hammock in a 2014 paper in Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. “During the 18th century,” she wrote, “hammock use has been reported by Spanish officials and the clergy as means to claim the laziness of local people.”

Alexander O’Reilly, an Irishman sent to Puerto Rico by King Charles III of Spain, was one of many prominent Europeans to brand the Taíno as lazy. He complained, upon his 1765 trip to Puerto Rico, that the land was simply too abundant, the climate too nice. “With only five days of work,” he wrote, “a family had enough plantains for the whole year.” The hammock was specifically singled out as a symbol of the laziness of the people of Puerto Rico: Nothing this comfortable and un-European could possibly be acceptable.

The denigration of something as basic as a sleeping method reads as an attempt to disparage an entire people, to make them feel inferior and erase their cultural heritage. The association between hammocks and laziness has been incredibly enduring—for good and ill. Essayist Richard Hedderman, in 2013, wrote, “Few other contrivance [sic] so invite such joyous abandon to sloth and indifference as the hammock, and it is justly emblematic of pure lassitude.” Paul De Smit, a guy who runs a store in Los Angeles called “Exotic Hammocks” says he tells people he’s in “the relaxation business.”

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Europeans, and those of European descent who live in cool climates, have never stopped exoticizing the theoretically easy-living, leisurely, romantic existence of the tropics. And the hammock is wholly of the tropics—a direct, practical response to a hot, humid environment. Alongside topless indigenous women (at least, up until the last few decades), palm trees, white sand beaches, and cocktails with tropical fruit, hammocks are now emblems of a chill lifestyle. They’ve become essential for social media influencers—a component of an ideal life, so much so that they pop up in the feeds of algorithm-constructed fake influencers created by marketing teams.

To share a photo of yourself in a hammock is to brag, in a way that a photo of yourself in bed is not.


There is no consensus on the spiritual home of the hammock today. (China, on the other side of the world from the hammock’s birthplace, is a major manufacturer.) But undoubtedly one of the great hammock cultures of the world is to be found in El Salvador, a country slightly smaller than the state of Massachusetts, a country that Americans, if they think of it at all, associate with gang violence and fleeing refugees.

“For me, [the hammock] is also a metaphor for Central American migrants in that, like the snail or turtle that carries its home on its back, Central Americans bring our homes with us in our hearts and make a home where we choose to relocate,” says Karina Oliva Alvarado, a Salvadoran lecturer in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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The capital of El Salvador, San Salvador, is nicknamed El Valle de Las Hamacas—the Valley of the Hammocks—due to the city’s location. Nestled among active volcanoes, in a zone where earthquakes hit on a regular basis, the city is accustomed to rocking from side to side. But El Salvador is also literally a country of hammocks. Concepción Quezaltepeque, in the north, hosts a hammock festival every year. Hammocks are everywhere, a Salvadoran staple, throughout the socioeconomic spectrum. “Hammocks swing from doorways, inside living rooms, on porches, in outdoor courtyards, and from trees. Just about everywhere a hammock can be hung, there will be a Salvadoran swinging from one,” according to travel writer Wade Shepard.

Hammock retailers around the world swear by the skill and beauty of the Salvadoran hammock. Companies, such as this Brooklyn-based “design collective,” go to great lengths to procure Salvadoran hammocks over all others.

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Salvadoran hammocks are traditionally woven, says Oliva Alvarado, with a vertical weave technique, in which the hammock-in-progress is strung between two vertical poles. Sometimes called a “Maya hammock,” this particular type is rather heavy, due to the quantity of string used in them. The string is thin, and strands cross over each other, rather than knotting at intersections. They’re also gathered at each end, unlike the more American styles that feature a spreader bar to make hammocks more rectangular and bed-like.

El Salvador exports a lot of textiles, T-shirts especially, but serious hammock-heads—there are forums for them—prize the Salvadoran ones.

Hammock history is complicated. In El Salvador and other countries where the hammock is essential and very old, it has taken centuries to reclaim them as a fundamental symbol and thing of value. For some of those from colder climates, the stereotype of the hammock as a symbol of laziness—staining the people who make and use them when not on vacation—has never really left. The converse, in which the hammock is a symbol of luxury and leisure, is problematic, too. The hammock itself? Just a great idea.

Swaddling Glaciers in Blankets Isn’t the Oddest Idea for Extending Their Lives

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As glaciers and ice sheets keep dwindling, scientists are proposing everything they can think of.

For years, if you wanted to get up close to a glacier—to feel the cold lift off the ice, to hear the water wending through rivulets and groaning beneath the surface—the Swiss Alps were the place to do it. But as the world warms, their frozen swaths are struggling.

Alpine ice has long captivated the people who have stood next to it. John Tyndall, an esteemed Irish physicist, rambling mountaineer, and avowed glacier lover, wound through the mountains in the 1850s, in an exhaustive quest to document their icy landscapes. Tyndall was propelled there by science, but found poetry in the peaks. He marveled at the milky blue color of the sediment-strewn water where the Rhône River fed into Lake Geneva, ferrying bits of silt from the glacier above it. He swooned over the "innumerable plates of mica" that "spangled the fine sand which the river brought down," and observed that "these, mixing with the water, flash[ed] like minute mirrors."

He certainly wasn’t alone in his awe. Because the Rhône glacier is reachable on a relatively undemanding trek, and readily accessible via the Furka Pass road, it has long drawn visitors who come to marvel at the cold mass, striped with damp earth. Since the late 1800s, they have even been able to step inside. Some 600 feet from the Hotel Belvédère, in the hamlet of Gletsch, a grotto has been freshly drilled into the ice each year.

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The glacier’s exterior is a murky white, verging on gray, with patches of brown from the dirt and rocks it has picked up on its plodding journey—but inside, it’s a different story. The walls of the roughly 330-foot-tunnel are glassy and aquamarine: The visitors who bundle up in sweaters and boots and pay six or nine Swiss Francs to amble along wooden planks are, essentially, wandering through a blue cathedral of living ice.

Trouble is, there’s less and less of the glacier to go around. The Rhône glacier—like so many others scattered through the Alps, Himalayas, Iceland, United States, and elsewhere—is shrinking. The glacier’s thickness has dwindled by 33 feet annually over the past 10 years, according to the Sierra Club, and the AFP reported that it is expected to lose half its volume within the next decade. The Hotel Belvédère—once so close to the glacier that at night, when car engines fell quiet, guests could drift off to the sound of rushing water—has closed its doors. Inside the grotto, the walls sweat; one visitor told the AFP that water falls from the ceiling like rain.

Because the Rhône glacier nourishes tourism—and because locals feel affection for it—the community has stepped in to try and slow its disappearance. For roughly a decade, the glacier’s human neighbors have swaddled it in fleece blankets, as though tucking it in to sleep. From June to October, visitors heading for the ice grotto pick their way around the blankets toward the inky opening, the only part that’s open to the sun. The white fleece makes the landscape look like a construction site, and, in way, it is: the demolition of a natural wonder, in slow motion.

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For those fighting to save glaciers and ice sheets, blankets are just the beginning. Over the past decade, as global temperatures have risen, researchers around the world have floated out-of-the-box ideas for delaying the disappearance of glaciers and ice sheets. The proposals include sprawling underwater walls, to prop up ice sheets; reflective coatings that could keep ice cooler; and even human-made snow and ice, for heaping onto the places where the old stuff is vanishing.

These ideas are controversial, but they aren’t exactly fringe. They’re often the brainchildren of researchers at major mainstream institutions, published in prominent, peer-reviewed scientific journals. Collectively, they fall under the large umbrella of geoengineering, which uses technology to deliberately manipulate the environment. Carbon geoengineering, for instance, focuses on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management, aims to cool the planet by reflecting more sunlight back into space. (Harvard University has a research program dedicated to the latter.)

Many of the proposals for putting glaciers on life support fall into the solar geoengineering camp, and call for herculean efforts in remote places, where the most ice is. In 2018, John C. Moore, chief scientist at the College of Global Change and Earth System Science at Beijing Normal University, and a professor of Climate Change at the University of Lapland's Arctic Centre—along with colleagues in Finland and the United States—outlined three ambitious geoengineering ideas in Nature. They fell somewhere between thought experiment and blueprint: The team wrote that it wanted “to stimulate discussion,” and acknowledged that all their ideas would require extensive modeling and feasibility studies.

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One idea involved filling in a sill near the base of Jakobshavn glacier in western Greenland, where warmer water is “eating away at the glacier’s base.” Padding that furrow with gravel and sand could create a berm to keep the glacier away from the warm water, the team wrote. Another idea involved removing the layer of water that accumulates below glaciers in Greenland and other lower latitudes, where sub-glacial streams “act as a lubricant, speeding up the flow, which in turn generates more heat, and creates more water and slippage.”

More recently, in July 2019, Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research scientist Johannes Feldmann, along with two collaborators in the U.S. and Germany, proposed a way of bulking up the West Antarctic ice sheet by manufacturing snow. Writing in Science Advances, the team described computer simulations that suggest the sheet could be bolstered by 8 trillion tons of human-made snow, constructed by siphoning ocean water, moving it several thousand feet, cooling and possibly desalinating it, and blasting it onto the ice sheet with tools that Live Science described as “massive snow cannons.”

Not all solar geoengineering projects are quite so intensive. A team led by Leslie Field, a chemical and electrical engineer and founder and CEO of the nonprofit Ice911, has been testing a more localized approach: a nontoxic, reflective material, made of glass microspheres that they say could increase the reflectivity of Arctic ice. In a 2018 paper in Earth’s Future, Field and 10 collaborators described its albedo-boosting effect as akin to protecting the ice “from the summer sun, much like a white shirt fends off the sun for a person on a hot summer day.”

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Broad-scale geoengineering proposals, in particular—and the idea of funneling more money toward hatching and testing more of them—have caused friction in the scientific community. Critics say the scale is too vast, the cost is significant, the feasibility is unclear, and the potential collateral damage is unknown.

“I think if you gathered a whole pile of glaciologists into the same room, they would not agree” about large-scale solar geoengineering, says Twila Moon, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “[It’s] not spoken about as much as other areas of research,” Moon says, “and I think that connects with personal feelings people have about where effort and money is focused, given that those are limited resources.”

Some environmental stewardship organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, have expressed tentative support for more research into geoengineering efforts, while highlighting that they are no substitute for cutbacks in emissions. But broad implementation seems fairly distant: A 2017 report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program said that large-scale geoengineering projects are "as yet unproven at scale," and their benefits and risks need to be studied.

Moon sees numerous problems in proposals to save specific glaciers. Infrastructure is a big hurdle—as its advocates freely admit. (Just hauling ocean water to land, in Feldmann's Antarctica proposal, would require the brawn of 12,000 wind turbines, the authors write.) Then there’s the thorny problem of geopolitics. “Antarctica is essentially a shared continent that is preserved for research, wilderness, things like that,” Moon says.

Meanwhile, solar geoengineering doesn't trace climate change back to the source. In response to Moore’s proposals in Nature, Moon and six other environmental researchers wrote a letter, contending that (among other concerns) the “limited resources available” would be better used to “address the root causes of accelerating ice loss—namely emissions and human-induced climate change.” The proposals, if they do pass muster in the kinds of feasibly tests that the 2017 national climate report called for, might buoy glaciers temporarily; they wouldn’t stave off climate change wholesale. Moon worries that the public will assume that we can “depend on technology to bail us out.”


A glacier like Rhône is a lot different from an Antarctic ice sheet. It’s not a knotty international issue, dependent on long-shot, high-cost efforts in remote reaches. “If you’re trying to protect a small glacier in the Swiss Alps, you can make a local decision, and a local area can say, ‘This is what we’re going to do, this is how we’re going to allot resources,” Moon says. (Of course, remote ice sheets pose a much greater risk, in terms of global sea level rise, than a single mountain glacier.)

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And the blankets over the Rhône glacier may be helping, at least on a small scale. David Volken, a scientist in the hydrological forecast division of Switzerland’s Federal Office for the Environment, told the AFP in 2015 that the blankets reduce summer ice melt by somewhere between 50 and 70 percent. Still, the overall melting continues: according to analysis from the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network, several glaciers experienced “unusually high melt rates” during this summer’s heat waves, E&E News reported. Tourists don't seem deterred: A representative says that the number of visitors to the Rhône ice grotto this year is similar to other years.

Strategies to save individual glaciers, Moon says, may be helpful. Though she doesn't know of data that tracks the effect of wrapping the Rhône, "It makes physical sense that if you are protecting a glacier from additional radiation, you are creating some delay in the disappearance of ice," she says. But interventions like this are treating symptoms of a much larger problem. “The reason they are losing ice is this long-term change in air temperature and changes in precipitation," Moon says. "Perhaps there’s some space there for a metaphor about battle versus war.”

Canada's Ice Roads Are Melting Too Soon

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Climate change is fraying these seasonal lifelines, causing hardships for the remote towns that rely on them.

It’s March in Canada’s Northwest Territories, almost 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, and the Mackenzie River Delta is frozen solid. Seen from above, its marbled surface is laced with cracks, criss-crossing one another and extending deep below the top layer of ice.

It’s beautiful to look at, especially in the clear arctic light of a winter midday. But it’s difficult to reconcile something so fragile-looking with the 54 vehicles that drive over it on a typical March day. As Noel Cockney of the Inuit-owned Tundra North Tours tells a small group of travelers bundled into his van, this isn't just a frozen river. This is the Inuvik-Aklavik Ice Road.

The 73-mile-long seasonal highway that connects the town of Inuvik, the region’s administrative center, to the remote community of Aklavik later takes the group past an immobilized barge, two stories high, encased in ice when the river froze around it. Come springtime the barge will be free again—and Aklavik will once more be inaccessible by land.

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Ice roads in northern Canada appear each winter as if by magic, then melt away in spring. When lakes and rivers freeze, they offer temporary access to places that, the rest of the year, are reachable only by barge or air. A network of ice roads, built and maintained by the territory’s department of transportation, cross the Northwest Territories, linking 10 towns.

But there is, of course, no magic. Only a complex process that involves radars, to check the thickness of the ice; snowcats, to remove the insulating snow cover; and heavier snow plows, to build up the ice and finish the job.

The Department of Infrastructure has highway-maintenance staff across the NWT who conduct daily inspections during the ice-road season. To ensure that the road is safe to travel on, they use ground-penetrating sensors—tethered to equipment such as snowmobiles or Argos (amphibious vehicles)—to monitor the condition of the ice.

This part of Canada, however, is warming at a rate four to five times faster than global averages, according to a recent report by the Government of the Northwest Territories—and that’s causing big problems for the people who rely on these ephemeral roads.

Ice roads are a seasonal lifeline for some of the most isolated settlements in the North. The hamlet of Aklavik is one such community. Home to about 600 people—mostly Gwich’in and Inuvialuit (western Canadian Inuit)—the area was traditionally a trading place for nomadic indigenous people. In the early 20th century, when the Hudson’s Bay Company established a fur trading post here, Aklavik became a permanent settlement and the region’s administrative center.

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In the 1950s, however, periodic flooding of the Peel Channel and subsequent erosion led the government to establish Inuvik—built on higher, drier ground some 60 miles to the east—as the region’s new center.

But instead of abandoning Aklavik, as the majority of white settlers did, many indigenous families decided to stay put. They were used to a traditional hunting and trapping lifestyle, says Cockney—familiar with the land, and sure that they could find the food they needed.

Aklavik’s resilience is expressed via its coat of arms, which bears the legend "Never Say Die.” Still, it has the appearance of a place ever on the edge. Houses are raised off the ground on stilts, so that their warmth doesn’t melt the permafrost on which they’re built. Next to a small graveyard, where crosses are nearly submerged under deep snow, a rough-hewn sign marks the grave of Albert Johnson—“the Mad Trapper” who was killed at the culmination of Canada’s largest-ever manhunt.

Tundra North Tours’ mission is to provide visitors “with an authentic experience of the unique atmosphere and culture of our home in Canada’s North.” Part of that experience entails meeting with Aklavik elders, traditional repositories of community knowledge.

Danny and Annie Gordon are two of them. In their cozy one-level home, photographs of family members and Inuit sealskin hangings cover the powder-blue walls. Cheerfully—Annie’s whole face lights up when she smiles—and patiently, the pair regale visitors with stories of their lives in Aklavik.

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In 1947, when he was just nine years old, Danny walked with his family all the way from Utqiagvik (then named Barrow), Alaska, to Aklavik, where Annie has lived her whole life. For their first two years there, his family lived in a tent before moving into a house. He and Annie married in 1956.

Today, Danny continues subsistence hunting and trapping—muskrat and pine marten pelts cover their living-room floor. He talks warmly of heading out onto the land with his children and grandchildren, keeping alive the tradition of whole families going trapping and hunting together. Smiling, he recalls taking out their 17-year-old great-grandson, whom he describes as “smart on the land. You teach him once, he doesn’t forget it.”

But the tourism made possible by ice roads presents other opportunities. Annie runs a small craft shop, called Okevik, from their home, selling her own handmade items like beaded slippers and mukluk boots. Danny also crafts tools for sale: snow goggles made from carved wood, hunting knives with caribou antler handles, and ulus (half-moon-shaped knives used for cutting food and cleaning pelts).

For year-round residents like the Gordons, the ice road is crucial to accessing Aklavik in winter. But like much else these days, it’s being affected and afflicted by climate change.

“I’m 30 years old, and even I have seen a difference,” says Cockney, who hails from the Inuvialuit hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, about a hundred miles north. Until recently, his hometown was accessible only by ice road. Now an all-weather road connects Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk, which sits on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.

But a permanent road can’t entirely shield the hamlet from the impacts of climate change: Accelerating coastal erosion is threatening homes and putting the entire community at risk

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The rapid warming of Canada’s North is due to a number of factors, including loss of snow and sea ice, which increases absorption of solar radiation and causes more surface warming than in other regions. Thawing permafrost and coastal erosion are big problems too.

“The winters have shortened by around one month in total,” says Cockney. That means the region's crucial ice roads are closing about two weeks earlier each spring than they used to, and opening about two weeks later.

As ice roads around the North melt earlier than ever before, the communities that depend on them are facing increased isolation and higher costs for basic goods, which now have to be flown or shipped in. In Aklavik a gallon of milk costs $15 (roughly $18 in U.S. dollars), while a gallon of gas runs $8 ($10).

Danny Gordon says that some adjustments to a traditional lifestyle have their benefits. He long ago replaced his dog team with a snowmobile, for instance, so he doesn’t have to attend to animals every day. Now, he jokes, ”I can turn them on and off with a key.”

Aklavik residents have to stock up on goods and visit family and friends during the final weeks of the ice-road season, which typically runs from December through the end of April. If a road closes abruptly, or earlier than residents had been planning for, it can cause prices for everyday goods to spike (incomes here are already lower than average for the NWT).

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“A lot of food is brought along the ice road,” says local hunter J.D. Storr. A shorter ice-road season also means higher gas prices, which have a particularly serious impact on those who hunt for food. “It's getting harder for people to get out onto the land,” Storr says.

Some support comes from the Aklavik Hunters and Trappers Committee, which gets funding from the Northwest Territories Government for Community Harvesters. The committee assists locals with gas “to help them harvest for their families.”

As ice roads become less reliable, permanent roads seem increasingly necessary. Six-hundred miles to the south, work is progressing to replace the ice road that serves the Tłįchǫ Dene community of Whatı̀ with a 58-mile all-weather road. Government spokesman Greg Hanna says that building the Mackenzie Valley Highway and the Slave Geological Province all-season highway are the transportation department’s next priorities.

But replacing winter roads with year-round ones is an expensive and time-consuming solution. The new Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway, for instance, cost $225 million and took more than three years to complete.

After Cockney’s tour last March, unseasonably warm weather destroyed Tundra North Tours’ igloo village, just off the Inuvik-Aklavik Ice Road, where guests used to spend the night. It also affected the region’s popular spring festival, the Muskrat Jamboree. Attendees were advised not to park their vehicles on the compromised road.

A small inconvenience, perhaps. But for residents for whom the ground under their feet is increasingly unstable, it’s another worrying symptom of what’s in store for the North as the world warms.

How a Banana-Chicken Casserole Defined Swedish Cuisine

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The recipe for "Flying Jacob" was the improvised creation of an air-freight worker.

In his best-selling Nordic Cookbook, internationally renowned chef Magnus Nilsson praises the Flying Jacob, writing that “few dishes are as emblematic and unique to the contemporary food culture of Sweden.” The original recipe calls for shredded, grilled chicken topped with sliced bananas and Italian salad spice to be submerged in a mixture of whipped cream and Heinz chili sauce. After baking, it’s to be sprinkled with fried bacon chunks and peanuts—an unusual combination of ingredients that’s been called “anti-epicurean,” and “a truly horrifying mash-up of things.”

Swedes begs to differ. In the nearly half-century since its inception, the casserole has become ubiquitous. Peaking in popularity through the 1980s, it’s still served in cafeterias and nursing homes, sold as a frozen meal, and offered as a baby-food flavor. And it's not a one-off—the popularity of Flying Jacob reflects a uniquely Swedish sensibility toward food.

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The story goes that in the summer of 1976, air-freight worker Ove Jacobsson was woefully unprepared for a neighborhood dinner party. He rummaged through his kitchen, threw what he found in the oven, and created the first Flying Jacob. The dish was a hit among his neighbors, including Anders Tunberg, then an editor of Allt om Mat, or “All About Food.” Tunberg gave the dish its nickname, Flygande Jakob, an allusion to Jacobsson’s occupation and last name, but also a reference to a Swedish long-distance runner from the 1940s. (Other accounts credit Jacobsson with coining the name.) With Tunberg’s encouragement, Jacobsson submitted the recipe to his magazine.

In their September, 1976 issue, the magazine pitched the salty-sweet, creamy-crunchy hodgepodge as the perfect party casserole, one that’s “easy to make and tastes great.” It was an overnight sensation, a simple solution to working families’ weeknight hunger, comprised of affordable ingredients.

The Flying Jacob’s flight path is a bit easier to understand in context. The 20th century in Sweden was a period of rapid modernization, creating a suburban middle class that enjoyed new luxuries: refrigerators, televisions, two-car garages, and exotic, foreign foods.

“As part of embracing this improvement in living standards, people abandoned traditional Swedish cuisine in favor of new and exotic ingredients and dishes,” remembers Swedish-born engineer Jonas Aman, “even if it meant making up completely ridiculous dishes!” The Flying Jacob emerged alongside other culinary oddballs such as kassler hawaii (a canned pineapple, curry, and cheese casserole) and After Eight Pears (baked preserved pears covered with mint chocolate).

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This newfound accessibility of foreign foods only highlighted a pre-existing Swedish propensity for mixing sweet and savory flavors. Sweden’s longtime national dish, meatballs, is often served with sweetened lingonberry jam, and as Dr. Richard Tellström, Professor of Food and Meal Sciences at the University of Stockholm, points out, “You can serve sweet jam [with] fried herring as well.” Similarly, a traditional Swedish Christmas lutefisk platter pairs lye-fermented cod with cranberries. It’s a testament to the uniqueness of Swedish taste that American author Garrison Keillor claimed, “Most lutefisk is not edible by normal people. It is reminiscent of the afterbirth of a dog.” Another sweet and savory recipe for a Swedish fish fillet called Spättabörsar med banan includes almond shavings, tomatoes, and sweet bananas.

“Swedes don’t compartmentalize foods too much,” says food writer John Duxbury, and especially not when it comes to bananas, a key ingredient in the Flying Jacob. Bananas accompany many of the country’s savory dishes. The similar flaskfile med banan is a casserole of pork, bananas, peppers, cream, and curry.

This Swedish culinary proclivity for bananas seems to have been encouraged almost as national policy. The fruit was one of the earliest tropical varieties to hit Swedish soil. The first shipment, in 1906, of two trucks carrying 200 bunches of bananas sold out in days. In 1914, a steamer carrying 10,000 kilograms of the fruit sold out in just a week. “It became a symbol of both the modern and international society,” says Dr. Tellström.

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Following a wartime drought in imports, a boon of “heavy [banana] propaganda,” writes Swedish economic historian Rosalia Guerrero Cantarell, brought the fruit roaring back. Newspaper articles touted the fruit’s nutritional benefits for children and the elderly; banana-recipe contests offered handsome rewards. A book published by banana ad-man Axel Blomgren titled The Wonderful World of Bananas argued, for the sake of the country, that Swedes should consume more bananas to lower their price. Magazines and cookbooks published by advertisers flooded readers with opinion articles, banana anecdotes, and recipes, including a banana, celery, lemon, and white pepper salad recommended to accompany grilled meats. In 1916 an argument sheltering bananas from all import customs received broad support in Parliament; from 1916 to 1933, the fruit was customs free. As of 2010, Cantarell notes, banana consumption in Sweden handily topped national averages across both the E.U. and the U.S.

This embrace of new arrivals over traditional Swedish fare intensified in the 1960s. After abstaining from the World Wars and the Cold War, Dr. Tellström says, “We had a longing for international cultural context.” The international student protests of 1968, then, gave the neutral country an opportunity to participate in a global cultural shift. Food writers and journalists of the day encouraged Swedes to ditch pretension and arrange informal, communal dinners in their newly outfitted suburbs. The Flying Jacob was an easy casserole to make for these gatherings. “It was easier to serve brand new dishes which had no older customs attached to it,” adds Dr. Tellström. And what had fewer customs attached to it than Ove Jacobsson’s banana-chicken casserole?

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In 2014, Allt om Mat caved to widespread reader demand and reissued the original recipe, prompting its inventor to break from decades of silence to marvel at his contribution. “I never thought [my] recipe would have this impact,” he wrote in the comments section. “[It’s] my contribution to the dinner tables and lunch restaurants around the country.” The magazine’s current editor, Charlotte Jenkinson, told The Takeout that the recipe is still referenced daily, and most Swedish households have developed their own versions.

While it’s popularity has long since peaked, visitors to Sweden can still track it down in small restaurants and cafeterias. And if that doesn't sound appealing to you, you should know that most foreigners who express dismay at the ingredient list go on to praise Flying Jacob once they've tried it, confessing shame over their previous reservations or complimenting the brilliant pairing of sweet bananas, Italian spice, and smoky bacon fat. If you plan to cook it at home on your own, Dr. Tellström advises, “it must be Heinz chili sauce.”


How Do You Convince 125 Million People to Embrace Wolves?

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It would be good for Japan's forests and farms (less so the deer).

If asked to imagine deer in Japan, one’s mind may turn to thoughts of docile herbivores gently eating out of tourists' hands in Nara. Less likely to come to mind are the unchecked herds of hulking 300-pound deer picking clean growing swaths of Japan’s forests and farmland. But that is increasingly the reality facing Japan, with deer responsible for millions of dollars in crop damage each year.

It is a situation retired professor Naoki Maruyama hopes to fix. The chairman of the Japan Wolf Association, Maruyama believes that the reintroduction of wolves—extinct in Japan for the better part of a century—can help curb the damage caused by deer and restore ecological balance to affected regions of the country.

Historically, owing to migration via land bridges from Asia and Russia, Japan was home to Ezo wolves—found on the northern island of Hokkaido—and Honshu wolves, which inhabited the three other main islands. Changing agricultural needs and fear of rabies in local communities, combined with aggressive hunting policies, gradually led to the extinction of the Ezo wolf in 1889 and Honshu wolf in 1905. Over the intervening century, the wolves’ former prey—deer and boar—flourished.

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For Maruyama, the idea of reintroducing wolves first came to him in 1988, with the discovery of wild wolves in Poland’s Bieszczady National Park, where they had previously been wiped out by hunting in the 1960s. “As a researcher on the social ecology and conservation management of deer,” Maruyama wrote in an email, “I realized the importance of the existence of predator wolves.” His calls for the reintroduction of wolves in Japan were rebuffed, however, by the country’s ecological societies. Ultimately, “we gave up on appealing to the academy,” Maruyama continued, “and decided to appeal directly to the public.” And so the Japan Wolf Association was formed in 1993.

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There are a number of concerns surrounding Japan’s large deer population, which itself was on the verge of disappearing in the years following World War II. In Hokkaido, home to an estimated 600,000 deer, some 2,000 car accidents involving deer occur each year, leading to government-led culls on the island. Deer, with their voracious appetites for up to 5-pounds of plant matter per day, have also caused ecological issues, among them “crop damage, bark stripping, soil erosion … and reduced tree diversity,” according to Pacific Standard. Such is the extent of the problem that even Nara's famed deer have been slated for culling.

In 2015, Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries released a report indicating that of the 8,000 hectares of forest damaged by wildlife in 2015, 77 percent—totaling some $53 million—could be attributed to deer. This is almost double the amount of damage recorded in 1998. News reports further indicate that 20 of the Japanese main islands’ 30 national parks have sustained damage from deer.

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For the Japan Wolf Association and similar organizations, reintroducing wolves would likely involve the importation of similar subspecies from Mongolia and China. The more immediate challenge, however, is in convincing the public of the merits, and value, in reintroducing wolves. While wolves have traditionally been viewed favorably in Japanese mythology—often portrayed as messengers of deities and protectors of travelers—Maruyama noted in an email the lingering impact of Little Red Riding Hood—of wolves as dangerous, man-hungry predators—on contemporary Japanese opinions of wolves.

Maruyama cites surveys conducted by Kunihiko Otsuki, a director of the JWA board, showing increased support for the plan and decreased opposition among respondents from 1993-2016. At the same time, he notes the difficulty in countering persistent public indifference to the issue. Opposition has steadily dropped from 44 percent to 11 percent, but JWA surveys note a consistent high level of indifference—45 percent of respondents to the JWA’s most recent survey in 2016 had no opinion on reintroducing wolves—relative to those with firm pro or anti-wolf-reintroduction views. Said Maruyama, “It is much more difficult to persuade people who are simply not interested than persuading those who oppose [the reintroduction of wolves].”

Compounding the issue is opposition from other ecological and animal welfare groups in Japan, as well as from the government. They note the considerable industrialization that has taken place in the country since wolves were last spotted over a century ago, and the encroachment of development on natural areas. Proximity of humans to wolves, accordingly, could become an issue for both alike.

Critics worry that wolves will come into contact with humans. The JWA says there are regions sparsely populated enough that human-wolf contact would be unlikely. “[Wolves] are not an alien species,” says Maruyama, and would fall into similar hunting patterns of wolves elsewhere.

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Supporters of reintroducing wolves point to successful reintroduction programs elsewhere, such as in Yellowstone National Park in 1995. Professor Maruyama has also noted that returning wolves have an ancillary impact of controlling the park's elk population.

For the JWA, work continues on building public support for their initiative. “We have 570 members,” wrote Maruyama, “but [we] are aging like the rest of Japanese society.” Indeed, recruiting young members to carry on the JWA’s work is the organization’s most pressing, and flummoxing challenge. Maruyama, who is 76, says “we have held dozens of seminars, lectures, forums, and symposiums all over the country,” but youth engagement remains low. “If you can't understand the feelings of Japanese people, including young people, there is no way to reach them.”

To that end, on August 1 the organization launched a year-long poster advertising campaign on the well-trafficked Keihan Electric Railway, timed to coincide with heavy rail use by students and office workers on summer holidays and promote the idea that “wolves are not scary.”

For Sale: A Signed Copy of King Edward VIII's Abdication Speech

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Fort Belvedere, where he gave up the throne, has seen both historic romance and political crisis.

King George V didn’t understand why his son, Edward, Prince of Wales, even wanted the place. To George, Fort Belvedere in the southeastern English county of Surrey was dilapidated, unsuited to the pomp and political horse-trading of the London court. To Edward, it was an escape—the opposite of his residence in London’s St. James’s Palace, which was "more an office than a home," he wrote in LIFE magazine.

The fort was an official holding of the Crown Estate on 59 acres, so it’s not like Edward was simply waving “Cheerio!” to the privileges of his noble birth. The prince quickly set about sprucing up the place—installing a swimming pool, a tennis court, even a Turkish bath. Through lavish parties, he turned the estate into a kind of English West Egg, with a recurring guest of honor: Wallis Simpson, an American who spent her first weekend at Belvedere in 1932. Edward became King in early 1936, but his desire to marry the soon-to-be-twice-divorced Simpson put him at odds with his ministers and the Church of England. Just 11 months after assuming the throne, Edward abdicated, and about six months later he married Simpson. (Edward's brother became King George VI, whose daughter Elizabeth is the longest-serving monarch in British history, at 67 years and counting.)

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So it’s fitting that Fort Belvedere served as the site of Edward’s abdication on December 10, 1936. The following day, when he was no longer King, Edward delivered a speech that the BBC broadcast on the radio. A copy of that speech, signed by Edward himself is now up for auction—along with one of Wallis Simpson’s white gloves—and is expected to sell for at least $3,000. This copy of the speech is addressed, “with best wishes,” to Walter E. Edge, an American diplomat who twice served as Governor of New Jersey and represented the state in the Senate. It is signed not by a King, or a Duke, but simply “Edward.” The fort remains a royal holding today, though there doesn't appear to be a lot of sentiment about it as the former residence of a king. It's occupied by a Canadian billionaire.

In the speech, Edward struck a modest chord, assuring the British people that “I have made this, the most serious decision of my life, only upon the single thought of what would, in the end, be best for all.” He also pledged to offer his dethroned services to the nation.

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Well, today Edward is perhaps most remembered not only for his ardent love and the abdication crisis it spawned, but also for his post-abdication association with Nazi Germany. At best, the relationship was far too cozy, with Hitler lamenting Edward’s abdication as “a severe loss for us,” and with Edward and his wife visiting Germany as the dictator’s guests (with photos to prove it). At worst, the relationship might have been outright collaborationist: Contested documents allege that Edward supported “continued heavy bombing” by Germany in order to “make England ready for peace.”

Nepal Is Banning Single-Use Plastics On and Around Everest

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Will it help solve the peak's trash problems?

Mount Everest, with a summit more than 29,000 feet above sea level, means something special to mountaineers. The mountain’s popularity has grown over the decades since it was first scaled in 1953 by Tenzing Norgay, a Nepali-Indian Sherpa, and Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, culminating in this year’s startling queue of people waiting for their turns to reach the peak. Along the way, this mass of mountaineers—close to 1,000 a year—leave countless bits of trash on the trail or at one of the high-altitude base camps. In an attempt to address this increasingly troubling issue, Nepal recently announced that single-use plastics will be banned from Mount Everest and the surrounding region, starting in January 2020.

According to CNN.com, only plastic water bottles will be exempt. “Not leaving any trash on the mountain is imperative,” says Gordon Janow, of Alpine Ascents, which guides climbers and aspiring mountaineers all over the world. While the ban is aimed at reducing waste on Mount Everest, it’s difficult to see how it will actually be applied. Understandably, hikers have to bring lots of gear with them to the base camps—including toiletries, those exempt bottles of water, and lots and lots of other equipment that they don't intend to use again—so it’s hard to say what plastic will be considered “single-use.” But, “The idea that there are rules to make the mountain more clean is probably the most important part,” says Janow.

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Though debris is a problem on the slopes, it's not soda cans and candy wrappers. “It’s more tarps and oxygen bottle parts and things like that,” says Janow. “Travelers are a pretty good crowd overall in terms of the environment … but [Nepal] just needs to start limiting the different types of things that go up there.” Most of the trash found on Everest is left behind because of the focus on survival—and there are times when the weight of a pack can make the difference between life and death. Local Nepalese cleaning crews often sort this trash into piles around the various base camps. In fact, earlier this year, 14 volunteers collected more than 6,000 pounds of material.

“It’s not a place for anything left up there, [the mountain] is a harsh environment where things will last for a long time,” says Janow. “A lot of the effort needs to be on the idea that if you bring it in, you’ve got to bring it out, whether its biodegradable or not.” (Unfortunately that includes the bodies of climbers who died along the way.) Similarly, in Tanzania, local officials announced a country-wide ban on single-use plastics, motivated in part by the trash being left on Mount Kilimanjaro. Says Janow, “That may be a nice model for how the future will look.”

Feast Your Eyes on These Delicate Glass Models of Decaying Fruit

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Blighted, century-old produce goes back on display for the first time in decades.

There’s something a bit brain-scrambling about this particular buffet of fruit. If you’ve ever let something languish on the counter or in the fridge a little too long, the white fuzz blanketing the shriveling strawberries or the spots of rot on the surface of a pear might look fairly familiar. But there’s something else that doesn’t feel quite right.

“You almost expect to be able to smell it,” says Scott Fulton, a conservator at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. “We all know what a rotten apple smells like.” But the fruit Fulton has been working on doesn’t smell at all: It’s made of glass. Beginning August 31, 2019, it will all be behind glass, too, back on temporary exhibit at the museum after nearly two decades in storage.

The fruit models are part of the larger oeuvre of Rudolf Blaschka and his father, Leopold, Czech artists who spent five decades making plants out of glass. The museum has 4,300 of these detailed models, depicting 780 species and collectively known as the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants (more casually and affectionately, the “Glass Flowers”). As the conservator tasked with caring for all of the glass models, Fulton knows them well—and he knows they can be pleasantly disconcerting for visitors. The shriveling berries, the curling leaves, the textured bark—it all looks so true to life that it’s hard to process that they’re really, truly made of glass. “Your mind tells you that if you blow on a blossom or branch,” Fulton says, “it would move.”

The decaying fruits were made by Rudolf Blaschka between 1924 and 1932. Like the rest of the glass plant models, these gnarly specimens were commissioned by the first director of Harvard’s Botanical Museum, George Lincoln Goodale, as teaching tools. These were designed “to show fungi in particular, and also bacteria that infect the plants, and symptoms that they show,” says Don Pfister, a mycologist and curator of the Farlow Library and Herbarium at Harvard. The collection highlights the strains of misfortunes that could befall an orchard, from peach leaf curl and gray mold to pear scab, fire blight, leaf spot, and shot-hole disease, which makes leaves look as though they'd been riddled with bullets. Blaschka sometimes used a single branch to illustrate the devastating progression of some pathologies: One, heavy with six apricots, shows the progression of brown rot, as it takes a fruit from healthy to totally mangled.

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The Blaschkas worked from nature, not books. They collected specimens to work from—meaning that, even if the models don’t smell rank, their studio may have. Working from life helped contribute to the fruits' startling fidelity. “Don bought in a rotten apple for me with brown rot on it, and it looked exactly like what they modeled,” says Jenny Brown, curator and collection manager.

Many of the glass flowers have been on display continuously since 1893, but the decaying fruit all went into storage in 2000, when staff determined that their display, on a landing of the museum (now a gift shop), was too busy and was tricky to keep under climate control, says Brown. The models, which sit on foamboard mounts, spent nearly two decades on cushions or custom pillows in archival boxes on shelves in a climate-controlled room. “From a conservation perspective, it was a good thing they came off exhibit, so they could rest, if you will,” Fulton says.

“Glass seems like it should be impervious to just about anything,” Fulton says. Blaschka even put that hypothesis to the test, Pfister adds, tucking some models under the eaves of his house and checking on them every year to see whether they had changed. But in the museum, they faced light, vibrations from visitor footsteps, and soot on their surfaces from the days when the building was heated by coal. (This is something other older museums have dealt with, too.) Plus the models were subject to “disfiguring mends” from well-meaning conservators, Fulton adds, who sometimes used glue that has discolored with age.

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And then there’s the inherent vice of the models themselves. “The glass flowers are made of chemical compounds, not just glass,” he says. To achieve the uncanny realism with the believable coloring and sheen, the Blaschkhas covered the glass surfaces with a proteinaceous glue, and then built up layers of paint from there. “In dry conditions, it shrinks, pulls away, delaminates the paint, and—in worst cases—it pulls apart the glass itself,” Fulton says.

The Blaschkas didn’t leave detailed records about their process, but as shards of glass have fallen off over the last 10 or 15 years, researchers have studied them to see what insight they can gain into how the artists worked. By taking samples to the labs at the Harvard Art Museums and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston they learned that the artists used lead and potassium oxides to lower the melting point of the glass, and give them more latitude for manipulating their enamels.

More than a century later, the lead oxide is behaving in ways that the artists likely didn’t expect. Fulton explains that the compound is hygroscopic, or prone to readily bonding with water. “On summer days, when humidity goes sky high, the lead compound migrates through every capillary and crack it can find, and it comes up,” Fulton says. Over many years, he adds, the lead oxides in a few of the models have migrated to the surface, where they have "recrystallized on exposure to air as a visible white powder," forming pale splotches.

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But such imperfections can be hard to spot on something designed to look mottled or moldy. “Sometimes it’s not that easy to differentiate between what they meant to be there and what’s there now,” Fulton says. "Probably, to the untrained eye, [the white spotting] could easily be confused with the purposeful rendering of a fungal disease adjacent to it." After eyeballing the model led to the hunch that lead oxide was causing the spotting, X-ray diffraction confirmed the diagnosis. Written descriptions, condition and treatment reports, and photographs will capture the state the models are in now, for future researchers who may have similar questions.

When the exhibition, Fruits in Decay, winds down at the beginning of March 2020, the models will go back to storage. Anyone who sees them before they return to the shelf might find themselves a little more attuned to the gnarliness all around. For example, before she saw the model showing symptoms of peach leaf curl—rolled, reddened leaves caused by the fungus Taphrina deformansBrown had never heard of the plant disease. Then, “I was walking down the street near the office, and a tree had the peach leaf curl,” she says. “I recognized it from the model, and I spotted it in real life.”

An Iranian Cave, a Neanderthal Tooth, And an Ice Age Murder Mystery 

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Lions, cave bears, and leopards, oh my!

Traces of Neanderthals live on in the DNA of modern humans, and their fossil record suggests a once-expansive presence across Eurasia. However, archaeologists are still trying to piece together just how widespread the extinct hominin species was in life. Now, analysis of a decades-old discovery in a remote mountain cave has confirmed suspicions that Neanderthals once roamed in modern-day Iran, expanding the range of our thick-browed cousins.

The research, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Evolution, based its findings on an artifact smaller than a thimble: a tooth. A child’s premolar, to be precise, originally found in Iran’s Wezmeh Cave following “clandestine activity” in 1999–in other words, looters disturbing the site in search of hawkable valuables. Only now, 20 years after it was recovered, has definitive analysis been conducted on the dental discovery. It is the first young Neanderthal's tooth to be found in Iran. (The second, according to state media, was recovered last year in the same region.)

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The Wezmeh tooth was discovered amidst an array of bones, few of them human. The other remains in the cave mostly belonged to Ice Age fauna—prehistoric bears, giant hyenas, wolves, cave lions, leopards, and more. Though the tooth was dated to a minimum age of 25,000 years old, researchers believe it’s considerably older, because the worldwide Neanderthal fossil record mysteriously stops around 40,000 years ago.

As far as scientists can tell, this child did not live in the cave. “Since the cave has a very low ceiling, and it is very narrow, deep and dark, Neanderthals could not use it for occupation,” says Fereidoun Biglari, head of the Paleolithic Department at the Museum of Iran and co-author of the paper, in an email.

How, then, did the lonely tooth end up in Wezmeh Cave? The answer is as grisly as you might expect. “The child most probably was killed by a carnivore,” Biglari says. “It is also probable that his carcass was found by a carnivore in the area and brought to the cave.”

Biglari says that, based on dating research, a range of carnivores inhabited the cave between 70,000 and 11,000 years ago.“In the early phase, the cave was used by bears for hibernation, some of whom died in the cave,” he says.

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Though this prehistoric whodunnit may never be fully solved, the revelation of a Neanderthal tooth in the Iranian side of the Zagros Mountains is confirmation of a long-suspected presence of the species, previously hinted at by tools and other bone fragments.

“Wezmeh confirmed that [the] range of Neanderthals expanded into central Zagros,” Biglari says. “I expect that their range was expanded even further to the south Zagros where their stone tools have been found in numerous sites.”

Biglari’s hypothesis will be tested in the coming year with more work in the cave, according to Marjan Mashkour, an archaeozoologist with Paris’ National Museum of Natural History and co-author of the recent paper.

“We are looking more specifically on finding traces of human activities, although this cave was primarily a den for hyenas and bears who alternatively occupied it,” says Mashkour.

The Vanishing Act of New Zealand’s Iconic Clam

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Once, toheroa were endless. Now, they're all but gone.

People talk about toheroa like they’re a dream, because these days, they are. The big, delicious surf clams were once plentiful on New Zealand shorelines, before populations suffered a mysterious, catastrophic crash in the second half of the 20th century. Those old enough to have seen the last-ever toheroa season are full of memories.

Toheroa bury themselves in the sand using their fleshy tongues, which can approach the size of a human’s. They were fast enough, Raglan’s Tracey Cooper remembers, that by the time you’d spotted their two tell-tale siphon holes on the low-tide sand flats, it was nearly too late to dig for them.

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“They might be a foot deep but by the time you’ve dug that deep, they’re even deeper,” he says. Their elusive strength was immortalized in a popular children’s song recorded in 1979–the peppy Toheroa Twist.

Auckland’s Phillipa Crews remembers digging toheroa with her grandmother on Himatangi Beach, a black-sand stretch on the west coast of the North Island. “I was hardly ever fast enough and usually only found pipi [a smaller shellfish],” she says. “If I found a toheroa I was really proud of myself.”

If you were quick, you could pluck the heavy shells–huge, the size of your hand–from their sandy tombs, their creamy white tongues pulsing. Traditional Māori flax bags, or kete, were ideal for harvesting; the sand and water drained right through. Then you’d crack the strong hinge, eat the greenish flesh raw on the beach, or boil them, throw them in a hāngī (a traditional Māori ground oven) or driftwood fire, perhaps sprinkling them with vinegar before eating. Or you’d leave them in a bucket of water overnight so they spat out all their sand, then steam them open, mince them, and turn them into fritters to gobble with soft, fresh, white bread and butter.

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Found mostly on west and south-facing New Zealand surf beaches, toheroa (Paphies ventricosa) remain both a traditional food staple and taonga, or treasure, for the Māori. But they became an everyman’s luxury in the early-20th century. Rich, sweet, gamey, yet creamy, the flavor was fine enough to also appeal to the epicurean. A 1936 issue of the New Zealand Railways Magazine described them as “now firmly established as a delicacy highly esteemed by the most fastidious gourmet.”

Pale green toheroa soup was also a specialty, described as “like clam chowder, but better,” according to a 1925 advertisement in the Auckland Star. One vintage recipe book lists toheroa soup under “Native Delicacies.” It required a dozen toheroa minced, simmered with onion, water or stock, milk, cinnamon, flour, and parsley.

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“People having convenient access to beaches where this much-flavoured shellfish is plentiful are fortunate indeed,” the author wrote. Plentiful might be putting it lightly. Toheroa beds were once so rich as to be considered practically inexhaustible, with numbers so numerous that they could be harvested with a horse and plough.

New Zealand has admittedly not given much to the culinary world, with the exception of pavlova, golden kiwifruit, dairy, and lamb. But toheroa became known worldwide and shipped abroad as canned whole shellfish and, later, canned soup. Toheroa canning began in the 1890s, and soon several factories sprang up to process them. Their popularity was helped along by the future Edward VIII’s brief visit to New Zealand in 1920. He tasted toheroa soup at a dinner party and, in a startling break with royal protocol, reportedly asked for a second helping.

The event was reported throughout the Empire, and toheroa took off, featuring on hotel menus across the nation. It was “a gift of nature which is a remarkable commercial asset, and although a mere shellfish, has done much to advertise the Dominion all over the world,” the Railways article boasted.

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But its immense popularity soon began to cause friction between Māori, Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent), and harvesters. It became fashionable for urban Pākehā to go to the beach to collect toheroa, and the gathering grounds became culturally contested areas. Scenes such as one in 1966, when an estimated 12,000 cars and 50,000 people visited one beach in a single weekend and gathered an estimated one million toheroa, weren’t uncommon. One image from the 1960s shows cars stacked along an Auckland beach, the low-tide line busy with bent bodies digging, digging, digging.

They’re nearly all gone now. The harvesting seasons, the canneries, the soup, the recipes. Commercial harvest stopped by 1969, and regional recreational fisheries closed between 1971 and 1980. Some toheroa are still around, but it’s forbidden to take them. Māori retain customary take, largely for hui (meetings) or tangi (funerals); providing toheroa to visitors is an important component of manaakitanga, or generosity and hospitality. They can also grant permits for particular occasions.

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But if the fishery has been closed for that long, why haven’t the toheroa returned? There should be plenty of large, mature shellfish by now, but they’ve failed to thrive. A review paper published in the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research in 2017 outlines some of the main suspects for factors preventing recovery, though it points out that there is a surprising lack of knowledge around their biology and ecology.

The list of potential causes is long. The lack of recovery could be down to a reduction of freshwater streams running onto beaches to the sea; toheroa need these to cool off and as a source of nutrients. According to Māori lore, the streams may also be important in their breeding cycle, along with native dune grasses as nurseries. Silt could be choking the toheroa, and excess nutrients or chemical runoff from land could be affecting them as well. Driving on beaches, which many Kiwis consider their God-given right, causes shell-crushing and exposure to birds.

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Overall, the reasons for toheroa’s failure to recover are still largely uncertain. The authors of the review article point out that similar patterns have been observed in other large, long-lived, and tasty surf clams worldwide. Everywhere, systemic poaching and unregulated over-collecting remain serious problems.

New Zealand has faced fishery collapses before, most notably of scallops. But while toheroa may be largely gone, they shouldn’t be forgotten. They should be a cautionary tale, illustrating the destructive effects of rampant culinary enthusiasm, ignorance of how land use affects the ocean, overwhelming commercial interest, and pure greed – all of which run roughshod over the Māori tikanga, or cultural practices, that traditionally protect food sources from extinction.

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Perhaps the toheroa’s demise is best summed up by my uncle, who, when I asked for historic experiences with toheroa on my Facebook page, responded: “Used to access forbidden beds via an uncle’s farm up north and recall playing cat and mouse with toheroa patrols in the dunes,” he wrote, before adding, “Canning destroyed them, not me.”

Climbers in Utah Scaled a 400-Foot Rock to Measure How It Moves

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Scientists say Castleton Tower is always vibrating, but doesn’t seem in danger of falling down.

As you read this, a popular 400-foot-tall rock in Utah is wobbling ever so slightly. Castleton Tower, a red rock formation that rises from the desert like a turret, vibrates constantly but imperceptibly, swayed by wind and tiny earthquakes that rumble in the distance. Its vibrations are so slight that they cannot be seen by the human eye, or felt by the many climbers that scale its steep sides. Now, for the first time, scientists have measured Castleton’s beating pulse. Their research, led by geologist Jeff Moore, is published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

Though it may seem dangerous for such a precipitous peak to be wiggling, even gently, this movement is perfectly natural and even expected, according to Riley Finnegan, a graduate student at the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper. “At any time throughout the year, at any hour, at any second, the tower is shaking back and forth,” she says. This is actually true for every structure and surface around us, she clarifies: the world is not static, and energy from various sources sends vibrations through everything. “Humans are unable to pick up on these vibrations because they’re so small.”

But these generally tiny vibrations are a big deal for large rock formations, because if they increase, the rocks could come crashing down. Researchers at the University of Utah have been studying vibrations of such formations ever since the high-profile Wall Arch—the 12th largest arch in Arches National Park—collapsed in 2008. “Not being a geologist, I can’t get very technical but it just went kaboom,” Chief Ranger Denny Ziemann told HuffPost after the fact.

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On a geological time scale of millions of years, rock towers and arches are temporary structures that will eventually crumble from the twin forces of gravity and erosion. Castleton dates back to the late Triassic period, around 200 million years ago. But it’s unusual for humans to observe the death of large geological structures during our relatively short lives. “There were no obvious triggers for the rock fall. It was just a nice sunny day in the summer,” says Paul Geimer, a graduate student and co-author of the paper. Through their work, Geimer and Finnegan hope to better understand how rock formations such as arches, towers, bridges and hoodoos (small, spire-like formations) respond to vibration sources, in order to assess their long-term stability.

The researchers had always been curious about the vibrations of Castleton Tower, but the structure is only scalable by skilled climbers. So when two professional climbers, Kathryn Vollinger and Natan Richman, volunteered their time, Geimer and Finnegan were game. In December 2018, the researchers trained the climbers to unpack and use seismometers, instruments that can measure miniscule movements in three dimensions. “It’s a pretty straightforward instrument. You can set it directly on any part of the rock,” Geimer says. “But it’s delicate in a lot of ways.”

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In March, the climbers set out, carrying the hefty seismometers in a protective box around the size of a suitcase. According to Geimer, it was a perfect spring day. “Great weather for climbing, and measuring,” he says. After placing a seismometer at the base of the tower to serve as a reference, the climbers summited easily and took measurements for three hours, while hanging out at the top with a handful of recreational climbers. Castleton Tower, also known as Castle Rock, was first ascended in 1961 and is enormously popular among climbers and nature photographers. The tower even starred in a car commercial, in which Chevrolet lifted the starlet Diedre Johnson and a 1964 Chevy Impala onto the tower via helicopter.

Large structures like Castleton vibrate at lower frequencies than smaller structures. The seismometers picked up two primary frequencies of 0.8 and 1.0 Hertz, which means the tower sways around once per second—roughly the same frequency as a heartbeat. “This tower is like a quiet sentinel,” Geimer says. “But every gust of wind will get this thing shaking.”

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Luckily, Castleton Tower is relatively stable. It stands in a “range of sensitivity” that shields it from human-caused vibrations, such as traffic, as well as natural forces such as distant earthquakes. Around a month ago, an earthquake in California caused some smaller hoodoos to collapse. The researchers’ long-term goal is to be able to predict when these structures might fall down, but they’re not there yet. In the future, they hope to return to Castleton Tower to measure the formation’s vibrations over a longer period of time.

After measuring Castleton, Finnegan and Geimer went out and studied several other towers, choosing small enough formations that they could scramble to the top. They’re still on the hunt for more rocks to measure, and their process basically consists of Googling around for interesting structures. Sometimes they’ll just drive out by the desert and see what they can find. So if you know of any swaying arches or wobbling hoodoos, give them a ring.


Researchers Track the Tick Boom With Linen Squares and Lint Rollers

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The blacklegged bloodsuckers go on three "quests" in their life, each time seeking a blood meal.

In recent years, bloodthirsty blacklegged ticks have been found in greater and greater numbers in the forests of New England. The tick boom has increased concerns about Lyme disease, an infectious disease the insects carry that when spread to humans causes rashes, aches, and even permanent paralysis.

Yet the behavior that ticks are most famous for—sinking their teeth into the skin and sucking blood for days at a time—is a relatively small part of their lives. “They live most of their life in that leaf litter layer,” says David Allen, a forest ecologist at Middlebury College who has spent the last four years monitoring tick populations in the Northeast.

Ticks only leave the underbrush on special occasions. “When they’re ready to look for a host, they go on top, and actively look,” Allen said. For some reason, this behavior is known as “questing,” which makes ticks sound like hobbits heading off to Mordor. “I don’t know where that word came from,” Allen says. “The tick is much more passive in its search for a host than a mosquito. It doesn’t feel like a quest.”

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In any case, the blacklegged tick goes on three quests in its life, seeking a blood meal during each stage: larval, nymphal, and adult. So how do you count these abundant and vampiric arachnids, when they’re hidden in the detritus of the forest floor? For scientists like Allen, the quests are an opportunity. All he needs is a small fabric square, roughly three feet on each side.

“We typically drag this cloth for 200 meters. We feel that gives us a pretty good estimate of the number of ticks,” Allen says. “When you flip it over, sometimes you don’t find any ticks. The next time you’ll find five. These ticks are on the leaf litter and they’ll just grab it.”

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The ticks take the sheet for a passing host—a mouse or a deer, perhaps—and latch on in hopes of their next blood meal. Itsy bitsy larval ticks will also grab onto the cloth by the hundreds. “Your cloth is covered in little specks that slowly start moving,” he says. Allen’s team will remove the little bloodsuckers with a lint roller, take some to the lab, and crush the ticks before extracting their DNA for analysis.

Allen notes that tick density throughout the forest can vary based on the abundance of the tick’s favorite hosts—small rodents for their first two blood meals, and larger mammals, especially deer, for their third. Though the populations are prone to booms and busts, Allen says that the last two decades have seen a steady increase in the number of blacklegged ticks.

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Since the ticks are teeny and innumerable, Allen encourages his students to take showers between their morning forest surveys and their afternoons in the lab. But he doesn’t believe ticks should deter people from the outdoors.

“Ticks are a problem, and we have to be really careful because of the pathogens they carry, but it’s not like I think people should not go outside,” he says. “I think it’s important to strike a balance.”

Found: 2,500 Medieval Coins, and Evidence of Tax Evasion

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Making heads or tails of a discovery in southwestern England.

It’s often said that life’s only certainties are death and taxes, but people have spent centuries figuring out ways to evade the latter. Look no further than a hoard of 2,528 11th-century coins recently discovered in England, which together bear witness to regime change, domestic unrest, and, amid it all, fraud.

The coins were found in January 2019, by metal detectorists in southwestern England’s Chew Valley. This week, the British Museum released details: 1,236 coins date to the brief reign of King Harold II (which started and ended in 1066) and 1,310 to the first years of William I’s reign, following the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Hastings. Three of the coins represent types known to numismatists as “mules,” or illegitimate blends of different coin faces cast by moneyers in hopes of avoiding taxes on new coin dies.

If William had seen these counterfeits, they may have hit his ego harder than they hit his purse. Two of the mules depict William on one side of the coin and Harold on the other, indicating that the moneyers reused old dies to mint the coins so they wouldn’t have to pony up for more of the updated variety. (The third mule splits its sides between William and Edward the Confessor, Harold II’s predecessor.) According to the British Museum, these are the first known examples of William/Harold mules, and they surely would have been two too many for William the Conqueror. After all, you don’t go to the trouble of leading a massive military conquest just to split coin space with your dethroned rival.

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Gareth Williams, the British Museum’s curator for Early Medieval Coinage, says that this find represents an exceptionally large haul for the time period. The coin hoard adds greatly to the known examples of each type, and offers a new opportunity to study the evolution of English coinage in a period of massive social and political upheaval. Already, thanks to information on the coins, the researchers have learned of mints not previously known to exist. Some of the coins also attest to the linguistic impact of the Norman Conquest, with the incorrect usage of Old English characters illustrating the real-time process of different cultures coming into contact for the first time.

The British Museum suspects, but cannot confirm, that the coins were buried in an attempt to preserve wealth in 1067 or 1068, when skirmishes and uprisings were still bubbling up in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. The collection has not yet found a home, though the Roman Baths & Pump Room in the city of Bath has expressed interest, pending further evaluation.

Found: Slime-Covered Notebooks Full of Conservation Data and Fish Scales

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Century-old data paints a grim picture of salmon populations in British Columbia.

Skip McKinnell found the slim books in a Vancouver basement: stacks of field notes coated with salmon scales still stuck to the 100-year-old fiber with slime. Then affiliated with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, McKinnell had read about the notebooks, which allegedly contained extensive data about and samples from British Columbia’s salmon population from the first decades of the 20th century. But even after scouring collections from British Columbia all the way to Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institute, McKinnell found the wrinkled pages elusive. That changed one day in 1996, when, at a colleagues’ suggestion, McKinnell searched the Pacific Salmon Commission’s Vancouver basement. There the notebooks were, overlooked but intact. When the notebooks were opened, papery fish scales sloughed off their brittle lined pages and fluttered like moth wings to the ground.

For more than 20 years, funding issues prevented scientists from taking advantage of that informational treasure trove. This year, however, a team of researchers, led by biology PhD student Michael Price of British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University, used the rare data to conduct one of the most historically in-depth available studies of Canada’s native salmon populations.

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What they found was surprising. Modern data had suggested declines in 7 of 13 wild salmon populations in Canada’s Skeena River watershed in the past 50 years. The British Columbia government has taken up efforts to conserve these salmon populations, but, says Price, the populations’ relative stability meant the issue wasn’t always seen as urgent. In contrast, the team’s research revealed a more shattering decline: a 56 to 99 percent reduction in the Skeena River watershed's sockeye salmon population over the past century.

“The situation is more dire than we realize,” Price says. Local commercial and recreational fishers were already feeling the pinch, with fisheries pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into farming salmon populations every year. But the team’s findings reveal just how vast this historical loss has been for one group in particular: First Nations Canadians.

First Nations people have a legal right to local salmon, and often rely on salmon for subsistence. “Salmon are this cultural keystone species,” says Holly Nesbitt, a PhD student in Forest and Conservation at the University of Montana, who has studied the effects of salmon depletion on indigenous food security in British Columbia. Price’s new study reveals just how much of this historical bounty Native communities have lost since the establishment of British Columbia's commercial fisheries.

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In conservation studies, in-depth data like those contained in the notebooks are a holy grail. That’s because accurate historical records for wild populations such as salmon are notoriously difficult to find. Available baseline data, used to estimate changes in population, are often colored by decades of human intervention. “For sockeye salmon, which are the most commercially important species, data only go back as far as 1960,” says Price. “That was 80 years after commercial fishing began in the Skeena.” This leads to a problem researchers call “shifting baselines.” By comparing current populations to populations that were already made scarce by modern industry, scientists come to a distorted conclusion about how large an effect economic activities like commercial fishing truly had on wild populations.

In contrast to this normally scant historical data, the information contained in those slime-covered field notebooks was astonishingly thorough. Originally commissioned by the British Columbia government as part of their efforts to monitor the province’s fisheries, the notebooks were the result of 35 years of painstaking data collection. From 1912 to 1948, resident biologists, led initially by fish expert Charles Gilbert, randomly sampled, weighed, measured, recorded the ages of, and shaved the scales off catches from canneries along the Skeena. For Price’s team, the sheer detail in the notebooks was breathtaking: Rows and rows of pencil and ink record the yearly yields from each cannery—a measure of the salmon population as a whole—alongside scale samples pasted right to the page with salmon slime.

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While Gilbert likely couldn’t have imagined it, it was this hands-on sampling method that enabled Price’s team to undertake such a detailed study. Using traces of slime, the team conducted DNA analysis to identify which types of salmon those fisheries had been catching. Darlene Gillespie, a salmon expert, examined the rings in each individual scale—yearly growth patterns like tree rings, caused by variation in nutrition levels across seasons—to determine the ages of the sampled salmon. That, in turn, allowed Price’s team to paint a holistic picture of the historical population.

When people see inaccurately conservative estimates of salmon decline, says Price, “We don’t feel the urgency” of population depletion. Yet Canada’s First Nations people have been feeling the urgency of salmon overfishing for years. Economically and culturally reliant on subsistence salmon fishing, the First Nations people of the Skeena river system have a legal right to the fish under Canadian law. But with depleted populations, First Nations people are left unable to to assert this right—and, often, left hungry. Holly Nesbitt partly attributes this scarcity to geography: First Nations people who live further upriver have access to less salmon population diversity than commercial fisheries, which are located at the river mouths. But at root, says Price, scarcity is a result of the historical policy priorities of the British Columbia government. "Economic interest takes precedence over indigenous rights,” he says.

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There is some hope: Indigenous-run organizations like the First Nations Fisheries Council and the Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance have taken the lead to advocate for their legal right to sustainable salmon populations. In 2018, the Skeena Nations, a group of eight First Nations along the Skeena River, took a stand against recreational chinook fishing in the river. The British Columbia government has also recently been proactive, banning recreational sockeye fishing in the Skeena in 2019. But it’s going to take much more concerted efforts to restore natural salmon populations to the level scientists recorded when they began their fisheries study in 1912. That box of scale-filled, slime-stiff notebooks is a record of what is lost, but it’s also a promise. Now that scientists know so many fish once filled Canada’s rivers, stewards of the river can embark on the task of making Skeena salmon abundant once again.

California's Mexican-American History Is Disappearing Beneath White Paint

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It’s surprisingly hard to protect beloved public art.

On July 15, 2019, Maria del Pilar O’Cadiz learned that someone painted over one of her father’s murals—another one, that is. The news came in a text from her sister, who was driving home from work at an elementary school in Santa Ana, California. She had just passed the wall, on Raitt Street, to see it was a shocking white. When Pilar O’Cadiz received the text at work, she screamed. “My coworkers wondered if someone had died,” she says. “And it felt like someone had.”

Before it was whitewashed, the Raitt Street wall held a mural by artist Sergio O’Cadiz, who passed away in 2002. The mural, which was painted in 1994 by both the artist and local children, with the permission of the owners of the land the wall abutted, contained scenes of the old Santa Ana cityscape, with caballeros on horseback and children carrying banners that read “Love,” “Tolerance,” and “Peace,” among other messages. A painted scroll noted, in English and Spanish, that the mural was dedicated to “the children of Santa Ana and the people who work for their future.”

It was, as one can imagine, a beloved landmark for the community, which might explain why it escaped graffiti and tagging for nearly a decade. It was only in recent years that those depredations began to accumulate. There were some thoughts and discussions about restoring the mural to its original condition, but no action had been taken. Then, in July, neighbors spotted a solo artist—no one knows who it was—attempting to restore the mural, without the permission of the property owner or the O’Cadiz family, according to Voice of OC. For reasons that aren’t quite understood, the property owner had the entire mural painted over. “It’s silencing our history and our community’s value,” Pilar O’Cadiz says.

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Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma was born in Mexico City in 1934. He studied architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He moved to Orange County around the time that the Chicano Movement, a civil rights effort aimed toward empowering Mexican-Americans and sprinkled with revolutionary themes, began to gain momentum. Perhaps the movement’s most significant and visible expression was in the form of murals. In the 1960s and 1970s, more than 2,000 were painted in Los Angeles alone, the vast majority by Chicanx muralists, according to a timeline from the exhibit ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals Under Siege, which documented the city’s disappearing murals (and is on display until the end of 2019). Within this context, O’Cadiz became one of Orange County’s most prolific contributors, according to investigative reporter Gustavo Arellano’s 2012 cover story on O’Cadiz for OC Weekly.

O’Cadiz’s oeuvre consisted of more than murals, but he became known for them. “From the moment a public artwork is made and exists in public space, it impacts the lives of everyone who passes by it,” says Janet Owen Driggs, director of the Cypress College Art Gallery, who is curating an upcoming retrospective of O’Cadiz’s work. “The people who painted it feel their sense of pride and accomplishment, and they see their faces reflected.” Though Pilar O’Cadiz was not present for the painting of the Raitt Street mural, she assisted her father in several other projects. “The key to his artistic process was to get the community involved,” she says. “He listened to them, and he got their input.” In the 1982, inspired by her father’s work, Pilar O’Cadiz painted a mural of her own, in the Third World House dormitory at Oberlin College. “My college flew my dad out and as soon as he saw it, he said ‘Good try, Pilar,’ and went over the whole thing to fix it,” she says. “And it came out gorgeous.”

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In the 1970s in Southern California, O’Cadiz’s community murals appeared throughout Orange County. He designed murals inspired by the Chicano Movement for Santa Ana College in 1974 and California State University Fullerton in 1974, and in 1976, his magnum opus: the Fountain Valley Mural on the Calle Zaragoza wall of Colonia Juarez, a Mexican-American neighborhood in Fountain Valley.

This 600-foot-plus wall depicted 25 scenes from the community’s history and heritage, including the first arrival of Mexican peasants in California and the Mexican army's victory over France at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. One scene stood out as particularly controversial, depicting cops clad in gas masks dragging a Chicanx youth toward a police car. The mural was completed four years after Mexican-American activist and journalist Ruben Salazar was killed by a stray tear gas canister fired by a Los Angeles County sheriff.

Though the city withdrew funding and support for the mural, O’Cadiz and volunteers finished it anyway. The police scene was eventually defaced with white paint, which O’Cadiz did not retouch. “The idea of [a] mural is compatible with the American concept of democracy and freedom of expression,” he wrote in response to the defacement, according to materials published in conjunction with ¡Murales Rebeldes!. “Being an American is having the freedom to be as Mexican as I want.” Over the years, the city refused to allow O’Cadiz to restore the mural, so it fell into the kind of disrepair that, by 2001, made it easy for officials to bulldoze the entire thing.

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As public art, murals are usually aren’t endangered by direct opposition or censorship, according to the curators of ¡Murales Rebeldes!. More often, they fall victim to prolonged neglect and the tricky bureaucracy of their maintenance and preservation, says curator Erin Curtis.

That was the fate of much of O’Cadiz’s public art. A fountain he constructed in Fountain Valley was turned into planters, and half of his mural on City Hall was demolished for the construction of an annex. Later in life, he contemplated suing the cities that destroyed his work, but never took action.

Pilar O’Cadiz, director of an engineering research center at the University of California, Los Angeles, has taken up the cause of preserving her father’s surviving work. Before the Raitt Street mural was whitewashed, she had started working on its restoration—a case she’s still building.

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Complicating the already complex reality of preserving public murals, the Raitt Street wall is on private property, and the landowner does not live in Santa Ana. There is, she says, a state statute protecting public artwork that requires private property owners to notify the artist’s next of kin before removing or altering the work. “But that’s a battle that I don’t think would resolve in our favor,” she says. “I want to make a friendly plea. Like, ‘This is the artist. This is the significance to the community. This is the historical heritage.’” If these efforts fail, she plans to explore recreating the mural in another part of the community.

At Cypress College Art Gallery, the exhibit J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma: El Artist, curated by Driggs, opens September 19 and will run through November 14, 2019. Pilar O’Cadiz hopes that the buzz might benefit her cause at Raitt Street. Driggs sees a special kind of value in the artist’s local work, as opposed to his larger, more ambitious commissions. “Sergio’s work in his community murals speaks to a different way of being in the world than the way that best supports the status quo,” she says. “A sense of community, lack of hierarchy, about celebration and sharing, and speaking the truth of the community.”

Scientists of the Future Will Unearth Traces of the Scorched Amazon Rainforest

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Long after the forest stops burning, traces of the blazes will linger in the soil and water.

The Amazon is burning. In Brazil, tens of thousands of fires have scorched the rainforest this year, according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research, and several recent weeks of intense blazes have turned lush green landscapes gray and brown, reducing trees to skeletal stumps in billows of smoke. The fires have displaced the creatures that live in the forest, encroached on land demarcated for indigenous groups, and smudged the skies of faraway cities. Judging by data gathered aboard NASA satellites, the Brazilian Amazon hasn’t seen fires this numerous and intense since 2010. Meanwhile, some of Bolivia’s forests are also ablaze.

Long after the fires stop, the legacy of their destruction will linger in the earth, and in the trees that eventually sprout inside the burned area. Tens, hundreds, even thousands of years from now, scientists could sift through what’s left behind and puzzle out some information about the damage we can currently see from space. This year's damage will be etched into natural history in the form of charcoal.

“Typically, in the Amazon proper, researchers associate any charcoal at all with human presence,” says Nigel Pitman, a conservation ecologist at the Keller Science Action Center at the Field Museum in Chicago. While lightning strikes may char a tree or savanna at the edge of portions of the Amazon, most threatening bolts coincide with the wet season, meaning that a fire they spark will likely “burn out within a few meters,” explains Crystal McMichael, an assistant professor at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. Much of the land covered by thick forest is so mightily humid that “it is too wet to burn naturally,” McMichael says.

The fires currently ripping through the Amazon were set deliberately, likely to make room for ranching and farming, and are fueled by past human activity. Deforestation has dried out the area and produced "dead fuel to be burned, and microclimates that are more conducive to sustaining fire,” says Mark Bush, a paleoecologist at Florida Institute of Technology who specializes in the ecological history of South America.

Evidence of past infernos hangs around in charcoal particles, which collect on the ground and water almost instantly and last indefinitely, Bush says. These fragments are easiest to track at the bottom of lakes or peat bogs, where sediment accumulation tends to be greatest, according to Hermann Behling, a botanist at the Albrecht-von-Haller Institute for Plant Sciences at the University of Göttingen, who works on palynology (the study of pollen and spores) and climate. Watery environments are spared the disruption of wriggling worms, falling trees, or burrowing animals—and oxygen-depleted environments like bogs can preserve pollen records, too. “Some Amazonian lakes deposit so much sediment that you can [occasionally] see annual banding patterns stretching back thousands of years,” says Bush. To date charcoal in churned-up soil, on the other hand, researchers would likely have to date each fragment.

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Charcoal particles can also help researchers determine what kind of plant matter a fire ravaged, and the size of the fragments suggest where the blaze likely burned. “Grasses don’t produce charcoal, so when you find it, you know forest was burned,” Bush says. Particles larger than 150 micrometers suggest that a fire raged locally, Behling says, while ones smaller than that size indicate that a blaze sizzled somewhere between 10 and 100 kilometers (or between six and 62 miles) away. “Very small particles can be transported by wind over longer distances—while larger particles, not that much,” he says.

Finding many bits of charcoal scattered across several lakes is another indication of a conflagration’s big footprint. “When you dig multiple holes in a landscape and find charcoal fragments of the same age, it gives you an idea of the spread of the fire,” Bush says. Taking soil cores—which narrate the long history of the forest, as told through layers of dirt—is also a way to look for hints of several past fires at once. Scientists can even read the chemistry of charcoal to reconstruct the approximate heat of past blazes, distinguishing, say, between lower-heat fires and the hotter ones that tear through a rainforest canopy, according to a recent paper by Crystal McMichael and her University of Amsterdam collaborators.

Though leaves can be consumed completely by fire, biogeochemists might find traces of flame-licked foliage in lake or soil records, in the form of phytoliths, microscopic remains that mainly consist of silica. Scientists may also detect the compound levoglucosan, which occurs when cellulose burns. Trees are chock full of cellulose, and because levoglucosan forms through fire, it is “a robust marker for characterization and quantification of [biomass burning] throughout the world,” an international team of researchers recently reported in Atmospheric Research. Fires can also register as abnormalities in tree rings, and as damaged bark on trees that are licked but not felled by flames.

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Even after the fire is extinguished, a singed forest is never the same. “The danger is that the forest that comes back after a fire doesn’t look a whole lot like the forest that was there before,” says Nigel Pitman, the Field Museum conservation ecologist. Even if the area burned by the fire is allowed to regrow, instead of being tapped for agriculture, the landscape may be dominated by different species.

The particular plants that are first on the scene will depend on which pollinators fly by and which seeds disperse, says Farah Carrasco-Rueda, an ecologist at the Field Museum whose work focuses on the Amazon. If the forest is completely gone, the newcomers will be sun-loving, fast-growing plants that wouldn’t have been at home beneath a dense, dappled, humid canopy. You’ll likely find secondary forests starting to crop up within 15 to 20 years, she adds, and these will be joined by plants that tolerate the shadows those trees cast. Eventually, these will grow into a mature forest.

Subsequent fires on a once-scorched footprint are likely to do even more swift and debilitating damage. “The bottom line is that fire is unnatural in Amazonia,” Bush says, “and the organisms have not evolved with it.” After a tract burns, "it portends a much more rapid degradation of the remaining mature forest," he adds. A single fire may kill the ground-nesting birds, and a sizable share of the trees, he says, while "a second fire in a few years will cause complete mortality." Which means that the next fires that sweep through could be even more devastating.

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