The jobs are simple, but the views are spectacular.

In medieval times, Urquhart Castle’s main problem was a centuries-long war for Scottish independence. In an attempt to seize control of the castle, English and Scottish armies subjected Urquhart to a series of bloody battles, devastating raids, and constant storming—a real downer for one of Scotland’s most picturesque castles, seated on the shores of Loch Ness.

In the 21st century, Urquhart Castle’s greatest problem is stranded tourists. “They arrive by bus and are meant to leave by boat, but sometimes they forget to catch the boat,” says Euan Fraser, the manager of the castle, which is one of many monuments under the purview of Historic Environment Scotland. “And sometimes they say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go on the boat,’ and so we call a taxi.” Urquhart Castle is, technically speaking, a “complete ruin,” Fraser says. The historic site has no rooms that would allow stranded guests to sleep over.

These problems could soon be yours, as Historic Environment Scotland is hiring for a slew of seasonal visitor associate positions at its various storied ruins. The jobs vary in task but share two things in common: a verdant, sweeping landscape and the chance to work alongside centuries of Scottish history. Applications are open until January 16.

Scotland has no shortage of castles, or castle-related jobs: Kismul Castle, Stirling Castle, Lochleven Castle, St. Andrews Castle, Kildrummy Castle, Doune Castle, Dunblane Castle, Craigmillar Castle, and Newark Castle are all hiring. But not all of Scotland’s ruins are so well-fortified. Fraser points to the Blackhouse, a traditional thatched house that a family would have occupied in the 19th century, and Skara Brae, a well-preserved Neolithic village that bustled 5,000 years ago. Unlike Urquhart, Skara Brae actually has rooms; an entire replica house was constructed, complete with a fire pit and furniture. It may be a better place to be stranded for the night.

Though working at a Scottish castle sounds grand, it’s no more fancy than, say, working in a thatched house. Some job responsibilities might have once been common at the historic sites themselves, such as operating a boat to ferry people across Loch Ness or tending the garden. “Some castles have more herbaceous borders, the kind of shrubs that you’d expect of a castle,” Fraser offers as an example. Others tasks are decidedly modern. “We always need someone to oversee the car park,” he says. Occasionally, castle staff have to rid the site of unwanted visitors, such as a very angry badger who famously stormed Craignethan Castle in 2018. And no, you do not have to be Scottish to work at Historic Environment Scotland. In fact, Fraser says it’s even helpful to speak another language, to guide international tourists.

Fraser has a degree in engineering, but he’s devoted his career to Scotland’s historic sites. Before Urquhart, he worked at Dallas Dhu Distillery, a historic, single-malt Scotch whiskey distillery and another site managed by Historic Environment. “At Dallas Dhu, unlike a working distillery, you can put your head in a still,” he says. After several years at the distillery, Fraser left for a new job at Urquhart—a princely sort of promotion. Now, in his 20th year as the castle manager, he makes sure things run smoothly, and they generally do. “It doesn’t matter if it’s glorious sunshine or a snowy, blizzardy day, a castle is always a beautiful place,” he says.

Fraser has a few words of advice for all future visitors passing through Urquhart. Come in the summer, around the evening, when there are fewer guests. “You get to see the site better, and wander around on your own,” he says. Dusk at Urquhart is also majestic, as the setting sun casts a shimmering glow over Loch Ness. But he does have one ask: Please remember to catch your boat home.

Of all the variations on the beloved character, Russia's Ded Moroz might have the strangest history.

There are versions of the character widely known as Santa Claus throughout northern, central, and eastern Europe—all large, bearded men who arrive with winter to bring gifts to children. Russia is not exempt from this, but the Russian version, Ded Moroz, which translates roughly as “Grandfather Frost,” has a particularly strange, convoluted history.

Ded Moroz today is about what you would expect. He has a long white beard, wears a fur-lined hat, has an animal-towed sleigh, and delivers presents to well-behaved children when it is cold outside. But Ded Moroz’s last hundred years have been violent, political, and full of massive social upheaval. This, for Santa, you would not expect. As a result, his status is unlike that of any of his holiday peers around the world. For one thing, he isn’t even necessarily associated with Christmas.

Santa Claus is one of several manifestations of a particular wintertime character, probably originating with the pagan, pre-Christian Germanic and Norse god Odin. Odin was a fearsome bearded figure, rode a flying horse, and was often associated with the Christmas predecessor holiday Yuletide. In fact, one of Odin’s names translates as “Yule Father.” As Christianity swept through the colder parts of Europe, many Yule traditions became Christmas traditions, and Odin’s image blended with stories of Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century Greek bishop also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker for his many miracles.

From there the character evolved into distinct but similar forms. There’s Sinterklaas in the Netherlands, Joulupukki in Finland, Mikulás in Hungary, and several more. Over time some have faded away and shaded into the more international Santa Claus. Ded Moroz was the Russian form of the bearded wintertime gifter.

Christmas was a major holiday under the tsars, though not as important as Easter. It wasn’t really a festival exactly, but more of a somber religious holiday marked by fasting and long church services in Old Church Slavonic (which, by the 19th century, hardly anyone could understand). The Russian Empire of the 18th and 19th centuries was religiously diverse, but in most of what is now Russia and Belarus, if you were Christian, you were probably Eastern Orthodox. The Eastern Orthodox Church used, and sometimes still uses, a totally different calendar than the rest of the Russian Empire—the Julian one, which is 13 days behind the more common Gregorian calendar. This means that in Orthodox communities, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations would actually take place on January 6 and 7, out of step with the rest of the Christian world.

Ded Moroz emerged around the late 19th century. One of the first major cultural introductions of the character was in the 1873 play The Snow Maiden, by Alexander Ostrovsky, one of the most important playwrights in Russian history. Ostrovsky was often a political writer, and The Snow Maiden is an odd entry in his oeuvre. It’s a fairytale, based in part on obscure and largely forgotten pre-Christian pagan mythology, and designed to promote a different kind of Russian patriotism than the Imperial government’s brand. The play was published—not necessarily a given for Ostrovsky, who had many of his plays censored or banned—and eventually rewritten as an opera, which was performed many times.

The play included the notable characters of Snegurochka (the titular maiden) and her grandfather, Ded Moroz. He was based on a very old and mostly forgotten character in Russian mythology, an elemental snow demon. Demons of his breed aren’t necessarily bad guys. Ded Moroz was actually a good omen, because he was associated with particularly brutal winters, which, in Russian superstition, mean a good harvest the following year. By the time of Ostrovsky’s play, Ded Moroz and the other pagan demons were thousands of years old and had not had a place in the contemporary Russian Empire.

The educated classes loved The Snow Maiden, and interest in its characters, especially Snegurochka (who was created by Ostrovsky) and Ded Moroz, grew. “It was a development from the better-educated strata, in the cities, who were aware of how much joy the Santa Claus, tree, and presents gave to the kids,” says Vladimir Solonari, a historian at the University of Central Florida who was born and raised in Moldova. Suddenly there was a ready-made, deeply Russian version of Santa Claus, and the less-religious Christians began to use him in Christmas celebrations in essentially the same way that Santa Claus and his kin were used elsewhere.

He rewards good children with presents, and brings celebration and good tidings. He wears a big, fur-lined coat, though Ded Moroz’s is often an icy blue or patterned white, along with traditional felt valenki boots. He also carries a magical staff, though it’s not clear what he does with it. His flying sleigh is technically a troika, pulled by three horses, with no reindeer in sight. Ded Moroz is usually accompanied by Snegurochka, his granddaughter, and she is always dressed in white or very pale blue. She is sort of Ded Moroz’s helper, more of a partner than the elf-employees of Santa. He doesn’t live at the North Pole; a few northern sites lay claim to being is hometown.

The Eastern Orthodox Church wasn’t very into Ded Moroz, because he wasn’t a Christian figure, but was rather a resurrected pagan remnant who did not square with the stricter observance of Christmas. But by the early 20th century, his popularity and that of his granddaughter had grown. Then they faced a struggle that no other Santa Claus type has ever had to endure.

Among the stated goals of the Communist Revolution of 1917 was to abolish organized religion and establish atheism throughout the Soviet Union. “It was remarkably effective,” says Catherine Wanner, a historian and anthropologist at Penn State who works on religion in the Soviet Union. “I'm not certain they produced atheists, but they certainly got rid of overt religious celebrations.” Attacks against organized Christianity came in several brutal waves throughout Soviet history. Priests were thrown in camps or simply executed, churches were destroyed, and the ruling powers bombarded the country with pro-science—or, more accurately, anti-religious—propaganda. One example: There were patrols at one time that actually looked in windows for Christmas trees. If they saw one, that family was in serious trouble.

The brutality and singular focus of the attack on organized religion produced a culture, especially in the cities and larger towns, of complete terror at the idea of practicing religion. But, starting with a 1935 letter from a prominent Soviet politician, the idea of some kind of wintertime holiday began to take hold. By 1950, it had been firmly established. It was not Christmas, of course. The wintertime Soviet holiday would be “Novy God,” or "New Year."

These holidays are treated separately in most places today, but in the Soviet Union, most of what had previously been associated with Christmas grew to become associated with Novy God. For the last four or five decades of the Soviet Union, everyone had a Novy God tree, and Ded Moroz made an appearance. It was not—for a while, at least—as consumerist as Christmas. It was more like Thanksgiving: national, secular, marked by feasting and family.

In this context, Ded Moroz’s pre-Christian roots were an asset. The Soviet leadership never said this explicitly, but it seems likely that they permitted and even encouraged Ded Moroz because he was, theoretically, Russian, born and bred. Depictions of Ded Moroz changed with the times during the Soviet era. For the Space Race, he was sometimes shown driving a spaceship rather than a troika. At other times he was depicted as a muscular, hard-working, semi-shirtless emblem of Communist industry.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, religious practice became legal again. But that put those who were theoretically Christian in a very weird position with regard to Christmas. They were able to celebrate Christmas, but they had never done it before. In fact, their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents had likely never celebrated Christmas. And Christianity in Russia still largely means the Eastern Orthodox Church, which carries its own complicated baggage.

The modern Russian government, which does not enjoy universal popularity in Russia, is heavily associated with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Not everyone finds it appealing to celebrate a holiday that’s supported by both the Church and the Putin government. “Actual attendance at church is very low in Russia,” says Wanner. “It's not to say that religion isn't important or that the Church isn't important, but attendance is low.”

Today, Russia has what’s called a “holiday marathon.” It starts with the Gregorian calendar Christmas on December 25, passes through Novy God, which remains a much bigger holiday, and finishes with Christmas as it appears on the Julian calendar, on January 7. It’s sort of exhausting, but Novy God still stands out as the most important single date. Gift-giving largely happens then, and when you wish someone the tidings of the season, you say “С Новым Годом,” or “Happy New Year.”

“The vast majority of people living in these countries [Russia, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine] still perceive the New Year as a much more important holiday than Christmas and most of those claiming to celebrate Christmas view it merely as an occasion to launch a party that usually lacks any religious content or even the sentimental sweetness typical of Christmas celebrations in the West,” says Alexander Statiev, a historian at the University of Waterloo who focuses on the Soviet Union.

Through it all, there is Ded Moroz and his granddaughter Snegurochka. They appear in seasonal cartoons, on greeting cards, in advertisements. People dress up as these characters for celebrations of various sorts. There are many classic Ded Moroz movies, which people watch every year, the equivalent of A Charlie Brown Christmas or Home Alone.

Ded Moroz is an unusual Santa-type for a bunch of reasons—his blue outfits, his traveling companion, his magical staff. But what’s most unusual about him is that he isn’t even really a Christmas figure at all. Happy New Year!

Welcome to the ancient woods of Cairo, New York.

If you woke up one day and found yourself rocketed back to the dawn of the Devonian period, more than 419 million years ago, you would encounter a forest-free world. Before there were leaves and woody trunks, there were other things, like carpets of fuzzy green mosses and ferns, unfurling their fronds. Trees arrived a little later.

Scientists want to understand the earliest forests, including one that sprouted in present-day Cairo, New York, by the mid-Devonian, about 385 million years ago. But today, the landscape is full of the usual suspects of an Eastern hardwood forest: maples, oaks, beeches, and birch. Modern-day trees bear little resemblance to the plants that could have survived there when the climate was much different, and the region was a temperate wetland that sometimes flooded.

What researchers do have at their fingertips at the Cairo site, an abandoned quarry, is roots—massive, sprawling systems of them, preserved in fossil soil. In a new paper in Current Biology, a team led by William Stein, an emeritus biologist at the State University of New York’s Binghamton University, point to the root systems as proof that the some of the plants that one sprouted on this site were important precursors to modern forests.

Reconstructing a picture of an ancient forest is like assembling a massive jigsaw puzzle with a ton of tiny pieces, many of which are missing. Stein draws a comparison to paleontologists studying dinosaur remains. You have the body evidence—the bones—and perhaps some tracks, which provide evidence of a creature moving through the world. “The body tells you what they were capable of doing, and footprints tell you what they were in fact doing,” Stein says. For plants, “body evidence” might include a fossilized leaf or trunk—but on its own, that’s only a snippet of a larger story. “A couple leaves here or there, you wouldn’t even know what they were connected to,” Stein says.

The roots that hung around in the fossil soil, also known as paleosol, are “essentially footprint evidence,” Stein goes on. “We know that [those plants] were living at that time and place together.” At the Cairo site, Stein’s team identified several types of root systems. They found some from Eospermatopteris, for instance, a palm-tree-like plant with a simple root system that is well-documented at the fossil forest in Gilboa, New York, about 40 minutes away. (Before the discovery of the Cairo fossils, the Gilboa site was considered a remnant of the oldest-known forest on the planet.) But the star of the show were the roots of a plant from the extinct genus Archaeopteris. These roots were deep and expansive, stretching up to 36 feet across the fossil soil. The researchers suspect that several diverged from the base of central trunks. From the air, they look like the gray beds of branching rivers, or the arms of a wriggling octopus.

Though the Archaeopteris roots at Cairo predate the fossils at Gilboa, in some ways these plants were more modern. The Archaeopteris plants had a vascular system in their wood, as modern seed plants do, Stein says, but in place of seeds, they had branches stippled with spores, stored in little cone-like structures, a bit like simpler versions of modern conifers. They also had leaves, Stein adds, which might have looked a bit fan-like, similar to a gingko. Compared to the roots of the trees that grew at Gilboa, these ones have a lot more going on.

In an interview with Science, Patricia Gensel, a paleobotanist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said that the Archaeopteris fossils push back the origins of some features of modern plants by up to 20 million years. “Woody trees with leaves that can produce shade—and a big rooting system—is something fundamentally modern that wasn’t there before,” Stein’s coauthor Christopher Berry, a paleobotanist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, told Science. Forests fundamentally changed the planet, causing carbon dioxide levels to drop, and nudging oxygen levels up. By wandering around these old root systems, scientists are getting a snapshot of a long-gone world that shaped our present one.

More than a thousand years ago, coastal hunters started honing their skills early.

Near the town of Seaside, Oregon, a heap of Native American artifacts has been hiding in plain sight for more than a millennium. The site known as Par-Tee, in a region long populated by Chinook- and Salish-speaking people has yielded thousands of tools excavated from centuries-old middens since the 1970s. Now, several objects from the middens at Par-Tee—spear-throwing tools called atlatls and weights used with them—have surprised archaeologists with their small size. The find suggests that atlatl training began early in the lives of the people who lived there.

During the site’s occupation between the second and 10th centuries, before the bow and arrow came to be the hunting tool of choice, atlatls were in wide use. They’re handles made to latch on to spears, so they can be thrown farther and faster. Learning to use an atlatl effectively, as one might expect, takes practice.

“It’s a critical thing,” says Robert Losey, an archaeologist at the University of Alberta and the co–lead author of the findings, published in the journal Antiquity. “For us, it’s like knowing how to use your phone or your car. It’s essential.”

The atlatls look like long paddles, with two carved rings on one side for the thrower’s fingers to slip into. Weights would be attached, to add torque to the throwing motion. “They’re the kind of thing you’d use if you’re throwing a tennis ball to your dog and you don’t want to hold the slobbery thing,” Losey says.

Atlatls are found in the archaeological record in Europe as far back as the Upper Paleolithic, about 30,000 years ago. Most are about a foot-and-a-half long, and built for adult hunters. At Par-Tee, they might have been used to hunt seabirds, sea lions, and seals, as well as in combat with other groups. The new atlatl finds at Par-Tee are a fair bit smaller. Though they were in fragments, one would have been less than eight inches long. They would not have been able to be used by even the smallest adult, leading the researchers to conclude they had been made specifically for children.

“We often pigeonhole certain kinds of activities,” says Jane Baxter, a historical archaeologist at DePaul University who specializes in labor, gender, and childhood in the recent past. “There are artifacts we think of as for work, and play, and learning. And we often think of learning as the work of childhood. But these are artifacts that break down those boundaries. It’s a toy, it’s a training tool, and it’s a way of learning to work.”

The presence of children have long been overlooked in the archaeological record, in part, Losey and Baxter say, because few actually look for it. The archaeology of childhood—alongside the archaeology of women—first started to get long-overdue attention in the mid-1970s. And they remain something of an afterthought in many archaeological investigations.

“Traditionally it was thought that children were hard to see archaeologically, that they were hard to find,” Baxter says. “There was also a sense that children weren’t terribly important, that they didn’t do things that matter, that they weren’t worth archaeological study.”

Children’s toys have turned up at sites around the world, and in some places roughly made ceramics or stone tools appear to indicate a novice’s hand. Such ceramics have turned up in the American Southwest, Baxter says.

“The presence of men has always been assumed, whereas the presence of women and children has to be proven,” Baxter says. “You know, ‘Prove to me there are children.’ Well, prove to me there aren’t.”

At Par-Tee, the scale of the atlatls is tangible evidence of the presence and activity of young ones. “You want to learn how to use these things as soon as you can in their life,” Losey says. “Surely, people started using these things in childhood, so by the time you’re physically an adult you’re already good at it.”

Interpreting how these finds might have actually been used is a challenge, but is significant to a richer understanding of a long-vanished way of life.

“It always gets harder when you start to put things like age and gender and identity and feelings into the equation,” Baxter says. “But we if don’t take those risks, what kind of a past are we showing ourselves?”

Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service's Fire Sciences Laboratory.

In a metal-walled lab in Missoula, Montana, scientists play with fire. At the Fire Sciences Laboratory of the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station, flames skitter through a wind tunnel, crawl uphill, and swirl into a blazing orange twist that seems to stand on end. Each pyrotechnic experiment is in service of a better understanding of how wildfires behave in the world beyond the lab—and how firefighters might be able to deal with them safely and effectively. Learning about fire behavior is a year-round project, but as winter dawns and we look for ways to get warm and homey, Atlas Obscura realized that the team’s experiments are often mesmerizing. The scientific work inspired the 2019 Atlas Obscura Yule Log, which you can enjoy in the knowledge that these flames flicker in the name of science.

These researchers set the blazes in order to understand specific aspects of how and why fires spread. “It’s not just because we’re fire geeks,” says Jason Forthofer, who works on modeling projects. And there’s still a lot to unpack. “I don’t think people fully understand that we don’t understand fully how wildfire spreads,” says Sara McAllister, whose work focuses on how fuel beds ignite and burn. “We have glimpses of things, but don’t understand the nuts and bolts of it.” The physics are complicated and subtle, adds Torben Grumstrup, who studies heat transfer.

Scientists know that burning fuel releases energy, which heats up unburned fuel to ignition temperature—“almost like dominoes,” Grumstrup says. But it’s the nuances, he adds, “that we can’t describe very well.” And nuance can be everything.

To puzzle out these finer points, scientists are investigating specific, big-stakes questions, such as why trees or grasses can spark when they’re full of water, how much the density of a forest affects fire behavior, or exactly how long various fuel beds can smolder.

Of course, the best time to model fire behavior and try to understand it is when you’re not staring down an inferno. “There’s no way you’re going to stand in front of a raging fire in the wild,” says McAllister. That’s where the lab comes in. There, the team can control temperature, windspeed, relative humidity, fuel distribution, and the exact shape, size, and composition of material in the fuel bed, says Forthofer. And it’s easy to flick off the lights to see and document the fire’s behavior more clearly.

The Yule Log video—set to a carefully chosen soundtrack—shows various kinds of experiments conducted at the lab. The first is known as the “chimney experiment,” in which the team burns strands of shredded wood under metal tube that is a foot square and about 12 feet tall. This simulates how a tall column of smoke pulls in an influx of fresh air at the bottom, which feeds the fire and blasts straight up. The second experiment is called the “cardboard experiment,” and entails placing little, laser-cut cardboard cones at regular intervals and then changing the slope to see how fires spread uphill. The third is known as the “fire puffing” experiment, which demonstrates how the frequency of “puffing,” or sudden bursts of flame, hot gas, or smoke, is related to the size of the area it burns in. The bigger the pan in this experiment, the less frequent the puff, and this holds true across fires large and small, says McAllister. “A candle flame will flicker” she says, “while a big, gigantic wildfire will puff every one or two minutes.”

The most mesmerizing of all is probably the “fire whirl.” To coax flames to swirl around and around like a vortex, the team sets fire to a bit of alcohol enclosed within a tube with slits in the side. “The air being drafted in is forced to come in in a swirling motion,” says Forthofer. As the air spins it accelerates upward and stretches the tube of air, which in turn cinches the diameter of the rotating column of fire. And, like a figure skater tucking her arms in, the tighter the column, the faster it spins. Out in the world, fire whirls can be massive, hundreds of yards wide, and deadly, Forthofer says. The final experiment in the video takes place in a wind tunnel, where the scientists explore how wind impacts fire and its spread.

Each flicker is part of the lab’s overall mission to develop tools and models that fire managers can use in the field to save lives and property. Over the years, the lab has worked on software including the Wildland Fire Decision Support System, which helps fire managers run models to predict fire behavior, and document decisions they make in response to it. If you cue up the Atlas Obscura Yule Log at your next get-together, you can kick back in front of a very educational fire—and explain to everyone just what they’re seeing.

Through the new year, Atlas Obscura will highlight our staff’s favorite places of the moment.

This year for the holidays, we’re presenting a special series of collections—assembled and curated by our staff—that are directly inspired by the more than 18,000 awe-inspiring places available to discover on our site.

We’ll be highlighting locations and ideas that have long fascinated us, from spectactacular bathrooms, to places best visited on two wheels, to Italy’s cinematic side. You can find the first five of these collections below, with many more to follow:

Our Favorite Places of 2019

20 Out-of-This-World Stargazing Spots

Around the World in 7 Futuristic Farms

16 Tales of the South Pacific

13 Places to Indulge Your Inner Horse Lover

Through the new year we’ll be rolling out more of these collections—at least a couple each day—so check back regularly to be inspired, whether you’re actively planning a trip for 2020 or just love seeking wonder from the comfort of home!

And for those of you who have an Atlas Obscura account (if you don’t have one already, it’s free and easy to sign up), this is also a reminder that you can create lists of your own—to help plan a vacation or road trip, or just to keep tabs on the places that have always fascinated you. To start a list, click the “Add to List” button on any place entry and follow the prompts to create your own collection.

In Canada, roads disrupt wetland water flow and multiply methane emissions, a new study finds.

In recent years, Northern Alberta’s boreal peatlands have seen a string of unwelcome visitors, in the form of access roads that criss-cross the ecosystem. The wetlands make up 20 percent of the province’s forests and capture almost 60 percent of carbon stored in Canada’s soil. But new research suggests that local wetland microbes are not responding well to the intruders. (If the microbes could talk, they might sound a little like Shrek, the fictional ogre who was known to shout: “What are ye doing in me swamp?!”)

Though these wetland roads might look benign, they disrupt a bog’s natural order, multiplying its methane emissions by as much as 49 and making the soggy soil a hapless driver of climate change, according to a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “Whenever we disturb these peatlands, it releases carbon,” says Saraswati, an ecohydrologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and the lead author of the study. “It’s problematic."

For much of Northern Alberta, a toxic whiff of methane is nothing new. Canada, which has produced oil since the 1850s, is home to one of the world’s most destructive oil sands operations, according to National Geographic. It’s part of the reason that Canada is warming twice as fast, on average, as the rest of the world, according to the country’s national assessment of its climate. Extraction industries are partly to blame for the construction of more than 135,000 miles of these peatland roads, the authors note.

In 2016 and 2017, Saraswati and Maria Strack, a biogeochemist at the University of Waterloo, examined roads that cut through bogs and fens, two distinct but swampy kinds of peatlands. Bogs are considerably more solid, receiving water and nutrients from precipitation alone, according to the U.S. Forest Service. “The bog is very spongy,” Saraswati says. “When you jump, you can see the other areas wiggling with you.” Fens, on the other hand, receive water and nutrients from groundwater, making them much more pondlike than a bog. “We chose a forested bog and a shrubby, rich fen.” The fen in question was surrounded by greenery like paper birch and silvery sedge. The bog was carpeted in green sphagnum moss and crested with black spruce, bog cranberry, and globular patches of sherbet-colored cloudberries—an oasis of wildlife surrounded by oil extraction.

Both bogs and fens capture carbon dioxide in the same way, drawing the gas from the atmosphere through the plants and trapping it underground as carbon before it can entirely decay. Here, carbon can last for millennia, and can even turn into coal over the course of millions of years—unless someone decides to extract it, or disrupts it.

The bog and fen were both located in Carmon Creek, the former site of a Shell extraction project in Alberta. Saraswati and Strack dug into the peat and buried a closed chamber about two feet by two feet, leaving a colored flag above ground to help them relocate it. The chambers collected emissions from the bog. The researchers expected that more methane would be released from the road-adjacent fen, which, due to its drippier nature, would be more easily disturbed by a passing truck. But in 2017, the highest emissions came from the road-adjacent bog, which released an average of 16 times the methane that it released in 2016. (The worst spot released 49 times its 2016 emissions.)

The roads weren’t triggering these methane emissions by sending vibrations into the ground, but rather by cutting off the water flow, Saraswati says. The areas of the bog with the greatest increases in methane had sections of road built perpendicular to the water flow, disrupting the natural cycle of the bog and breaking up the natural water level. On one side, the water had gotten shallower, exposing new peat to the heat of the sun and encouraging microbes to decompose more plant matter, she says.

Still, roads are far from the region’s greatest climate threat. This past summer, Alberta’s forest and peatlands went up in flames during a series of wildfires, according to PRI. According to Saraswati, the answer to this simmering carbon dilemma isn’t to remove the roads, which is a painstaking, expensive process. Instead, she hopes that future peatland roads will be built parallel to the natural direction of the water, minimizing their ecological effect.

Road-riddled peatlands will likely take decades to recover the plant coverage and species diversity of their formerly wild state, according to a 2012 study of abandoned winter access roads in northern Canada. But the researchers did find that even in severely disturbed peatlands, a green carpet of sphagnum moss made a steady comeback, entirely on its own.

Activists envision a bloodless future for the annual Dashain festival.

When Ashok Adhikari invited me to celebrate Dashain at his family’s home in the countryside outside of Kathmandu, he had explained that it is Nepal’s “biggest festival, like Christmas is for Westerners.” On the streets, he describes holiday traditions as we pass them: oversized card games played in courtyards, towering bamboo swings used by adults as much as kids. But it is something small that catches my eye: a sliced gourd lying on the doorstep of his uncle's house.

“That,” Adhikari explains, “was our sacrifice.”

Sacrifices are essential to Dashain, and provide the Prasad, or blessed meat, central to the festival’s main dishes. But this is also the source of growing controversy: The traditional preparation of Prasad involves the ritual sacrifice of thousands of animals across the small, mountainous nation.

Nepalis describe the spilled blood as an offering to Durga, the festival’s warrior goddess, who subsequently draws strength to overcome demons and assorted forces of darkness. While families spare cows because of their revered status in Hinduism, they herd buffaloes, sheep, chickens, ducks, and goats (known collectively as the panchhbali, or “five offerings”) that they’ve raised or purchased into temples or local courtyards. Once there, Hindu priests or family chiefs with ceremonial knives butcher them, sometimes in front of gathered crowds. But an increasing number of voices in Kathmandu is demanding another, more humane way of vanquishing demons: the sacrifice of coconuts, pumpkins, and other vegetable substitutes.

Every year during Dashain, as well as during Gadhimai, another sacrifice-based festival, which takes place every five years, animal-rights organizations distribute leaflets, plan online campaigns, and enlist local stars to encourage Nepalis to replace buffaloes with squash or coconuts. When it comes Dashain in particular, the eighth and ninth days of the 15-day festival are the most controversial.

The eighth day, known as Maha Ashtami, focuses on Kali, an incarnation of Durga whose wrath is fierce, destructive, and key to keeping the universe in motion. In the Devi Mahatmya, a sacred Hindu text, Durga fights a demon horde and is nearly overcome. Victory arrives when Kali is summoned to consume the armies of darkness whole. The animal blood, evoking fertility, is the centerpiece of an offering made in thanks for continued life, protection, and prosperity. Accordingly, the city’s men drag hundreds of buffaloes into nearby chowks, Kathmandu’s ancient courtyards, for the slaughter. This evening is known as Kal Ratri, or “Black Night.”

The next day, on Maha Navami, Nepalis celebrate another victory from the Devi Mahatmya. In the story, Durga faces off against Mahishasura, a shape-shifting demon who terrorizes the realm of the gods. The Nepali military makes its official sacrifice on this day, typically choosing a buffalo, as this was a form Mahishasura took during the battle. But other animals will do in a pinch: The defeated demons were said to hide from Durga’s wrath by (unsuccessfully) concealing themselves in the bodies of goats and birds.

Nepali activists, however, believe that animal slaughter is no way to honor the warrior goddess.

“I remember creating a scene when I was about eight and realized that a goat I used to play with was going to be killed,” says Pramada Shah, the president of animal-rights organization Animal Nepal. “What upset me even more was that the fact that the goat would be beheaded in the name of God … When I married a member of the royal family, my in-laws kindly agreed to abandon animal sacrifice and introduce the offerings of fruits and vegetables.”

While the practice of substituting vegetables has existed for years, it drew national attention after Prah and other activists organized a mass campaign in 2009. Prompted by the mass sacrifices at Gadhimai, a number of organizations united under the Stop Animal Sacrifice initiative, which demanded that celebrants “stop sacrificing animals [in the] name of God” and “celebrate Dashain without blood and meat.” For them, Durga is more than a warrior. She is also a mother, and vegetable offerings reflect the goddess’s love and care.

Still, even environmentally conscious locals make the vegetables more animal-like before the sacrifice. “Tiny sticks are inserted into the vegetable so that they resemble legs,” Basant Pokhrel, a Nepali-American who comes home for the holidays, tells me. “It makes it easier to ‘slaughter’ the vegetables.”

In families like his and Adhikari’s, the oldest parent or sibling in the room arranges the floor with ritual bowls, idols of Durga (or Kali), and knives called hasiya or aashi. They smear a red powder called abir (used in a variety of non-sacrificial Hindu rituals) in lines across the vegetable, and then sprinkle a mix of abir and rice called achetaa over everything and make offerings of water or flowers. Before the head of the family brings down the knife, everyone worships the vegetable, which often involves a moment of silence in respect or thanks.

After the ritual, the women in the family usually take the vegetable, which is now prasad, and prepare it for the following day’s feast, which celebrates Durga’s ultimate victory over the darkness. In preparation, the family’s leader takes a bowl of tika (a combination of rice, vermillion powder, and yogurt) and rubs it on their relatives’ foreheads. Everyone takes turns placing jamara sprouts behind the ears of their younger family members, money is given as a blessing, and the ceremony is complete.

For activists, this shift in the menu is actually a return to a more authentic expression of Hinduism. According to Animal Rights Nepal, in the scriptures, “nothing is mentioned of [making] animal sacrifice to appease the Gods and Goddesses, who would never approve of their own creatures being slaughtered in their name.”

And the animal-rights movement is gaining ground, with celebrities and even military leaders getting on board. Correspondingly, the number of animals sacrificed during Gadhimai and Dashain is falling. While official figures are not collected, activists such as Shah report a drop in buffalo sacrifice from 20,000 to 3,000 between the 2009 and 2014 Gadhimai celebrations. At this year’s Gadhimai, more than 100 protesters gathered, wearing masks of animals typically sacrificed at both festivals.

Though progress is steady, it is admittedly slow. More than 70,000 animals were sold for sacrifice at Dashain in 2018, reports the Nepal Livestock Traders Association. “It will be difficult to immediately stop the ancient tradition,” Mohan Krishna Sapkota of the Ministry of Culture told South China Morning Post, “but we [do not promote] such practices.”

What’s more, animal-rights activists face resistance. “People are made to believe that killing animals in a temple is a shortcut to becoming successful,” says Shah. For her, local superstitions “[stand] in the way of abolishing archaic practices such as animal sacrifice as well as witchcraft, racial discrimination, women’s suppression, and others … [Locals] feel it is better to continue the age-old traditions and be safe.”

Understandably, many livestock farmers, whose livelihoods sometimes depend on the sale of animals around the festival, oppose the activists. “It is a tradition that our fathers and grandfathers have followed and we will continue to follow this path,” says goat trader Krishna Prasad Dhangal. “We believe offering the blood to the goddess Kali will please her and bless us.”

But leaders like Shah remain confident. “We are very few campaigners, but we have a very loud voice,” she says. “We are a loud minority.” Having been loud enough to impact the menu of the country’s most sacred dinner, they’re proving that even the fight against demons can be co-opted into the wider environmental movement.

Issa Kassisieh has turned his centuries-old family home into a Christmas wonderland.

The soft ringing of bells approaches, and a red iron door opens in a stone facade in the Christian Quarter of East Jerusalem’s Old City. In the hallway, next to a sled, stands Issa Kassissieh. He is tall and powerfully built—Kassissieh is a talented basketball player, and was once recruited to play college ball in the United States—and he is Israel’s only certified Santa Claus. When he gave me directions to his house at St. Peter’s Street, he asked if he should answer the door as Santa. We agreed on "50/50." So the 35-year-old's short, dark beard is viable, but is wearing a fuzzy red shirt and pants, and a pair of tall black boots. Oh, the boots. That’s where the sound of the bells came from.

This is “Santa’s House,” a small space on the first floor of the Kassissieh family home. Issa has turned this room, adorned with an ancient tile floor and a vaulted ceiling, into a glittery fantasy that seems particularly out of place in the Middle East: Christmas trees, glinting snowflakes, reindeer and polar bear dolls. In this setting, Kassissieh looks like a giant. For a moment, it’s not clear if he’s going to do a slam dunk or take to the sky in a sled.

It was 14 years ago when Kassissieh found an old Santa Claus costume that had belonged to his father. He decided to amuse himself and tried it on. It fit so well that he went to the nearby Jaffa Gate, a historic portal in the Old City’s wall, while wearing it. Children happily gathered around, and it had an effect on him. “I realized that as a child I didn’t get to have this happiness, and that it’s time to give it to the children of Jerusalem,” he says. “While traveling the world during Christmas I realized how deep Santa is embedded in Western cultures, while here, in the place where Christmas began, we only know Santa through television and movies.” The following year, Kassissieh donned the costume again. The year after that he hired a camel. Since then, around Christmas, he has ridden the camel around the Old City spreading cheer, and then receives visits from children and their families in Santa’s House in the afternoon. At the height of the season, the line in front of “Santa’s House” can be two hours long. Kassissieh funds most of the operation himself, but he does get candy donations from Christian individuals and organizations worldwide.

In 2016, Kassissieh took the next step in his development—he decided to train at the Professional Santa Claus School in Denver, Colorado. He studied for a week and learned how to build wooden toys, bake cookies, and say “Ho, ho, ho” the right way.

“You can’t just call ‘Ho, ho, ho,’” he says. “The sound needs to come from the abdomen. To be Santa you have to do things from the heart, and the heart should hold hope, love, and peace.”

Kassissieh, who is Orthodox Christian, was the first Arab to attend the Santa school in Denver, they told him. In 2018 he enrolled for further training in the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School in Michigan. “It’s a famous school founded 83 years ago, which trained more than 5,000 Santas,” he explains. “They told me, ‘You’re the first Santa from the Middle East and the Holy Land.’”

Today, Kassissieh earns his living as a basketball coach in West Jerusalem. “Santa’s House” has been his family’s home for 700 years; they were the first Orthodox Christian family in East Jerusalem. In the home, in which he currently resides with his parents, there are memories, mementos, and pictures that go back centuries.

“My family came to Jerusalem 900 years ago, but we don’t have any exact information on where we came from,” he says. “Some family members claim we came from Greece. Others think we came from the Palestinian city Lydda.” Some centuries back, the family founded a tile factory, and many of those tiles today adorn important churches in Israel/Palestine, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The back wall of the house carries a relatively new sign for the factory, with the name Issa Khalil Kassissieh, Issa’s great-grandfather. The belongings of those great-grandparents—a black telephone, masonry tools, a clock—are now hidden among Christmas paraphernalia. Behind a Santa Claus doll there is a sewing machine that was used by his great-grandmother, Malika.

A yellowing photo of Malika and Issa Khalil Kassissieh shows a handsome pair in Western clothing during the family’s financial heyday. “They were well-off, pillars of the community, very religious,” Kassissieh says. A few years ago, his father found a 250-year-old prayer book, written in Arabic, which now stands on a bookshelf. In the back space of the house hangs a panoramic photo of Jerusalem, around 150 years old. The Dome of the Rock was not gilded then, and the vast area where the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives would eventually be placed lies fallow. “My grandfather could travel to Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, just for a party and come back that same night. Can you imagine?!” he says. Today, few can.

Some of the Kassissiehs lived and worked in Katamon, on the other end of Jerusalem. In the war that Israeli Jews call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba, or the “catastrophe,” they fled from Katamon and took up residence in the Old City, leaving behind a house and a tile factory, which were confiscated by Israel. Kassissieh doesn’t dwell too much on this event. “The Kassissieh family lived with the Ottoman, British, Jordanian, and Israeli rule,” he says. “We always know how to recover from misfortunes and negotiate with everyone.”

Right now, he’s negotiating again, with the Jerusalem Municipality for assistance in making his dream come true: a Santa Conference, the first in Jerusalem history. Kassissieh intends to invite 50 fellow Santas from around the world and hold a great parade in the city during January. He believes it will happen, he says. Because he’s Santa.

Festive cheer and cemetery caretaking go together surprisingly well.

Ask anyone in Nome, Alaska (population 3,841) for the name of the bearded gentleman who digs the graves and drives a city truck, and they’ll tell you it’s Santa Paul.

For six weeks a year Paul Kudla is a contract Santa. Over the last 12 years, he’s donned the red suit and held court in sporting good stores and shopping malls across the United States.

The rest of the year, he works as a cemetery caretaker and truck driver in Nome, a town on the Bering Sea, inaccessible by road, that’s known for being the far-flung finish of the Iditarod sled dog race.

When his local newspaper shared a picture of him shoveling snow on Facebook, they captioned the snapshot “Santa Paul.” Naturally, when he answers his phone he says, “This is Santa Paul.” If you get his answering machine, a high-pitched elfin voice will say, “Santa left me on the workbench. I’ll let him know you called.”

Clearly, Kudla takes being Santa seriously. And it pays off: he’s in demand. Right before the 2019 Santa season kicked off, Kudla and nine other Santas from around the world toured around Japan, doing photo ops everywhere from hospitals and schools to the subway and a Toys ‘R’ Us. He’d been invited by a fellow Santa he met while competing at the Santa Winter Games in Norway and again at a convention in Kyrgyzstan.

“I like going to gatherings of Santas,” Kudla says. “It’s a fun community, we call ourselves the ‘Brothers in Red,’ but I’m the only one where I live.”

Despite being so far from his pearly bearded peers, Kudla is fairly well-known. In 2015 he won the title of America’s Best Santa on the TV competition show Santas in the Barn, where he competed against nine other diverse Santas in contests ranging from speed present wrapping, building gingerbread houses on ice, and Christmas song knowledge (his weakest category—he doesn’t care for holiday music). He ended up beating out the Surfing San Diego Santa on the final episode, broadcast on Christmas Eve. The title netted him $100,000 in prize money and $10,000 for Make-A-Wish, his charity of choice.

Though his two seasonal roles may seem like polar opposites—one spreading the holiday spirit to young boys and girls, the other spreading dirt over the final resting place of deceased locals—Kudla says they have one thing in common: they both provide comfort to others.

“Both jobs have turned out to be so rewarding,” Kudla says. “They both add to better experiences.”

There hadn’t been a caretaker at the cemetery for over 30 years before Kudla got the job. The land, Kudla says, was completely overgrown. Grass had grown several feet long, tree limbs had buried themselves in the earth, and grave markers had gone missing. In his early days on the job, the digging of a new grave would be interrupted when it became apparent someone was already interred there.

“The cemetery has a whole new look now,” Kudla says. “I really cleaned up the original part and recently the city bought another 11 acres adjacent to the old cemetery, so I’ve been working on leveling it out and making it look beautiful for the locals and the Great Spirit. It’s become a nice place to be.”

There is a limited window for burial in the Arctic—eventually the tundra gets too frozen to dig, even with an excavator. During the shoulder season between grave digging and professional ho-ho-hoing, Kudla drives trucks and operates heavy machinery for the city.

He spends his free time tinkering in his workshop, where he repairs sewing machines that are over 100 years old and crafts his extensive collection of Santa regalia. “I Santa-ize all my clothes,” Kudla says. “I’m finishing a jacket I made out of muskox. I look huge in that thing. I have a golden moose hide and a pure white buffalo hide that I’m saving—those need to be for something special. I have a vision of a duster coat with fur trim and a half cape in red leather. I just made a Russian Army officers hat Santa-fied.”

Kudla, who is naturally slim, wears a gel belly at gigs. “I tried the pillow thing, but kids know,” he says. “It doesn’t move right.”

Winter 2019 is Kudla’s first time staying in Alaska for the season, splitting his time between hunting-and-fishing outfitter Cabela’s and a Bass Pro Shop in Anchorage, the state's most populous city. The agency that sets him up with his winter gigs, Nationwide Santas, knows that he likes to go somewhere warmer and with more daylight—his hometown receives fewer than four hours on December days. In the past he’s been stationed in places like Las Vegas, Nevada, and Fort Myers, Florida, but this year he’s alternating shifts with a Santa buddy who has a daughter living nearby.

It’s been a slow season so far, which Kudla thinks is due to online shopping. Still, he says it’s his favorite part of the year and the short lines mean he gets to talk to his visitors for longer.

“There’s nothing like when a kid sees you from down the hall and comes running up to give Santa a hug,” Kudla says. “This job is magic in that way.”

On December 26, Kudla will be back home in Nome until November, dispersing merriment and serenity in a different way: making sure snow is cleared from the city roads and that the grave sites look nice for visitors.

And if any local kids write letters to St. Nick during the off-season, they’ll end up in Kudla’s mailbox. The name on it reads, simply, “Santa."

"HeyJTree" is built like a dating site, but it matches readers with the charismatic, threatened plants.

If you’re prone to anthropomorphizing the natural world, you’ll find a lot to love in Joshua Tree National Park. Introduce yourself to the shaggy trees that lend the park its name, and you might notice charming and distinct characters: You can imagine one talking with a baritone croak, maybe, and another in a high-pitched warble. The residents of this patch of California’s Mojave Desert are charismatic, like sedentary Muppets with root systems. It’s hard to imagine the fantastical, boulder-strewn landscape without big, goofy stands of them. But as the world warms, the trees are losing ground.

Researchers have consistently found that Joshua trees, or Yucca brevifolia, are struggling in a changing climate. For one thing, while adult trees can rely on stored water during triple-digit summer temperatures, seedlings aren’t surviving them, KQED reported. A temperature increase of 3° Celsius would curb the trees’ range by as much as 90 percent, according to the research ecologist Cameron Barrows. He has canvassed the park in search of refugia—higher, cooler spots where young trees might be able to hang on—but those aren’t a guaranteed lifeline. Joshua Tree is the southernmost edge of the plants’ range, and it’s getting too hot and too dry. The trees are often flanked by grasses that can go up in flames during wildfires, and the trees struggle to successfully spring back after burns. “It doesn’t look good for the trees,” says ecologist and artist Juniper Harrower.

Harrower, who grew up roughly 20 minutes from the park, wants people to fall in love with Joshua trees—and to get curious about interspecies relationships between the trees, moths, and underground fungi that might help keep them healthy. Harrower recently finished her PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has launched a collaborative digital project called “Hey JTree,” a science-communication effort inspired by dating apps.

Sixteen trees throughout the park get the Tinder treatment, with cute portraits, location information, and coy little profiles peppered with made-up names (say hi to Jerome, Eleanor, Shorty, and Marty) and real-world data, including the local temperature; soil moisture; tree height; elevation; number of seeds; and sightings of yucca moths, which pollinate the Joshua tree and lay their eggs in its blossoms. (Harrower performed much of this field work while pregnant or with her infant son in tow, with a truck and ladder borrowed from her parents, and her mom helping out as an assistant and lunch-packer.) Atlas Obscura talked to Harrower about the project, and what the trees are up against.

What threats are the trees facing in the park right now?

It's an issue of reproducing, but also, the trees that are standing just getting too hot, too dry, and starting to lose limbs and collapse. When we think about climate change and how it impacts Joshua trees, you also have to think about all these other players: Joshua trees and yucca moths have tightly coevolved over millions of years, and you can’t have one without the other. If the moths are responding to climate in a certain way, and it takes out the moth sooner, that's it for Joshua trees in terms of reproduction.

Why draw inspiration from dating apps?

As a biologist, I’m interested in all kinds of species, for all kinds of reasons. But Joshua trees—people love Joshua trees. It was a way I could get people to listen to what I’m saying. Visitation rates in the park have skyrocketed over the last 20 years, and especially the last 10 and five years, and part of that is driven by Instagram culture. Joshua Tree is so photogenic.

I grew up as a really young kid hanging out in the park, and I'm just seeing the explosion of phones out—lots of people, lots of phones in the air. So I thought, this is a way I can engage with phone culture. Also, it's catchy. I've given talks before, and university students are sitting in the back with headphones on. As soon as I say "dating site," headphones are popped off. All this stuff is really heavy, so here's a way that we can be playful with it but still have some important conversations.

How did you settle on these specific trees to profile?

I look at it across a climate gradient. Across the park, landscapes, ecosystems, temperature, and rainfall patterns vary dramatically. At the highest sites, you get snow every year. Out of the park, and even in the park at the highest elevation sites, it's really cold and windy. As you start to go down in elevation, it changes. There are areas in a little valleys that are protected, then places that might be exposed to certain cold wind patterns. You definitely get microclimates.

When I was thinking about what trees I wanted to include in this project, I really wanted to make sure that they were accessible to people. I didn't want people to have to be, like, tromping through cryptobiotic crusts, these amazing ancient soils that have all of this life. When you step on them, that destroys it. So I picked trees that were close to parking lots and could be accessible to people with disabilities, or really close to trails. I picked trees that looked like they had different personalities. I've always been really intrigued by the form an organism takes, and how it's responding to environmental conditions and also genetic cues.

Do the trees seem to have a sweet spot in the park?

Across all of the measurements that I looked at, there was this one happy area where trees were really big and large, there were lots of them, they were reproducing, there were lots of moths. Things were just looking good. That was really interesting to see, like, "Oh yeah, everybody's kind of happy around this mid-level elevation." There’s a good example on out on the Cap Rock Trail, a little loop.

Why do the trees like it there?

Joshua trees need really specific patterns to be able to thrive and flower. If you don't flower, you don't set seed, and you don't have the next generation of Joshua trees. They need a cold snap to get the plant to flower, and they also need enough water. The precipitation pattern needs to bring them enough water to survive through the years. I mean, it's a desert plant; it's evolved to be able to take a little bit of hardship.

Assuming someone does not literally go out and woo a tree, what are you aiming to accomplish?

The most basic thing is just interest in our natural world. I see a lot of kids and a lot of people so focused inward, and downward on their phone, and these kind of internal, technological worlds. It bums me out. I really hope that people can find the magic that is in our natural world.

You'll hear scientists say, "I don't really want to get political because we want to keep science separate from politics, to preserve its dignity or believability." Over time, I realized we don't have the luxury of not being political anymore. I firmly believe you can do really solid science, and when people understand how the science process works, you can recognize good science from bad science—and it's peer-reviewed and held to high standards. And you can also be really politically outspoken and say, "We can't continue to consume at the levels we're consuming." People need to understand that there's value in our natural world outside of just, “extract all the resources you can get from it and then make as much money to buy a bunch of stuff that's gonna destroy our environment and us.”

Do you remember the first time you saw a Joshua tree? Was it love at first sight?

I was born in the Palm Springs area, and we moved up to the High Desert when I was six or seven. We lived on five acres, down a bumpy dirt road. There are very, very few Joshua trees in this area because the elevation is too low, but we had one in the backyard, and it was totally weird. It was really special to us. My dad is a landscape architect, and so we always thought about our plant friends in the area.

I was the oldest of four kids—four kids, and lots of dogs. Every time one of our dogs would pass away, we would bury it under the Joshua tree. It became this kind of mythological place in the backyard. I think at this point there are like seven dog skeletons underneath the giant tree. I always kind of fantasize about doing a painting of what it looks like underground. Roots seek out nitrogen and carbon, so I'm sure that the roots wind along dog spines and rib cages. It's probably really macabre, but it's incredibly beautiful to imagine the symbiosis.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The newly dated remains were found amid thousands of other bones on an Indonesian island.

On September 15, 1931, at a distinctive bend in Java’s Solo River known as Ngandong, the top of an ancient skull came out of the ground. At the time, it was thought to have belonged to a prehistoric tiger. On further inspection, the skull, alongside more than a dozen pieces, was identified as having belonged to Homo erectus—the “upright human,” the archaic hominin that ranged across Africa, Europe, and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. The age of these bones—found alongside bones of tens of thousands of other creatures, accumulated at the bend of a river—has long been a question mark. Now, nearly a century after the skull fragment was unearthed, archaeologists have announced the bones are the youngest H. erectus remains ever found—perhaps the last stand of a prolific human ancestor.

“When you think about it, out of the 25,000 some fossils on the site, only 14 were a Homo erectus,” says Russel Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and lead author of the study, published recently in the journal Nature. “They lucked out. Had they not found the skull, they may not have put such time into it.”

The new paper dates the fossils to about 108,000 years ago—very recent for a species thought to have evolved around two million years ago. The record-setting find from Ndangong shows just how late H. erectus persisted in Southeast Asia after the species had gone extinct everywhere else. The species, like its shorter possible relatives H. floresiensis and H. luzonensis, may have benefitted from arriving in the islands we now know as Indonesia by a land bridge, which was then submerged by rising seas. Cut off from the rest of the world, the island dwellers endured. The islands of Indonesia, from Flores to Java to Luzon and beyond, continue to yield fossil evidence of humankind’s complicated paths across a changing world.

“Homo erectus was there on the islands, and Southeast Asia is big,” Ciochon says. “All those areas there, we know there were [hominins] crisscrossing. There was a lot of interaction between these species. And part of that is because of the islands.”

Desperate English bottle-makers turning to a new fuel resulted in a sparkling innovation.

In the early 17th century, the kingdom of England was in the grip of the world’s first energy crisis. Decades of population growth, rapid urbanization, countless foreign wars, and myriad voyages of discovery to the New World under the capricious Tudors decimated the country’s forests and its timber supply.

King James I was terrified. No trees for timber meant no ships for the navy, and no navy meant leaving the country wide open and undefended against England’s enemies—which, at this time, was pretty much all of the rest of Europe. This lack of timber was nothing short of an existential threat to England itself.

A panicked Royal proclamation was swiftly issued in 1615 to stem the tide. It bemoaned the increasing dearth of good old English wood, “great and large in height and bulk” with “toughness and heart,” which is “of excellent use for shipping,” and it set out a series of drastic restrictions for its use for anything but absolutely essential purposes. In particular, the proclamation explicitly forbade that anyone should be so wasteful as to “melt, make or causeth to be melted or made, any kind, form or fashion of Glass or Glasses whatsoever, with Timber, or wood, or any Fewell made of Timber of wood.”

No timber as fuel to make glass? The country’s glass-makers were outraged. They had been burning timber for centuries to make their product: an almost alchemical process of using fearsome heat to melt a mixture of potash and sand. What on earth were they to do now?

While craftsmen around the country were up in arms about this new prohibition, the attentions of the London upper class were engrossed with a decadent new product.

English wine has long been maligned. The ancient historian Tacitus wrote that Britain was “hostile and unsuitable for the growing of grapes,” but it was his fellow Romans who brought their vines to Britain two millennia ago to sustain them in their drafty villas. A thousand years later, the Domesday Book listed 45 working vineyards in the country. And, in the 1600s, a new type of wine was being produced on the shores of England: refined and unique in character, to cater to the tastes of the affluent and upwardly mobile individuals who had flocked to the capital. And, for that, we turn to Christopher Merrett.

Sir Christopher Merrett was possessed by an insatiable curiosity. A librarian, gentleman scholar, physician and, in the terminology of the time, a ‘natural philosopher’, Merrett was one of the founding members of the Royal Society: the ‘invisible college’ where the greatest minds of the age investigated the minutiae of the known world. His output was extraordinary. He even produced an exhaustively comprehensive book attempting to list all the fauna, flora and minerals of England.

But it’s his 1662 paper, Some Observations Concerning the Ordering of Wines, that has had the longest legacy. ”Our Wine-coopers of latter times use vast quantities of Sugar and Melosses to all sorts of Wines,” he wrote, “to make them drink brisk and sparkling and to give them Spirits.”

What Merrett was describing was the méthode champenoise, the act of secondary fermentation where still table wines are loaded up with sugar and molasses to get the yeast going again, then sealed in a bottle to produce an effervescent, bubbling concoction. It is a method made famous, as the name suggests, by the French in the Champagne region. But here is the first known description of making ‘sparkling’ wine⁠—and Merrett writing that British vintners had been doing this for years.

The problem with this new liquid, “brisk with spirits,” was that it generated an incredible amount of pressure. In a standard bottle of sparkling wine today, the internal pressure is at around six times that of atmospheric pressure—three times that of a car tire. That’s the equivalent to over five kilograms of weight pushing hard against every square centimeter of glass. Only an especially strong bottle could withstand this sort of pressure. Thankfully, England’s glass-makers were prepared.

After the royal proclamation a few years before, English glass-makers had reluctantly turned to coal. While wood was thought of as a noble fuel, across Europe coal was historically considered undesirable and dirty, and the act itself of mining it had been likened to to vandalism or burglary from the earth ever since Roman times. Even though it was well known that rich seams of coal ran across England, these were left largely untouched for centuries.

Nonetheless, once laborers started begrudgingly using this coal to heat their furnaces, they overcame their reservations. Sure, coal gave off fumes and toxins, but it also reached a much higher temperature than timber, creating stronger, more durable, and thicker glass. Over time, artisans honed new industrial methods to take advantage of this discovery. While European counterparts were still using wood, the Champagne bottle as we know it was born in the furnaces of England.

Not only did these new bottles help spawn an embryonic wine industry, but they became status objects themselves. Samuel Pepys, in his Diaries, writes excitedly about visiting his local vintner to see “some of my new bottles made, with my crest upon them, filled with wine, about five or six dozen.” The introduction of lead oxide later in the century made the bottles even stronger, and catapulted England’s craftsman to the pinnacle of European glass-makers.

But what of Dom Pérignon⁠—the French Benedictine monk who, as the story goes, first created this beverage that would become known around the world as Champagne? “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!” he is said to have cried out. One can imagine the other monks rushing over to make merry with this novel and effervescent liquid that had just burst from its bottle.

But that thick, stout bottle⁠—the one memorialized in a grand statue of Dom Pérignon that now stands on the lawn at the House of Moet & Chandon on the Avenue de Champagne⁠—could not have existed anywhere but Britain at the time. And, what’s more, Merrett’s paper on the secondary fermentation of wine was submitted to the Royal Academy in 1663, five years before Dom Pérignon even arrived at the abbey in which his famous invention was said to have been born. And decades before the famous saying could have been uttered.

The founding myth of Dom Pérignon has played a vital part in transforming Champagne into one of the richest and most fiercely protected global food and drink regions. It is a convenient, if apocryphal, ‘first-to-market’ story that has successfully given authority to the Champagne region over every other wine producing area. It was actually the infamous English sweet-tooth and the Londoner’s predilection for bubbles that first gave the wine-makers of Champagne inspiration; they just needed to work out how to create the right sort of bottle, like that of their cross-Channel cousins, in order to capitalize on the new potential market.

This, however, took some time. Replacing wood with coal in the bottle-making process was not adopted in France until after 1700, to imitate and reproduce bottles à la façon d'Angleterre (‘in the English fashion’). But change was so gradual that, as late as 1784, French entrepreneurs were after the industrial ‘secret’ of English bottle-making. And still, in 1833, when Cyrus Redding published his A History and Description of Modern Wines, anywhere between four to 40 percent of the Champagne region’s wine was lost to exploding bottles every year. The bodily danger was so great, Redding wrote that “workmen [were] obliged to enter the cellars with wire masks, to guard against the fragments of glass when the breakage is frequent.”

It was not until the Industrial Revolution reached France that bottles could be produced with enough precision and standardization to withstand the pressure. By then, Champagne’s reputation was assured. For that, we have to thank both the English bottle and the world’s first energy crisis.

The guests brought swine from far and wide, and left dozens of carcasses behind.

In many of the world’s most memorable holiday traditions, communities gather around a large pile of meat—whether it’s turkey and roast ham, seven kinds of seafood, or haggis to honor the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Recently, scientists analyzed dozens of bones found at the site of a historic Iron Age roundhouse in Ulster, Northern Ireland, and found that pig was the delicacy of the day. They concluded that the porkers had come from far and wide, and had likely fed the guests of an epic provincial feast.

The new research has hinted at a use for the massive circular structure at Navan Fort, which was built on a site that has been settled since the Neolithic Age. “People have suggested it’s a feasting hall,” says Richard Madgwick, an osteoarchaeologist at Cardiff University and a lead author of a new paper that describes the team’s findings in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. “For this period, it would be an absolutely mammoth building. One of the largest that’s known.”

The 1st-century BC roundhouse measures over 130 feet across, and contained the remains of some 35 animals. Madgwick studies feasting in prehistoric Britain, where mega meals offered a means of community bonding—as well as a chance to eat as much as you could, in a gastronomic marathon.

Previously, Madgwick described how ancient Brits schlepped pork to Stonehenge from far-flung parts of the Isles. But the presence of pork at that particular site was less surprising. “Stonehenge differs from this work because Stonehenge’s pigs were raised in an era where pigs were everywhere. It would’ve been way easier,” he says. “That’s not the case for the Iron Age. Pigs are a very peripheral species at the time.”

For the Iron Age feasters of Ulster, pigs were both the meal ticket and the meal. “You had to bring a pig in order to be part of the feast,” Madgwick says. Like the animals found at Stonehenge, the Irish porkers were not raised on the site where they were eaten. Multi-isotope analysis has suggested that the creatures were brought from more rural regions to the provincial capital at Ulster, Navan Fort, as a way of paying tribute to the local seat of power.

It seems that a very different party animal also made it to the feast. Alongside the 34 pig skeletons, excavations uncovered the skull of a Barbary macaque—a monkey from northern Africa. Madgwick says this speaks to the significance of Ulster as a cultural center, one where not only locally-sourced animals were brought, but also creatures from abroad. It’s not known whether the monkey was consumed.

Whether the primate was a mere curiosity or a meal, the pigs were the main event. Madgwick isn't sure whether they were eaten in one go, or in multiple feasts over a certain period of time, but they couldn’t have lasted too long. “Pig is a fatty meat,” he says. “It goes off quite quickly, and therefore you’d want to feast on it fast, and consume it all.”

Before the paper variety, nuts, hops, and dates rained down—and put out the occasional eye.

In the late 1820s, William Gunter, an English candy man visiting Italy, observed a tragic accident involving sugared almonds. "They pleasantly pelt each other with these trifles,” he wrote in his Confectioner’s Oracle, describing a festive food fight at Carnival. “But an English country gentleman threw his Comfits with such savagery that he actually put out one of the eyes of his young bride!”

A freak occurrence? Not at all. “Comfit” is an old English term for the sugared pan candy the Italians called confetti. These innocent-looking, snow-white sweets had long been the ammo of choice when it came to hurling edibles at festive celebrations. In terms of velocity, they were the original fast food.

The bits of colored paper that now rain down at sports championships and on New Year’s Eve share the name “confetti,” but it’s been denatured into something floaty and harmless. Why? Because society got fed up with the candied version: the mess, the bruises, the tears, the eye patches.

Humans have always thrilled to a bounty from on high. These were the original windfalls: nuts shaken loose by the wind, gravity-borne apples, olives littering the shade of the tree. The notion that providence bestowed these blessings was epitomized in the gift of manna in the Old Testament: Then said the Lord unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day (Exodus 16:4).

What began as a natural showering of readily collected food was replicated in community ritual, especially marriage ceremonies. A cascade of foodstuffs was a hint to the newly betrothed: be fruitful and multiply. With their gratifying ballistics and lasting shelf life, nuts were universally popular. Other items, as detailed in 1926 in Edward Westermarck’s A Short History of Marriage, included hops in Slavic countries; shortbread in Northern England; and raisins, figs, and dates in Morocco.

The happy couple was blessed, and so were the pourers, tossers, and hurlers of foodstuff. Before grooms could move on to fertility duties, they had an obligation, as Virgil notes: “Scatter, bridegroom, the nuts.” Young boys loitered outside wedding venues, hoping to score free food in the scramble. This was a form of social insurance: make a show of sharing the wealth, and you keep the masses happy.

It was also a small-scale re-enactment of a grander public ritual, taken to extremes by the Roman Emperor Nero. This was the sparsio, defined as “throwing things among the multitude to be scrambled for in scenes of wild disorder.” In his biography of the emperor, the historian Suetonius recounts gladiatorial games where “many thousand articles of all descriptions were thrown amongst the people to scramble for; such as fowls of different kinds, beasts of burden, wild beasts that had been tamed.” Suetonius, who was a constant critic of Nero, may have exaggerated, but this big-league largesse kept the populace happy and distracted from the leadership’s shortcomings.

What do scrambles have to do with confetti, either the nutty or the paper variety? All incarnate blessings rained from on high. They could be Imperial-grade decadent, as in ancient Rome, or humanitarian. Gail Halvorsen, an American pilot during the Berlin airlift, received Germany’s highest medal of merit in 1974 for attaching parachutes to candy and dropping it on war-wracked children below.

The candy confetti that William Gunter witnessed in 19th-century Italy can be traced back to when sugar became widely available in Europe in the 1400s. Confectioners began glazing dried fruit, nuts, spices, and seeds.

In Italy, sugared almonds were a particularly prized form of confetti. Their Greek cousin, koufeta, still appears at traditional fetes. The French dragée is a posh, beautifully packaged version. Quite wonderfully, these can be shot sky high thanks to artillery shells made by the munitions department at Braquier, France’s foremost sugared-almond manufactory.

It was at Carnival in 19th-century Italy, during the grand parade of carriages, that lobbing sweetmeats truly went postal. Foreign visitors were agog—Charles Dickens regaled audiences with fevered dispatches from the Corso. A delighted Goethe wrote that “everyone has leave to be as mad and foolish as he likes, and almost everything, except fisticuffs and stabbing, is permissible.”

Sugared-almond confetti were the munition of choice, especially when making love, not war. Tossed ever-so-lightly at an attractive, would-be belle or beaux, they meant “you’re looking fine and I want to get to know you better.”

Alongside the candied nuts came an innovation: ersatz confetti that looked like sugared almonds but was made of plaster of Paris. Protective wire masks became essential Carnival gear. The impact was fierce, all the more so the components, including quicklime. George Stillman Hillard, in his 1854 book Six Months in Rome, reported that “the first sensation is as if the points of a thousand needles had been suddenly shot into the skin; and then a cloud of darkness settles down upon the eyes, which gradually passes off in a rain of tears.”

Paper confetti wafted to the rescue in the 1890s. The advantages of paper were clear: It was a less bruising, more colourful, and less sticky toss, and easier to sweep away. And it put an end to incidents such as the one reported in 1835 in London’s The Penny Magazine: of “little boys and ragamuffins” who dashed to collect confetti, “down on their knees, even crawling among the wheels of the carriages and the horses’ legs to pick up the plums, which they think it is a sin and a shame to waste.”

Strips of paper also had the benefit of hang time. Tissue and foil confetti doesn’t hail, it floats, suspending the effect a few seconds longer. In March 1894, The New York Times rhapsodized, “The confetti made a velvet soft to the feet, picturesque to the eye, and novel even to the most advanced taste.”

Which brings us to confetti’s enduring appeal—no matter what the raw material. It’s about creating a spectacle and a flurry of excitement with one’s own hand.

Whether it’s celebrating a friend’s wedding, capturing beautiful effect on camera, making little kids whoop, or ringing in the New Year, confetti is a sensation for the eyes, and, when of the old-school variety, taste and touch too.

Just ink and colored pencil, it took Anton Thomas almost five years.

North America has nearly 10 million square miles of prairies, mountain ranges, forests, taigas, and deserts, rimmed by nearly 40,000 miles of convoluted coastline. It’s huge and lively, with more detail than most can imagine, much less commit to paper. But for four years and nine months—averaging more than 5,000 square miles per day—Melbourne-based Anton Thomas drew North America by hand, using a pen and about 24 colored pencils. His final product, completed in February 2019 and spanning 20 square feet, has completely reshaped Thomas’s life.

For Thomas, now—for the first time in his life—a freelance cartographer, who tours the world exhibiting the North America map, geography is a bit of a homecoming. He had begun drawing maps for fun as a child, and then took a decade-plus hiatus from it. He began sketching again while living in Montreal in 2012—on his refrigerator. The result was a detailed predecessor to his new map, which is pictorial, illustrated with all sorts of landmarks, fauna, and flights of fancy.

From the Arctic reaches of Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island (featuring a musk ox) to the tropical forests of Mexico’s Yucatán (with a toucan), the map is a stunning reminder of what can be accomplished with a little bit of skill, a lot of imagination, and even more hard work.

Atlas Obscura spoke with Thomas about the latest work, prints of which will be on sale in January 2020.

Let’s start with the fridge. Why did you start drawing a map on your fridge?

I was working as a cook in the old port of Montreal. And in classic Montreal fashion, we had littered the apartment with things we found on the side of the road. And one was this big fridge. It had all these rusty, brown stains on it. My housemate Douglas, from Zimbabwe, had been urging me to draw him something as a memento, since he knew I was going to go back to New Zealand. He had painted the fridge with white house paint to cover up the stains and I thought, “What about the fridge?”

The fridge was in use, so it was full of food and the door would need to be opened. I’d be sitting there, drawing on the fridge—though most of it was really on the freezer, not the fridge. And the sink was next to the fridge, so water would splash on it and I’d have to paint over the streaks and redraw. That wasn’t exactly easy. At all.

I started with British Columbia, and when I got to Vancouver, I thought, “Wow, it would be pretty cool to draw the Vancouver skyline,” not really thinking about the precedent you set by drawing one skyline. And then I got to Seattle, and Portland, and San Francisco, and onward and onward.

How does mapmaking shape your worldview?

There are two aspects to everything I’m doing. It’s half technical execution and half research. It’s not an exact split, it’s intertwined. The reason the map works is because the world is so interesting. I’m just trying to take the real content I find in the world and make it look nice.

Through an Australasia map I drew between the North America maps, especially with Australia and New Zealand, I was having to think about my reality and my own experience in life and where I’m from. Going to North America after drawing my own part of the world, it was less abstract. You need to draw places with respect and patience. You have to always remember that it’s the real world that you're representing, and that means real people, and places that are a part of who we are.

The map has so much detail, but how did you decide what to include and what to leave off?

Everything south of populated Canada, my metric was at least 100,000 people in a metropolitan statistical area. Everything above that is a whole different game, because you don’t have that many people. The Canadian Arctic, Greenland, and Alaska. The metrics are good for me because they break up certain hubs if there’s enough geographic space between them. The difference is like how Manhattan dominates Jersey City or Yonkers.

I am self-taught. I haven’t had cartography or art training. It’s been a process of just figuring it out as you go, and taking real stock of people’s feedback. That feedback informs your vision, your geographic vision. If a local tells you what you got right or wrong about their state, it tells you a lot more about what you got right or wrong than what you get from Google Street View.

Have you gotten any negative feedback?

One of the first times I published my map online was the subreddit r/MapPorn. It was a really terrible picture, actually, but it was part of the South and it had Texas in it, and Louisiana and Arksansas. I drew Dallas, but not Dallas–Fort Worth. The metroplex is a twin-city dynamic. The response to that was savage. I remember distinctly being called a fool. And I was like, “Okay, this isn’t your average trolling.”

But you’re just awash in information, so you have to create rules around the map. It’s important to have those guidelines, but you have to have some give in it as well. In the years since I drew the map, I go over it all the time. But at the time—I was in Melbourne drawing this—I was just looking at a list of cities. And it was Dallas: check.

There are so many illustrations beyond geographical places. How did you decide what to put where?

I think the animals help people engage with the map. They’re residents of the land. A longhorn is really going to help you in Texas. A grizzly bear is great in western Montana. But sometimes I’ll just have a bit of space, and put some wildlife there, so I have a skunk in Kansas, which doesn’t really endear me to people in that state. They take it alright, but in the United States, you have to be a little careful.

And when I put this raccoon in Arkansas—slightly more popular than a skunk—I got this email from a guy who said, “I was sold the moment I saw that raccoon in Gillett, Arkansas, to commemorate our annual raccoon festival.” But I was like, “What the hell are you talking about?”

But it’s not just the animals or the cities. Content all across the map says things about agriculture, culture, history. I try and be apolitical as possible in the things I represent, but it’s a little hard. Because you’re trying to tell the story of place, and places are complicated. They show up in statues, and landmarks, and the state flags.

I think it helps that I'm a Kiwi, I'm not American, but I have a love for the continent broadly.

What impact did the map have on your life?

From when I made the fridge map in 2012 through the first year of the big one, I was lost. I was truly on the road, Kerouac-style. I was cooking, I had ambition and aspiration, but I wasn’t in a good place in my life.

The ray of sunshine through all of it was these pictorial maps. When I started the North America map I was directionless, and I needed a map.

You must know a lot about North America now. Where do you most want to visit?

Out of the whole continent, southern Utah. It’s a popular place to go, but I haven’t made it yet. It looks absolutely, out-of-this-world beautiful. There’s Grand Staircase, Arches, Bryce Canyon. When I was drawing it I was like, “Get out of here. This is so damn beautiful.” Coming from the South Island of New Zealand, we have some pretty great scenery. But southern Utah looks supernatural.

Also Baffin Island in Greenland. So few people have been to that part of the world. And Cuba. I want to go to Cuba so badly. I was listening to Cuban music as I drew Cuba. It’s just like when I was drawing the Arctic, I was listening to Inuit throat singing. And I put my air conditioning as cold as I could in my house, just trying to imagine dark winters and snow under my feet. Does this actually impact what I’m doing? Maybe. But now I’m expanding my music taste, and if you’re more engaged with the task at hand, there’ll be no rushing.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Imagine a calendar that is the same every year—sort of.

Calendars are fundamentally weird—after all, none of the many divisions of time we use can be accurately and consistently pegged to the movements of the Earth, Moon, planets, and stars. A day is pretty close to the actual time it takes the Earth to make one full rotation, but that varies based on where the planet is in its orbit, a few seconds either way. The week has absolutely no connection to anything; a month is a variable unit of time that we just sort of guess at. There are several different ways to measure the length of a year, and they’re all complicated by the fact that Jupiter’s gravitational presence makes that period of time waver no matter what you do.

It makes sense that there are now, and always have been, multiple ways to declare, name, and codify the date around the world—calendars, basically. In fact it’s almost bizarre that the current calendar most of the world uses is as stable as it is—it only dates back to 1582. But not everyone is content to sit back and just live with the fact that calendars are imprecise, ad-hoc, and often annoying. Some people are trying to change them.

Of the several calendars that are currently in use today, by far the most important is the Gregorian calendar, the one that was introduced in 1582. It’s a solar calendar, meaning that the length of a year is the time from one vernal equinox—the first day of spring—to the next. That length is 365.2425 days, and that nonsense after the decimal point is why we have leap years (as well as the irregularly spaced leap seconds). Even leap years are also more complicated than they appear; we get one February 29 every four years, except for the years that are divisible by 100 but not 400. The year 1900 had one, but the year 2000 didn’t.

Purely lunar calendars, like the Islamic calendar, divide up a year into 12 months of either 29 or 30 days, determined usually by the length of time from one new moon to the next. If you do the math, you’ll notice that this doesn’t add up to the length of a solar year, so this calendar has a leap day added to the last month once every 11 years.

Then there are combinations of those two, called, boringly, lunisolar calendars. These, such as the Hebrew calendar, change the number of months in a year, which keeps the seasons in roughly the same place but can mean that a year has 384 days. That extra month is called Adar Aleph—First Adar—and comes before Adar Bet, or Second Adar, which appears every year.

Then there is the practical phenomena of fiscal calendars, like the one the United States government uses, which begins on October 1. This is mostly so that elected officials have time to create new budgets, so they’re not operating for their first years with someone else’s notion of how to spend money. Because the government is, you know, pretty big and influential, a lot of businesses operate on this fiscal calendar as well.

There is a bunch of problems with all of these calendars. One fundamental problem is that none of these divisions—weeks, months, years—divide cleanly into each other. And that means that each year must have an entirely new calendar, because December 25 can fall on any day of the week. Quarters—another division often used in business circles—also have different lengths, because the months aren’t equal. The first quarter has either 90 or 91 days (there’s the leap year again), the second has 91, and the third and fourth both have 92.

This screws up a lot more than one might think. An accountant working on quarterly profits, for example, must remember that the quarters aren’t equivalent—not to each other, or always from year to year. “From one year to the next, you can have big swings in the reported sales and profits of a company, and it's just due to the Gregorian calendar,” says Steve Hanke, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, and also cocreator of the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, which we’ll explain in a minute. “Analysts don't always know this. There are sometimes big fluctuations in stock prices due to day counts.”

There’s no real reason this has to be the way it is, except for the perceived difficulty of changing it. There’s absolutely no reason for a solar calendar like the Gregorian to have four different month lengths—they’re arbitrary with respect to the cycles of the moon, and only one of them is cleanly divisible by a seven-day week.

Hanke is an economist—in one sense he’s a strange choice for cocreator of a new calendar, but in another, he’s the perfect guy for the job. The idea for his calendar arose from conversations between Hanke and Richard Henry (whom Hanke refers to as Dick), an astrophysicist also at Johns Hopkins. “Dick brought up this scheduling problem,” says Hanke. “Every year you have to make up a new syllabus, a new schedule, courses are all at different times.” Henry was also convinced that there are economic implications from all of this mess.

And he’s right. Just one example: Bonds have to use a period of time to pay out interest. Some base this on a month, say, from the first day to the last day. Because months are of different lengths, some bonds estimate a “month” to be 30 days. Invest in February, and you could end up with a couple of bonus days of interest. Sign up in July and you could face back-to-back months of being shortchanged a day of interest.

The economist and the astronomer created the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, a variation on the Gregorian. It’s not wildly different, really. There are still twelve months, with the same names. There are still seven days in a week. But the number of days in each month are changed; each quarter has 30 days in its first two months and 31 in its third month (for a total of 364 days). Say goodbye to January 31 and hello to February 30.

This calendar is called “permanent” because in it each date falls on the same day of the week—forever. Christmas and New Year’s Day are both on Mondays. July 4 is a Thursday. This would obviate the need for the printed calendar industry. Hanke has suggested that you could paint a calendar on your wall, because you’d never need a new one.

Well, not quite. See, no matter what you do, there aren’t an even number of days or weeks in a solar year. There has to be a leap year of some sort, and a way to account for the slightly shorter Hanke-Henry year. To accomplish both of these, their calendar adds a whole new week, which they call Xtra, between December and January, every five or six years. This is not ideal, since it still messes with the lengths of quarters and the birthdays of the people born in this phantom week, but it is at least more consistent most of the time.

Hanke-Henry is just one of several proposals for calendar reform. Some posit 10 months, others 13, or a combination of 12 and 13. One, the World Calendar, proposes a worldwide holiday on two leap days. One falls between December 30—the last day of December in that calendar—and January 1, and the other between June 30 and July 1.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that the Hanke and Henry aren’t just interested in the date. They also propose eliminating daylight saving time, time zones, and even 12-hour clocks, so that when someone in Beijing looks at their watch, it says the same thing as the one on the wrist of someone in New York. It will mean something different—a 9-to-5 job in one place might be called a 19-to-3 in another.

These aren’t just intellectual larks. At least not entirely. Hanke is serious that his calendar has the potential to make scheduling and time-counting easier and cheaper, and is completely unfazed by questions about implementation. “It would be a lot easier than changing to the metric system,” he says, and we have some pretty recent data about how that went.

Canada began its switch to the metric system in 1970, and today the country uses both kilometers per hour and feet and inches. But there’s no widespread panic at being in some kind of measurement Twilight Zone. There was and still is opposition to metrication, but generally things are mixed up and just about fine, more or less? Hanke thinks adoption of their calendar would be about that smooth.

“The only industry that would be against it are companies that produce paper calendars,” he says.

Ötzi’s 5,300-year-old hunting kit could offer clues about how life was lived in Copper Age Europe.

Ötzi is the mummy that keeps on giving. Since the 5,300-year-old “Iceman”—the world’s oldest mummy—emerged from a high-altitude tomb, in 1991, he’s had just about every part of his remains and possessions thoroughly analyzed, from his leather clothes to his bear fur cap and grass cape.

Now a new study is paying special attention to Ötzi’s hunting kit, offering new insights into how the Iceman eked out an existence in Copper Age Europe.

Unlike his ancient contemporaries, Ötzi conveniently expired in ice—in the Schnalstal glacier, which straddles the current Austro-Italian border. His frigid death beautifully preserved his body, giving modern researchers a remarkable glimpse into his life.

“In ice, destructors such as bacteria and fungi cannot” do their worst, says Albert Hafner, an archaeologist at the University of Bern and a co-author of the new paper. “It is like a deep freezer: Nothing spoils there, and the ice preserves for thousands of years.”

That includes the hunting equipment that Ötzi took to his grave. Hafner’s team has recently been studying its contents: an unfinished yew bow stave, a quiver, 14 arrows and arrow shafts (only two of which were completed, ready-to-nock arrows), and a cord—the main focus of the research.

The cord, which measures over six feet long, seems to have fit into the notches of the bow, meaning Ötzi likely intended to use it as a bow string.

Most Neolithic bows were made to be quite large, though it’s not certain how big Ötzi’s might have been. “The length of the bow usually depends on the height of a person,” says Hafner. But because “the bow of Ötzi was not finished,” its size is unclear.

In their recent work, published in the Journal of Neolithic Archaeology, the interdisciplinary Swiss researchers found that the cord—the oldest known and the best preserved—was made of entwined animal sinew. The sinew was found wrapped in a neat, though perhaps hastily packed, bundle—like a computer charger that was squeezed into a bag just before travel.

“I don’t personally think that sinew is a really good material for bowstrings,” says paper co-author Jürgen Junkmanns, an expert in ancient bow use who’s affiliated with the University of Bern. The material, he says, is highly sensitive to water, and doesn’t stretch very well. “Obviously the Stone Age hunters thought different.”

Though the finer points of fletching and archery are easy to understand today, Ötzi didn’t have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. The Iceman was found with a fatal arrow wound in his back, and likely staggered his last steps in the Alps in an effort to evade his attacker. Perhaps if he had finished his bow a little sooner, he might have survived a little longer.

Two hundred men and women fought to protect the last wild sohisika trees.

At first, the fire didn’t look like much of a threat. It was October 2014, the end of the dry season in central Madagascar, 100 miles north of the capital city of Antananarivo. The hillsides of this area are as dry and grassy as the golden hills of California, but slash-and-burn agriculture is a part of daily life. So when smoke rises on the horizon, no one thinks much of it. Locals certainly don’t expect it to threaten nearby homes, or the town’s most precious resource: sohisika trees.

The sohisika is not a valuable tree, nor is it culturally significant, but it is incredibly rare. Generations ago, it would have been found in forests all across this part of Madagascar. Today, the 230-acre park known as Ankafobe Forest is home to the world’s last wild sohisika trees. But during that 2014 fire, the species was almost wiped out—and would have been, had it not been for two hundred local people, armed with buckets of water, who fought a dramatic, two-day battle for the survival of the species.

On a dry, hazy day in early August, a young man named Ando Andriantsalohimisantatra stands on the slopes of a gully in Ankafobe, facing south. Bare, rolling hills stretch out in front of him. “The fire came from that direction,” says Ando, who is secretary of the conservation association formed to protect the forest, as well as the local lemur monitor. Ando is arrestingly tall and lean, with a relaxed gait and slow grin, and he strides smoothly over the grassy slope. He is with his friend Tahiry Rivoharison, a self-taught botanist and forester.

It is not hard to imagine the fire: Several other blazes are visible on the horizon today. Fire here is a way of life. For generations, farmers have burned forests to harvest charcoal, and to grow whatever they can on the land left behind. When the land gives out, they move on to the next forest. It’s destructive and short-sighted, but in the absence of fertilizer, it’s how many farmers survive.

Today, what was once mostly forest is grassland as far as the eye can see. The Ankafobe Forest rises out of the plain landscape like something out of The Lorax, the book by Dr. Seuss about the disappearance of the fictional Truffula tree. Ankafobe is only a third the size of Central Park, but inside, the forest is lush and green, with three species of lemur, including the endangered fat-tailed dwarf lemur. And, of course, the sohisika tree.

“It’s like a fossil landscape,” says Chris Birkenshaw, a botanist with the Missouri Botanical Garden who led the project that rediscovered the tree in 2004. “The forest is as a vestige of a landscape that was certainly more extensive in that area before.” He estimates that there are about 160 mature trees left.

In 2004, a biologist named Mamisoa Andrianjafy, who was working with Birkenshaw, stumbled across the sohisika, which is pronounced “swiskah.” It’s a stately, white tree with long branches, and it lives on slopes along forest edges. As forests recede, a sohisika can endure, often becoming the only tree on a hillside, like a stubborn child who won’t follow the class.

Unlike other plants in the forest, the sohisika isn’t useful for medicine, or building, or much of anything. In fact, when it was discovered, locals barely recognized it. But it was among the rarest trees in the world, so the Missouri Botanical Garden offered to pay to preserve it. A cadre of locals jumped at the chance at jobs, and perhaps the potential to attract a few curious tourists. For a decade, they worked building nurseries, planting trees, and scouring the region for other plants. Then the fire came.

It came from the south, but at first no one paid much attention. By late morning, forest monitors were getting alarmed. The fire was moving toward the trees, and fast. Men from the four surrounding villages converged to battle the fire, which approached quickly along a ridgeline to the west. They fought the blaze along a firebreak, tamping out the embers that jumped over.

For a moment, Ando and Tahiry recall, it looked like the fire would miss the forested valley altogether. But powerful fires can play havoc with wind, causing hot air to pivot and twist. According to the people who were there that day, a tornado-like whirlwind sprang up and threw embers high into the air, over the break and toward the head of the valley. The fire had entered the sohisika forest.

“When the fire was outside the reserve, only men fought the fire,” says Jean-Jacques Rosolofonirina, president of the conservation association Vondron’ Olona Ifotony Sohisika. “But once it was inside, we called everybody.” About 200 men and women formed lines up and down the hillsides, passing buckets from hand to hand, fighting the fire. Below them, what was a six-foot fire had become a 30-foot blaze. “You had to be careful not to look straight at it,” says Ando. “It would burn the beard off your face.”

Even for seasoned firefighters with trucks, planes, and firebreaks, it can be hard to fight back a crown fire like this. For a handful of villagers with buckets and handheld rubber slats, called flappers, it was nearly hopeless. The fire worked its way through the forest, ravaging everything in its path. The animals, already trapped by deforestation, had nowhere to run. “We heard the voices of the lemurs screaming,” Ando says. “Later I found their skeletons.”

For two days and two nights, the villagers fought the fire. In many ways, it was a defining moment for the community. Four villages surround Ankafobe Forest: Firarazana, Andranofeno, Ampitambe, and Andranorovitra. Each has its own character and history, but Andranofeno occupies an especially thorny place in local politics—many of its inhabitants are former city slickers who were given land in an effort to curb overcrowding. Most of the conservationists come from there, and their presence wasn’t always welcome, according to Birkinshaw. Yet here they all were, united in an effort to save a tree that was barely known just 20 years earlier. “Two hundred worked day and night, passing water pails down a line,” says Tahiry.

Tahiry and Ando lead the way along a hillside, above the site of the final confrontation with the blaze. Tahiry is Rocky to Ando’s Bullwinkle: He’s short and strong, with sharp movements and a quick smile. Highly motivated and passionate about plants, he has traversed the entire landscape on his bicycle, searching for novel plants and collecting seeds. Both are in their late 20s and came to conservation as students who grew up learning about sohisika trees in school.

Ando says that at one point, he thought they would never beat the fire—that it would consume all the sohisika trees, and their livelihoods with it. “The two nursery men cried a lot. Because they had a nursery with 50,000 plants that died,” Tahiry says solemnly. Rural Malagasy men are expected to be stoic, and he looks a little uncomfortable talking about his colleagues weeping.

The forest of Ankafobe straddles a small drainage ravine, and the fire was tearing down the slopes toward the stream. On the second night, the firefighters made their last stand along the water. The dense trees and moisture stalled the blaze, and finally it slowed. It had consumed 80 percent of the sohisika in one forest, but it hadn’t jumped to a second grove. The trees would survive on the brink of extinction. “We knew that we had won when we were close to the river,” says Ando. “I didn’t believe we could stop the fire. I was astonished and happy.”

No one cheered. There was no celebration. “I didn’t feel tired, I just felt happy because the fire was stopped,” Tahiry says. “But then when I got home, I just collapsed into bed.”

When Birkenshaw arrived with other scientists a few days later, the devastation was shocking. “It did look awful. It was stunningly bad,” he says. It wasn’t just the damage—it was also the possibility of erosion where trees no longer held the soil in place. Plus, the fire would attract people looking for charcoal, a major source of fuel in Madagascar. The chances of maintaining this fossil ecosystem seemed small. Birkenshaw considered the possibility that the sohisika tree might not be savable. He remembers telling locals, “If you’ve had enough, now is the time to stop. It’s okay.” But they wouldn’t have it.

“They were really shocked that I would even suggest that,” Birkenshaw says. “They were quite insistent. There was no question of stopping.”

Since 2014, the community has rebuilt the nurseries, which are brimming with native plants, including sohisika. They have beefed up the fire breaks and sunk barrels of water at regular intervals along the edges of the forest. Inside the park office, they have stockpiled flappers and spray cans. They are also experimenting with green fire breaks—bands of fire-resistant plants—outside the park. Occasionally tourists even show up to see the sohiskas and plant a few native trees. Ando says the lemurs are doing well, and even leaving the tiny forest to mate occasionally. Tahiry still hops on his bike and crisscrosses the region looking for new plants.

Birkenshaw says that the community’s response to the fire was inspiring to him, as someone who studies endangered plants that rarely get the attention of their animal counterparts. “I was really quite surprised,” he says. All this time, he goes on, “I thought that it had been us motivating them.” Ankafobe’s conservation spirit grew out of the community. It started as a spark of curiosity and has grown into a towering blaze far larger than the ones that threaten the forest.

Conservation has given locals something even more precious than a few critically endangered plants. “We are considered like heroes,” says Rosolofonirina. “Before, nobody knew about this place. But after the sohisika tree was discovered, we had pride.”

This project was supported by a storytelling grant from the National Geographic Society.

Sikhs statewide have organized to feed their fellow Californians in crisis.

On a clear fall morning earlier last year, Kashmir Shahi received an urgent call from the Salvation Army. The organization wanted to know if he would be able to provide food for over 700 people at a Santa Rosa shelter who had been displaced due to the Kincade Fire burning through California’s Sonoma County.

“They called me at 11 a.m.,” Shahi remembers. “They needed the food at 4 p.m. I live in Union City, and Santa Rosa is an hour and a half drive from there. They asked if it was possible and I said, ‘We will make it happen.’”

Shahi is a member of the Gurdwara Sahib of Fremont, a Sikh temple in Northern California. He immediately put out word to his congregation, and other members assembled to prepare food in the gurdwara’s kitchen. That afternoon they drove rice, beans, bananas, cake, chips, and oranges up to hundreds of hungry evacuees.

It was hardly the first time Shahi and the broader Sikh community have mobilized to help victims of California’s natural disasters. “I’ve been doing this since 2009,” Shahi says. “I know what it takes to do that much food.”

Sikhism, which dates to the 15th century, is a monotheistic faith guided by the teachings of 10 spiritual leaders, or gurus. Gurdwara literally means “home of the guru,” and the temples are regularly opened to those in need. As wildfires and other disasters have ravaged Northern California in recent years, gurdwaras have mobilized to provide aid.

During the Kincade Fire this past fall, gurdwaras in Fremont, San Jose, and Santa Rosa prepared and served over 1,300 meals to affected residents. In 2017, when the potential failure of the Oroville Dam’s main spillway caused the evacuation of nearly 200,000 residents in the Sacramento area, gurdwaras put out calls for volunteers and opened their doors to those displaced. Later that year, San Jose’s gurdwara—the largest in the nation—partnered with the city’s police officers to send supplies to communities affected by the North Bay fires, which destroyed more than 6,000 homes. The 18-wheeler they dispatched was filled with diapers, food, and water.

Sikh communities are uniquely equipped to provide sustenance for huge groups. Nearly all gurdwaras have fully stocked kitchens due to a core tenet of Sikh practice: langar. Langar is a free, vegetarian meal provided to anyone who comes to a gurdwara. The food itself is made and served by volunteers from the congregation. Traditionally, it is eaten while sitting on the ground, a symbolic gesture indicating that all who partake of the food are equals.

Karanbir Singh, who helped organize the Sikh Center of San Francisco Bay Area’s outreach during fires in Santa Rosa two years ago, says that the community’s response is a natural outgrowing of its scripture. “We follow the teachings of Guru Nanak [the founder of Sikhism], and one of them is to share with other people and to help them,” he says. “We try to help out anybody who comes here; day or night we provide them free food or lodging.” Though the Center is not equipped to provide housing for long-term stays, he says that some people who had lost their homes in the fire stayed for two weeks.

Prior to the Tubbs Fire, in 2017, most gurdwaras had been operating individually to provide aid. That fire, which killed more than 20 people and burned through nearly 40,000 acres, was the worst the state had seen in years. Given the scale of the necessary relief efforts, volunteers realized that creating some kind of coalition would be the most effective way to help.

Members of roughly 20 gurdwaras, from Sacramento to San Jose, formed a group called Sikhs for Humanity. Now, when natural disasters strike, the group keeps in touch through WhatsApp and Facebook groups to coordinate collecting supplies or preparing food. During the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, Sikhs for Humanity collected food and blankets to send to a local shelter, while a gurdwara in Stockton organized a blood drive. During the first week of the Tubbs Fire, Shahi estimates that gurdwaras in Northern California served more than 5,000 meals to evacuees and first responders.

When the group hears about a wildfire or other potential emergency, members usually begin by reaching out to relief organizations like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army to find out what the needs are on the ground. “The idea is, number one, not to overflood with items that are not needed, and number two, to streamline a process of providing these things,” Shahi explains.

Because gurdwaras also have regular outreach actions during the year, organizers know who they can depend on. The Fremont gurdwara, for example, takes part twice a year in Feed the Hungry events in conjunction with San Francisco’s GLIDE Memorial Church. “When the disaster comes, we have to act quickly,” Shahi says. “So during these events volunteers learn how to manage things and how to build a team. And, God forbid anything happens, they already have experience.”

The Sikh community’s commitment to aid extends beyond its gurdwaras. Bhupinder Singh Kooner is a co-founder of SEVA, a relief organization based in Northern California. He and his friends started the organization around 2012 with the intention of feeding homeless veterans.

“Pretty soon, we realized you can’t tell who’s a veteran and who’s not,” he says. “So we expanded. In Sacramento we’ve been serving the homeless every Thursday for 6 years. During the Paradise Fires we did 27, 28 straight days serving lunch and dinner, sometimes a combination of both.” Because the group operates year round, when disasters strike they have large reserves—of water, hygiene products, blankets, and warm clothing—to contribute.

In addition to reaching out to larger relief organizations, Kooner says that SEVA often uses Twitter to get in touch with local facilities that might be hosting evacuees. During the Kincade Fire, he says, “we found out where people were being evacuated to and called them directly to find out how many people they had, their capacity, what [they were] in need of.”

Though SEVA is not officially categorized as a Sikh organization, nearly all of its members identify as Sikh. Seva is also the term for the Sikh philosophy of selfless service. “There would be no SEVA without Sikhism,” Kooner says. “For almost everyone in our organization who’s Sikh, that’s our driving point. It’s what our Gurus taught us: trying to do the right thing, helping your neighbor.”

Kooner references the Nishan Sahib, the Sikh flag, which flies outside many gurdwaras. He says that it stands as a symbol to all who see it that they have reached a place that will offer them food and shelter, regardless of their background. That concept, Kooner says, is one that his organization “has just taken and mobilized.”

Though Sikhism was first founded in Punjab (a region now divided between India and Pakistan), there are presently more than 50,000 Sikhs living in the U.S., nearly half of whom live in California. Sikhs have lived in the state since at least the early 1900s; the nation’s first gurdwara was founded in Stockton, California in 1912.

California’s Sikh community has particularly deep roots in the feeding of others. Many of the earliest arrivals to the state were farmers in California’s Central Valley. Nand Sing Johl, a rice farmer who was one of the state’s first Sikh landowners, is credited with introducing rice cultivation practices in the Sacramento Valley. Didar Singh Bains, who immigrated to California from Punjab in the late 1950s, is still known as the “peach king of California.”

A focus on charity is not unique to Sikhism. Most religions emphasize the value of helping one’s neighbor; churches, mosques, synagogues and temples all mobilize with donations, supplies, and volunteers in the face of natural disasters. A 2012 report from the University of Southern California emphasized the outsized role that smaller faith organizations can have, as they are able to respond quickly to immediate and localized needs on the ground. In 2017, USA Today found that many religious groups partner with state and federal agencies to provide a large proportion of the country’s disaster relief.

But even outside of disaster, many gurdwara doors are always open. “We serve food 24/7 to anyone who comes, regardless of religion or anything else,” says Channy Singh, a member of the Fremont gurdwara. “In the gurdwara, the food is always cooking, always there in large quantities, in large pots. We use the same facility to prepare those meals for disaster-prone areas.” Because volunteers cook so frequently, when the need arises they simply double or triple the quantity of whatever they are making, knowing that the rest will be sent out of the gurdwara doors.

But Singh stresses that while a gurdwara kitchen is helpful when it comes to logistics, the core Sikh belief of feeding the needy is what inspires the community to do what they do. “It is more based on the religious principle, not necessarily the physical infrastructure,” Singh says. “Obviously the kitchen comes handy, but it is the principle that is the driving force.”

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