Rising seas are claiming land, changing lives, and transforming our relationship with nature.

To cull the dead trees, Lin Spicer had to drive his tree cutter onto a treacherous stretch. Some of the pines he could almost have pushed over with his hands, there was that little holding them to the marshy flat of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Needles long fallen, bark sloughed off, these stands of trees resemble fleets of ship masts slanted along the water's edge. Spicer was riding among them on his tractor-sized machine, when he found that he was sinking down, down, down, and he thought, “I'm going in the wrong direction here.”

Spicer is a seasoned timber man, and he would not have taken his cutter out onto such a sodden stretch, except that the managers and scientists at the refuge had hired him to fell the dead trees covering these acres: a ghost forest. Now he was that close to losing the cutter, until it caught hold of a stump and he felt it rising back up.

"Wow, that was a close call," he remembered later, crammed into the backseat of a dark green pick-up truck. Spicer has a rounded nose and a long, tanned face, and he was grinning under a brown cap. Even now, he did not quite get the reasoning of the people who'd caused him to risk his cutter. It had to do with birds, as far as he understood, that would not fly through the dead snags. "It never did make a whole lot of sense to me," Spicer said. "Everywhere you look there’s standing dead trees."

All afternoon, Spicer, along with Elizabeth Hill, the chairperson of the Dorchester County forestry board, and Scott Daniels, the blue-eyed county forester, had been showing me the extent of the damage. In some stretches of the woods here, all the trees are dead—still standing, but dead, every one, as if they had been cursed. The road we started down cut through ranks of loblolly pines, healthy, tall, and straight, reinforced with oaks and sweetgums and red maples. But then, at intervals, this seemingly healthy growth gave way to wide-open areas studded with the silver trunks of dead or dying trees, some broken, jagged, in half. One step off the road would have sunken us into brine-soaked marsh, even soggier than the kind that almost ate Spicer’s cutter.

Daniels has worked in Dorchester for more than three decades, long enough for his hair to thin and soft wrinkles to cross his face, and part of his job is to help people with small plots manage their timber. In the past 15 years or so, he's been getting more and more calls from landowners asking him what could be wrong with their trees. When I first asked him about seeing a ghost forest, he immediately told me to come to Dorchester. It is low-lying land, veined with waterways, that fades straight into the Chesapeake Bay. As the level of oceans and seas and bays around the world inches upward, the rising table of salt water is having a devastating effect on the county's forests.

In Dorchester, timber has been a major industry for generations, and a stretch of land might pass from parent to child or grandchild like a family heirloom: A crop of loblolly pine harvested at the right moment might fund a college education or years of retirement. Ceding a plot to salt marsh can be an unsettling loss. From the spot where Spicer almost lost his cutter, we drove to a piece of property that his family has owned and managed for, at his best guess, 150 years. He pointed out one stand that had last been cut in the mid-1940s, about 70 years ago, and that wouldn't be harvested again for a while yet.

"It's my granddaughter's," he said. "She'll be the one that reaps the benefit. Just as I'm reaping my grandfather's."

Is it a spoiler to say that the trees aren't going to make it? Because it's clear by now where this story is going. Sea-level rise is a slow-moving calamity, and the trees here are among its early victims. Ghost forests like these are appearing up and down the eastern seaboard of North America, from Florida, through the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey, on into Canada. "The ghost forests are the best indicator of climate change on the East Coast for sure, and one of the best anywhere," says Matt Kirwan, a coastal geomorphologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "They're right up there with melting glaciers, and they're forming at faster and faster rates."

When scientists and climate activists describe the marks left by climate change—the land lost, the people displaced, the ecosystems irrevocably altered—Dorchester County is one of the places they're talking about. On maps projecting the progress of water upland, the Eastern Shore starts to erode into an expanse of blue. Critical carbon thresholds, thousand-year floods, climate refugees, doomsday: What they mean, in the language of wind, water, earth, and air, is that the salty bay will seep over this land until it's not land any more.

The imagery here can be almost too much: a sunken, weather-beaten shack, a trio of dark vultures lined up along the roof, fields of skeletal trees against dark, forbidding water. It looks like an apocalyptic fantasy, but at times, this place is still alive with people. When I visited in the fall, the county's largest city was preparing to host an Iron Man Triathlon, and in the right season the backroads are crowded with the parked cars of hunters seeking spotted sika deer, originally from Japan and imported decades ago. Properties that flood regularly still sell at respectable prices—as hunting cabins rather than full-time homes. Even as people who've lived here their whole lives plan their retreats, newcomers set up camp and hold on, however provisionally.

This place has been shaped by centuries of haphazard human intervention, and will be again as the coastline evolves. Climate change will inevitably morph this land from what it was into something else entirely, but a small group of people is looking for ways to guide this transformation. When scientists and conservationists sent Spicer to take down that stretch of ghost forest, it was because they are now considering the benefits of letting the marsh claim what used to be forest—of helping change along instead of holding it at bay.

Living on land that has always been prone to flooding, that never quite seems to hold its shape, where tides matter and people pay attention to the direction of the wind, some don't believe that man-made climate change is remaking the landscape they’ve always known. When the wind hits from a certain direction, and the tide's pushed far out, decades-old stumps dot the marsh. The water's incursion might be speeding up, they agree, but its assault on the forest has been happening for generations. On a country road I stopped to ask a man with mottled skin and close-set eyes about the dead trees beyond his house; he said that he'd lived in Dorchester all his life, and "not much has changed."

"I suppose it's been going on since the beginning of time, but I think it's accelerated in the last 20 years," Spicer said, looking out toward a stretch of ghost forest on the edge of the refuge. "I really do think it has speeded up, just exactly what you see right there. The fringe timber keeps moving inland all the time."

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is part of the expansive Delmarva Peninsula, which starts in Delaware's northern reaches and tapers to a point about 30 miles northeast of Virginia Beach. The ancient dunes that underlie the peninsula began forming millions years ago, as a supersized barrier island. Ocean currents swept the eroded grit of the Appalachian Mountains along the continent's edge, and over time, this sediment forced the ancient Susquehanna River to the west. When glaciers melted out at the end of the last Ice Age, a short 10,000 years ago, they drowned the river valley and formed the Chesapeake Bay.

Dorchester is located on the bayside of the giant spit, and all over there are remnants of its human past. The woods hide mounds of old sawdust where mills used to be, and ditches that had been dug to corral the tide. Some of the farms here have been managed since the 1600s. This is the place Harriet Tubman escaped from and returned to, again and again, as a guide for those who wanted to go north. Along the narrow county roads, some of the slouching buildings are old canneries, going back to the years before World War II, when farmers here grew water-hungry tomatoes.

In southern Dorchester, over time, the fields went fallow. The push of the salt water was insistent, and farms were given back over to forest. As the groundwater grew saltier, tree seedlings wouldn't thrive, either. Older trees, weakened by salt stress, might die early, or succumb to infestations they'd otherwise fight off, so while some ghost forests develop slowly, others appear somewhat suddenly. Daniels, the county forester, drove us down to a small, white church in the county's southern half. Behind it was a field of trees stressed by salt water, but done in by pine beetles. Their needles were flushed bright red in death.

“Hundreds of acres of this, and yet nobody called,” Daniels said. Once, he spent most of his time down in this part of the territory, but now there's little he can recommend that might help people there. "You look at aerial photographs," he said, "and you can see how the marsh encroached on these woods in the past 30 or 40 years."

As we headed to the next stretch of ghost forest, we passed by flooded yards and abandoned houses, “For Sale” signs hung by the road. The cab of the truck was quiet. "It’s hard to see some of that stuff, really," said Hill, chair of the county local forestry board. "I mean, I’d be sick if that was my land. It’s devastating."

Daniels hesitated before fording a creek that had spilled over the road. But he went ahead, and then stopped at the road's next junction. The house on the corner, a stately place with gray gables that someone had tried to turn into a bed and breakfast, stood in a small, shallow pond, fed by the overflow from roadside ditches. Before us, in every direction, the water was too deep to keep going.

Matt Kirwan's great-grandparents were married in a little white church not far from the refuge, now next to a sprawling ghost forest. His family used to farm corn, until the ground grew too salty. The cornfields then grew into tracts of trees, and they’re now a ghost forest, too.

Kirwan, the geomorphologist, studies the processes that shape coastal lands, and he has spent years trying to understand the movements of marshes. He comes to Dorchester to hunt and trap, but he is one of the only people from his line of descent, going back centuries, who did not grow up here. His dad left, for a variety of reasons, but later bought back property that had been in the family for a hundred or so years. In this part of the world people trap fat and fluffy muskrats and capture predatory, invasive snakehead fish in murky waters, but the real prize is those sika deer. "I'll be sitting in my deer stand with stars everywhere, and hear this beautiful whistle noise,” Kirwan said. Like much larger elk, the bucks bugle, and he often hears them right before daybreak. “You're listening to this buck, and another one answers."

Sitting in the deer stand on his family’s property, one season after another, Kirwan saw how the trees thinned and began to die off, the fastest-changing features of the landscape. It was less obvious from where he was sitting how the once-dry ground was giving way to wetlands—how the forest would become a watery expanse riddled with bobbing cattails and the tough triangular shoots of bayonet grass.

Coastal marshes often look different from one day to the next, depending on rain and tide, but once established they can remain surprisingly stable for thousands upon thousands of years. They form when sea level rise is slow; the supple grasses slow the rushing tide, letting sediment settle, so that when they’re flooded the marsh actually builds. Even as sea level rise accelerates, they can continue to accrete—up to a point, at least.

"Most ecosystems don’t have the ability to fight that kind of change," Kirwan said. Flood a forest, and it drowns; flood a marsh, and it grows. They were made for the unpredictable. "Most people think of wetlands as fragile ecosystems where if you mess with it just a little bit, it’s going to disappear forever. But that’s not the case."

There are limits to this tenacity and adaptability. Severe, repeated, or prolonged flooding—and the salty groundwater that comes with it—can kill the plants, loosening the marsh’s hold. Once that starts happening, marshes begin to break up and merge with the ocean. To survive, what grasses are left must migrate to higher, newly soggy ground. Whatever was in that once-higher ground—that becomes marsh. That’s how ghost forests grow. They are almost-marshes, marshes-to-be, sacrifices to a displaced ecosystem.

Waterlogged ground is no place for people to build a life. When marshes move, "It's bad for coastal communities," Kirwan said. "A big part of me feels bad when I see all the trees on my dad's property are dying." But he also understands that ceding ground to the marsh could have a purpose. Marshes, wherever they exist, are one of the most significant ecosystems in the world. They protect us from flooding. They blunt erosion and cushion the impact of storms. They nurture the base of the food chain and filter out chemicals that would otherwise flow straight into the ocean. They can be considered more important ecologically than even a healthy forest.

Kirwan is of two minds about the marsh's migration inland. As a person who has a relationship to land, he said, "I'm extremely torn." As a scientist, however, his stance is unequivocal: "I view it as a win.”

For a decade now, Kirwan has been studying marshlands, trying to understand their mechanisms, their strengths, their weaknesses. It's easy to assume that coastal wetlands would be goners when the sea rises to consume them. But they might have a chance. In 2018 Kirwan, along with a group of other scientists, wrote in Nature that "rather than being an inevitable consequence of global sea-level rise … large-scale loss of coastal wetlands might be avoidable." Long-cultivated loblolly pine forests might fade away. But the marshes could last, "even prosper," the scientists wrote. These ecosystems just need the space to move inland in advance of the sea. Their future depends on how much we are willing to cede to them.

Once, marshes were protected because they attract birds, which attract hunters. Miles inland from Dorchester's coastline, the Blackwater River pools through the 30,000 acres of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1933 for the benefit of migrating ducks and geese. It contains a full third of Maryland's tidal wetlands. At high tide, in the refuge's heart, water laps over the edges of the road and can cover it completely. Berms just a few inches above the surrounding land pass as high ground, but every view is still an expanse holding the deep blue of the water, the light blue of the sky, the green line of grass and tree where they meet.

In this place, creatures such as salt marsh sparrows and clapper rails, diamondback terrapins, seaside dragonlets, and salt marsh skipper butterflies have found a way to make life work. "It's just a beautiful place," said Matt Whitbeck, the refuge's supervisory wildlife biologist, standing on a wooden platform overlooking the river. "It's not water, it's not land, it's an in-between place." Whitbeck came to the mid-Atlantic after years at the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge on Galveston Bay, Texas, an estuarine setting of bayous and marshlands. His heart’s long been in the tide.

"You come here, and it’s beautiful," he said, "but understanding what happened, it’s kind of devastating, you know? This was all tidal marsh. This is an example of marsh converting into open water."

All around the platform, small circles of blue hid in the grass—pockets of open water breaking up the marsh. This is the marsh's equivalent of a ghost forest: patches of drowned marsh, where the plants have died and their roots lost their grip on the sediment—and then open water has taken over. As the patches grow, wind kicks up waves, which exacerbates the erosion and opens them further. Marsh becomes bay just as, at the edge of the view, forest becomes marsh.

As the refuge's wildlife biologist, Whitbeck's job is to help maintain its habitats, best he can, for the fish and birds and plants and other wildlife within its bounds. For many years, conservation of this sort has meant projects such as attempting to eradicate the invasive phragmites grass that's now ubiquitous here. The goal has been to resurrect nature’s past. In Dorchester that would require going back almost as far as the history of lasting European settlement in the mid-Atlantic, to the 1630s, when hardwoods dominated the Eastern Shore. People in Dorchester are used to thinking on the long timescales of timber plots and multigenerational drama, but three generations from now, this place will be transformed. To protect habitat for all the creatures that need the refuge's marshes, Whitbeck cannot hope to restore any one spot to what it once was. "We have to think about not so much where the marshes are now, but where they are going, and how to accommodate that change," he said.

It's hard to understate how big a shift this represents in how public land managers do their work. It means that some human choices and their effects can’t be undone. It means letting go of the ideal of restoration, and detaching the goals of conservation from a particular geographical point.

At Blackwater, it means accepting that the marsh is migrating and taking actions to ease its path, even if that requires sacrificing forestland. As part of a planning exercise a few years back, a team of scientists predicted what the marsh's spread would look like by through 2050 and 2100, just beyond the average life expectancy for an American born today. This map now guides decisions large and small. As Dorchester's aging farmers and foresters look to cash out, they often try to sell their property to the refuge. The land managers then consult the map, and only recommend the refuge buy land that fits into the larger plan guiding the marsh's migration upland. They’re essentially investing in marsh futures.

Within the marsh, a coalition of scientists and environmental groups, including the Conservation Fund, Nature Conservancy, and Audubon Society, are conducting small experiments to see what more they can do to ease the marsh's path. The job that Lin Spicer did, clearing away those dead trees from a damp stretch of land, was part of that work. Most salt marsh birds will not nest near a stand of dead trees, where predators might lurk. Living there would be akin to settling in a city of burnt-out skyscrapers, occupied by dangerous gangs. Cutting the trees down, the thinking goes, could expand the habitat for marsh birds. Simultaneously it allows the scientists to investigate the impact that removing the dead trees will have on the height of the marsh. Trees or no trees—which is better for keeping the open water at bay?

David Curson, of Audubon Maryland-DC, compares the role they're playing to that of master gardeners. "We appreciate natural processes but we need to intervene," he says. "Landscapes are changing faster, and it’s our fault. We need to get involved and play god a little bit." Whitbeck describes the shift from restoring the past to planning the future, as "revolutionary." In this way of thinking, the refuge still needs to maintain habitat for the birds and fish and plants and the other wildlife—but that habitat doesn't have to be in the same place as it was 400 years ago, 100 years ago, or even 10 years ago. It just needs to exist, somewhere.

This could work here because the refuge is giving the marsh somewhere to go. In other parts of the world, wetlands are disappearing because people have erected seawalls and dykes, which mean land and water are separated by a clear dividing line, and there’s no place for wetlands in between. On the Atlantic coast of the United States, these barriers are more haphazard, and the decisions to erect them often made by individual landowners, who don’t necessarily see the value in maintaining wetlands on their property.

The longer I spent in Dorchester County, the more the ghost forests came to seem unremarkable. I stopped seeing them everywhere, because they are indeed everywhere, and they no longer registered as small horrors. The marsh that had killed these trees is no villain in this drama. People have altered this landscape in so many ways—with the sika deer, the ugly snakeheads in roadside ditches, the reedy, weedy phragmites—that no other landscape like this has existed on Earth before. Many small human decisions made it this way, and many small human decisions will remake it all over again. Now is the in-between time for this in-between place. It's clear that change has come; only the shape it will take is still uncertain.

As a culinary historian, Lavada Nahon is working to bring the state's African American history to light.

Dark cast iron pans of various shapes and sizes surround a jambless fireplace, a Dutch-style hearth in Kinderhook, New York's Van Alen House. In the restored 18th-century kitchen, bright orange flames blaze behind Lavada Nahon, calm and collected as she slices onions. Two large pots with smoldering embers heaped on top contain beef à la mode, a popular 18th-century dish of chuck roast, stuffed with parsley, bacon, and spices, slowly braised with port wine. Another pot holds chowder fish, an English entrée of layered cod and bread, married with a mixture of butter, onions, and spices. Directly over the fire, a smaller pot contains boiling water, destined for blanching green beans.

Preparing for the upcoming dinner requires rotating and lifting multiple pans—heavy and scorchingly hot from the hearth— to ensure even cooking. While this scene looks straightforward, the mental and physical work involved is anything but. According to Nahon, a culinary historian, interpreter, and scholar who studies the early foodways of the Mid-Atlantic region and the enslaved cooks who fed the upper classes, working in historical kitchens was brutal and dangerous labor, where the risk of severe injury or death was a constant reality. “The food had to be perfect every time, as they were cooking for some of the wealthiest families in the world,” Nahon says. “As a cook, you had two masters. One was the fire, a living breathing thing, and one was your other master.”

In her new role as interpreter of African American history for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, she’s bringing her hands-on historical cooking experience to the table. But her two passions, history and food, came together 20 years ago.

Nahon was a voracious reader as a child, spending her time at the library studying cookbooks. Her love of history wasn’t far behind. At 24, armed with a master’s degree in technical theatre, she moved to Brooklyn and volunteered at the Brooklyn Museum. The museum’s preserved rooms from 17th- and 18th-century homes piqued her curiosity about the lives of their former inhabitants. “In technical theatre, you’re studying decorating and different time periods, culture, and art settings,” Nahon says. “It just clicked. I wanted to know who these people were and where they were from.”

In the following years, Nahon edited a food and wine column and worked with restaurant critics. However, her love for history always hummed in the background. 20 years ago, a tour to the Van Cortlandt Manor, built by the prominent Van Cortlandt family in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, finally brought the two worlds together. Nahon fell in love with the home’s wide hearth, which, before the advent of the stove, was where all the household cooking would have taken place. “I cooked over fire in my house growing up, and was a Girl Scout, so that kind of cooking was not foreign to me,” Nahon explains. “I wanted to learn how to cook a roast, which is one of the most difficult things about historic cooking. I wrote to the site director and said ‘I’ll volunteer for a year for private time on the hearth,’ and she agreed.”

As a volunteer, she learned that the Van Cortlandt family’s history was inextricably linked to Black history. While the Van Cortlandts are known as one of the founding families of New York, they also owned enslaved Africans. “It doesn’t take long to realize that all of these wealthy families owned slaves, and their cooks were enslaved as well,” Nahon says. “I wanted to know who these slaves were, and what were they doing.” Over the last two decades, finding the answer to this question has led to Nahon cooking and lecturing at Dey Mansion, Philipsburg Manor, the Austerlitz Historical Society, and other historical sites and museums in the Tri-State Area, all while researching the lives of enslaved cooks.

Documents such as wills, runaway and sale ads, journals, cookbooks, and letters hold clues about the lives of enslaved people in the Mid-Atlantic region, which differed greatly from the experiences of those enslaved in the South. “We know that people didn’t grow up on collard greens or sweet potatoes because they didn’t grow here,” Nahon explains. “These cooks were making high English-style food, they're cooking Dutch food. They're cooking Jewish food and French food; they're cooking what their owners want them to cook.”

Nahon’s research and hands-on experience help paint a picture of local cooking from the 17th to the 19th century. “As a historian reproducing a meal, I need to wear two hats: the lady of the house, who sets the menu, and the enslaved cook. I need to know how food is grown and preserved. It is about understanding timing and sensory cooking because these women weren't walking around with timers on their bodies. It’s not just about the methodology of knowing the food; I'm stepping back into the full culture,” Nahon says.

Her ability to fully immerse herself stands out from the crowd of academics, who often have theoretical knowledge but lack practical experience. “When I see a recipe for a pound cake, with all these pounds of flour, sugar, and butter, and it’s baked in a big giant slab, I can look at it and say, ‘That's wrong,’” Nahon says.“There's this conflict because they are not in the historic spaces, and don't see that the oven door is only 15 inches wide.” She can also tell whether said cakes are made by hand or with a mixer with one bite, among other shortcuts. “It’s about the handwork and the ingredients and quality; it just shows up differently,” Nahon says.

While Nahon will continue to educate the public with historical cooking demonstrations and lectures as part of her new role, her work with the State Office of Parks is expanding into the 20th century. Currently, the Interpreter team is gathering information for the renaming of Williamsburg’s East River State Park after Marsha P. Johnson, a Black activist who was key in advocating for LGBTQIA rights in New York City.

Nahon is looking to bring more instrumental figures and stories, like Johnson’s, into the public sphere. “There’s a lot of under-told stories in Black history,” Lahon says. While COVID-19 has put a lot of projects on hold, the Interpreter team is working on making New York’s history accessible to the public, digitizing information and creating centralized websites that educators and the general public can easily access. “That’s where my work is now,” she says. “It’s also encouraging people to get out to New York parks and historical sites. One of the few places you can go to now is a park, and there’s a lot of history there.”

Calling into work from the Gates of Hell has never been easier.

The world outside your window—or the world you once knew—may be starting to feel distant after so much time indoors. Seeing images of cultural heritage sites getting sanitized was a jarring capstone on what has been months of rapid change, as meetings have moved online and masked faces have made walks in the park look like depressed superhero conventions.

The wondrous world can feel like it’s a world away—even if you live down the street from, say, the little-known Liberty Bell of the American West—and the familiar sight of unfamiliar faces has slowed to a crawl.

Now, Atlas Obscura is repurposing striking images of some of the not-quite-iconic (though we think they should be) places in the Atlas. Wonder can be experienced from home, as we’ve been saying for weeks. But the only thing better than discovering something new is being able to share that wonder with others. That’s why amazing places like the Gates of Hell—and more bucolic places, like an Ethiopian restaurant that seems plucked from Star Wars—are being unleashed into the Zoomisphere.

It’s perfectly professional decorum now to conduct your video calls with a white-walled background—or maybe a nice bookshelf behind you. But Atlas Obscura’s new Zoom backgrounds will keep your audience and colleagues amazed and guessing. These off-the-radar sites are remarkable enough to turn a ho-hum meeting into a visit to an undersea museum, or an immersion in the aging, gargantuan relics of the Soviet Age.

Below are a few options for Atlas Obscura–approved Zoom backgrounds, with the resolutions and frames you need to make a suitable virtual venue for your next video call.

Socotra Island is a place as alien as any on Earth. A spit of land off the coasts of Somalia to the west and Yemen to the north, Socotra is rocky and noteworthy for its bizarre trees, which range from flying saucer–shaped foliage to plants with stubby branches and trunks as thick as an elephant’s legs.

The familiar teardrop shape of a hot-air balloon doesn’t hold a candle to Irvine’s helium balloon—literally. Unlike its heat-fueled cousins, the 12-story Orange Balloon of Irvine is lighter than air. When it’s not strapped to the Earth, the ship floats hundreds of feet above California, offering 40-mile views in each direction at its zenith.

Jaipur’s Palace of Winds might have been named the Palace of Windows; it has 953 of them, after all. If it weren’t so massive, the building and its extravagantly detailed sandstone façade—the same stone that gives Jaipur its nickname, “The Pink City”—could easily be mistaken for a dollhouse.

Several miles from Chernobyl’s familiarly empty cityscape lies a gargantuan radio antenna—an eerie reminder of the scale of Soviet engineering. The Duga radar was nicknamed the “woodpecker” for the chirping click it would broadcast, with signals powerful enough to be heard well beyond the Iron Curtain. The radar’s existence wasn’t confirmed outside of the Soviet Union until glasnost, when the rest of the world finally learned what was causing those woodpecker chirps.

Over a century ago, train tracks were laid on New Jersey’s Sunset Beach. Thought to have been used in glass manufacturing, and perhaps built during the First World War, the tracks were lost in the swirl of time, eaten up by the sand dunes of the beach. They emerged in 2015, after a large storm washed out much of the sand. Now the tracks lie in wait, occasionally revealed by the same natural forces that hid them away.

On the outskirts of London is an eclectic neon assemblage for your perusal, equal parts Miami Beach and Vegas Strip. The warehouse maze looks like Times Square set up a pop-up in jolly old England. Supervised by an English neon artist, God’s Own Junkyard is just as it sounds—a getaway from the gray world outside, and a reminder that all things, even old things, can glow in a new light if given the chance.

Deep in an Icelandic cave, a natural pool is heated by the volcanic activity beneath the island nation. Bathing in the pools is subject to how frenzied that activity is: When the volcanoes are busy, the pool gets dangerously hot. The Grjótagjá cave pool is always a remarkable place to visit, though, and immerse oneself in the language of geothermics (hot stuff, in plain English).

There’s a book waiting to be written about the Witley Wonder Underwater Ballroom. Just as its name implies, this smoking room was built beneath a glass dome in an artificial English lake, on the extremely large and lavish estate of Whitaker Wright, a financier who committed fraud to cover up shady business dealings. In a final flourish, Wright took a fatal cyanide pill when he was sentenced for his crime. Half a century later, his mansion was destroyed in a fire. Now, the submarine smoking room is all that remains of Wright’s contrived paradise.

The columns supporting the U.S. Capitol building today aren’t original; they’re Eisenhower-era replacements. The old columns, which stood over presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln during their inaugural addresses, weren’t destroyed but sequestered in the National Arboretum. Like streetlights without a street to brighten, the Corinthian columns serve as a reminder that the past is never far off—in this case, just a 15-minute drive from the Capitol they once guarded.

Off the coast of Kent, England, the Maunsell Army Forts——rusted two-story towers on stilts, some connected by bridges—look like the AT-ATs of Star Wars. Built in the darkest days of World War II, the forts were part of the Thames Estuary anti-aircraft defense network—a safeguard in case the Germans tried anything by air. Now inaccessible (and rickety), the structures can be visited on a boat, or admired from the land eight miles away.

A celebration of freedom, published next to advertisements for the slave trade.

On September 10, 1814, so its staff could help defend against the British Army, the Baltimore Patriot and Evening Advertiser temporarily ceased publication. Ten days later the newspaper returned with a blockbuster column on its second page. Its text would go on to become iconic—anthemic, even.

Printed under their original title, “The Defence of Fort M’Henry,” the four verses allowed the newspaper to report on the events of the titular battle with some literary flourish. “In our first renewal of publication,” the editors wrote, “we rejoice in an opportunity to enliven the sketch of an exploit so illustrious, with strains ... which so fully celebrate it.” The paper also predicted that the words were “destined long to outlast the occasion,” but it’s doubtful the editors understood just how long. In June 2020, more than 200 years later, this first newspaper printing of what became “The Star-Spangled Banner” will be auctioned by Christie's, for an expected minimum of $300,000.

Accompanying the lyrics is a reported account of the song’s conception. The writer, Francis Scott Key, had been captured by the British when they arrived in Baltimore Harbor on September 7, 1814, after taking Washington, D.C. (Quick chronology check: This was the War of 1812, which lasted until 1815.) From that captive position, Key watched the bombardment of the fort “with an anxiety that can be better felt than described,” the newspaper put it. The British had momentum, and their “Admiral had boasted that he would carry [Fort McHenry] in a few hours, and that [Baltimore] must fall.”

To Key’s shock, however, “his eye was again greeted by the proudly-waving flag of his country” after the long night of fighting between September 13 and 14. He returned to Baltimore with the American victors, and wrote the song on September 16 from his room in an inn. Just as he did in 1798, when he wrote “The Warrior Returns” (which first used the term “star-spangled”), Key set the new verses to the tune of the English drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.”

It’s hard to know exactly why. Ellen Dunlap and Lauren Hewes, of the American Antiquarian Society (the lot's consigner), say it may be because the song was well-known, so large gatherings would've been able to sing along with the new words. But as Peter Klarnet, a senior specialist at Christie’s, points out, it’s “not an easy song to sing,” with “octaves all over the place.” In that regard, it’s somewhat surprising that it eventually became the national anthem, though its association with the flag and invocation during flag rituals ultimately helped its case. Of course, the title was also changed to refer to the flag: Klarnet says “The Star-Spangled Banner” first appeared as its title in printings at a Baltimore music store in November 1814.

The song wouldn’t officially become America’s national anthem until 1931, and it’s typically only the first verse that ever gets sung. Though that first verse has itself become a site of protest over the decades, it’s the overlooked third verse—even if you interpret it generously—that most complicates the national mythology the anthem conjures. “No refuge could save the hireling and slave,” wrote Key, “From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave … ”

It’s possible that this line refers to enslaved African-Americans who joined the British forces in hopes of securing their freedom; more than 4,000 are believed to have done so. In this reading, Key is mocking those who escaped and joined forces with the losing side, and sort of celebrating their demise. Though some contend that the line does not intentionally reference those escaped slaves, it’s a reminder of the contemporary reality, one also documented in the issue of the Baltimore Patriot.

The paper’s front page, preceding the song, is populated by advertisements—at least five of which are notices regarding slavery: rewards for escaped slaves, sale advertisements, and announcements of the apprehension of escaped slaves. Key himself at one time owned seven slaves; he was also involved with efforts to end slavery, but not through abolition. As a founder of the American Colonization Society, Key promoted settling parts of West Africa with free and enslaved African Americans.

This sale marks the first time that a full issue of the September 20, 1814, Baltimore Patriot has gone up for auction, rather than an isolated clipping of the anthem. That larger context brings the contradiction of American history into stark focus: on page two, “the land of the free,” on page one, a refutation of that star-spangled sentiment.

George Eksts has digitized 200,000 works on paper. Several hundred had writings or drawings on the back.

Around a decade ago, George Eksts was digitizing a 19th-century photograph for the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London, when he turned it over and noticed that someone had doodled on the back. The front side showed an image of Kashmiri temple ruins, taken by the photographer Francis Frith. But on the reverse, rotated 90 degrees from the orientation of the photograph, were bizarre pencil portraits of a headless man, as well as a long-beaked creature with human legs.

“There are lots of photographs in the collection, but not many of them have anything on the reverse,” says Eksts, who is also a mixed-media artist. He was baffled, and wondered whether Frith or his children might have created the drawing. “I kind of have a fantasy that he brought his kids around to work one day, and they were sitting around getting bored and just started drawing on stuff.” Frith had five children: Mary Alice, Eustace, Francis Edgar, Mabel, and Cyril.

Eksts has now flipped over all 200,000 prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs that he has digitized since the Frith print, and has collected hundreds of verso images. (The term “verso” refers to the back of an artwork, which is normally hidden, and “recto” refers to its public-facing front.) “It wasn’t really a moment where I thought, wow, this is going to be a big project,” Eksts recalls of his first find. “It really just kind of grew organically.” In 2015, he started posting his discoveries on an Instagram account, @_muesum_, which is “museum” spelled backwards. Now he’s compiling a selection for publication by CentreCentre books in early 2021.

Just as Eksts found his first verso doodle by chance, most marginalia, or markings found in the margins, are discovered accidentally. “There’s almost no way around just going out and looking, and seeing what you find,” says Bill Sherman, director of London’s Warburg Institute and a marginalia scholar. “But there’s also the pleasure, as with graffiti spotted out of the corner of your eye in an alley: There’s something really exciting about finding a note for yourself that you didn’t expect to find.”

Among the treasures Eksts has found in the museum’s Word & Image Department are a list of household expenses on the back of a 16th-century Roman engraving, including essentials such as wine, bread, and firewood; shadowy traces left when ink seeped through paper; and even the name “Ron,” lovingly inscribed inside a cartoon heart. “The most surprising ones are when everyday life intrudes into the hermetic world of art,” Eksts says.

The backs of paper artworks are different from the backs of canvas paintings, which tend to have inscriptions left by the artist or stamps related to the art market. Paper is a portable material used for a variety of things completely unrelated to art, making it more likely that the back of a sketch or print would be used for scrap paper. Once, Eksts peeped at the back of a sketch by William Etty, a 19th-century British artist, and realized that the misshapen piece of paper was actually an inside-out envelope. The back showed the artist’s address, residue from a wax seal, and a postmark that could help date the artwork more accurately.

“A lot of people in the past didn’t have the easy access that we have to blank, available paper,” Sherman notes. Paper was more precious a few centuries ago, and marking up the empty spaces of a book or artwork ensured that these notations would be kept. “It’s an archivable blank piece of paper,” Sherman says of the blanks of these paper artworks. Eksts has noticed that older artworks in the V&A’s collection are more likely to feature deliberate verso markings.

Eksts’s project is currently visible only on Instagram, as though to nostalgically remind his online followers of a time that relied on pieces of paper. In an age when artworks are often experienced through screens, as flat thumbnails that are digitized by photographers like him, his photographs of versos remind us of their materiality.

On Instagram, Eksts doesn’t share the front side of the artworks. Instead, he leaves serial numbers in the comments section, which can be used to track down an image in the V&A catalog. “I like the idea that somebody might make the journey to the museum to find the rectos, online or in person,” Eksts explains. “I want the versos to be seen as independent artworks, outside the system of artists, movements, techniques. I sometimes think of them as the quieter friends who don’t get to say much in loud company, but are often more interesting than the others when they get a chance to speak.”

The authors of these quiet friends are usually unknown. Some may have been made by the artists, but they could also have been the work of children, or anyone who picked up the sheet and noticed its alluringly available blank space.

Artworks generally enter the V&A collection because they possess a certain pedigree: They’re made by a recognized artist, have noteworthy creative intent, and there’s history surrounding these works. But the doodles on the back are, in a way, more democratic. “That’s what I like about them, really,” Eksts says of his finds. “The appreciation of them isn’t scholarly, it’s really just visual. I feel like anybody’s opinion on it is worth as much as anybody else’s.”

An herbal a day will take the green from your gills away—and perhaps apply it to your thumb.

Just because good science is meticulous doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. At least that’s what a northern Italian illustrator decided when he went about drawing and coloring nearly 200 botanical specimens on parchment paper back in the 15th century.

Initially consisting of 70 plant paintings, as the Public Domain Review notes, the separate folios were consolidated into a single bound manuscript later that century.

The herbal is a thick folio of flora, equal parts Voynich manuscript and Monty Python cutscene. Some plants are depicted roughly, as they are in life, with accompanying notes on their medicinal uses scribed in cursive. Others have human faces. A blue woad, for instance, sports a wan, detached expression—like Gene Wilder sprouting leaves from his head. Another, a mandrake, is envisioned as a hairy woman.

Though not anatomically accurate, the manuscript’s illustrations are conventionally styled for the time. According to the University of Pennsylvania library, where the folio resides, many of them were copied from other manuscripts, and aren’t identifiable by botanists and horticulturists today.

The manuscript took decades to complete, which is why some of the plants are shown side-by-side with later illustrations of themselves—a case of conscientious artists showing a growing understanding of the plants, perhaps, rather than erasing past misconceptions.

Here, Atlas Obscura has compiled some of the more remarkable images featured in the public collection.

Show us how far-flung sights inspire you, even when you're stuck at home.

With travel plans on pause and social distancing still in effect, the world feels a little smaller right now. Luckily, between digital museum collections, documentaries, and online experiences, there are plenty of ways to explore the world, even if you can’t hop on a plane.

Photography has a long, long history with travel, and now it’s also been the creative outlet for many people under quarantine, whether they’re documenting daily life through disposable cameras, learning how to take great portraits over Zoom, or getting the kids involved. Some are flexing even more creative muscles, such as Erin Sullivan, a Los Angeles–based travel photographer who created and photographed miniature outdoor adventures using pancakes, aluminum foil, and other things around her house.

Now we want to see the world through your lens. We’re challenging you, your kids, your family, and your friends to take photographs inspired by Atlas Obscura. Below, you’ll find 10 intriguingly named places from around the world. We’d like you to find a way—creative, literal, even abstract—to bring these places to life with a still image. It could be a miniature landscape like Sullivan’s, something completely original inspired by the title, or something in your home or neighborhood that might as well go by the same name.

Share your photos with us by email to places@atlasobscura.com, on social media, or in Atlas Obscura’s forums. We’ll feature some of the most interesting photographs in a future article.

• The Center of the Universe
  Tulsa, Oklahoma
  
  
• Disappointment Rock
  Norseman, Australia
  
  
• IceCube Research Station
  Antarctica
  
  
• Inaccessible Island
  United Kingdom
  
  
• Cathedral of Junk
  Austin, Texas
  
  
• End of the World Cinema
  Qesm Sharm Ash Sheikh, Egypt
  
  
• Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
  Baltimore, Maryland
  
  
• Brief Garden
  Kirantidiya, Sri Lanka
  
  
• Phantasma Gloria
  Los Angeles, California
  
  
• Fantastic Pit
  Walker County, Georgia

Raku Inoue is now finding inspiration for his precise, ephemeral works in his backyard.

There’s a lively, sculptural presence to the creatures created by Canadian artist Raku Inoue, simply made of blooms and leaves. Elegant representations of insects and animals emerge from the natural materials, which he normally acquires from both local flower shops and flower farms abroad.

Occasionally, Inoue has found inspiration in his own backyard, and this has been especially true during the coronavirus quarantine in his Montreal home. “I was scraping off the thick layers of fallen autumn leaves and guiding the spring sunlight toward the soil when I noticed many sprouts and shoots hidden underneath,” he wrote on his Instagram. "It’s nice to see that outdoor life thrives regardless of the pandemic lockdown.” The early blossoms in his garden led him to create a series of smaller and quieter pieces—micro-insects—that seem fitting during the shelter-in-place. “My art is about being appreciative of the small things in life and enjoying each moment as time is precious and life is ephemeral,” the artist writes in an email.

No matter how beautiful his artworks are, the artist is practical and philosophical about their shelf-life, which is short. After Inoue has photographed his completed works, he immediately recycles them back to Mother Nature. And he hopes his viewers will both enjoy their appearance and recognize the cyclical character of the natural world. “It’s also understanding and accepting that not everything is forever, especially in nature, and that sometimes there is beauty in letting things go,” he says. “If I can get some of my audience to feel this way, then I have accomplished my true goal.”

Atlas Obscura spoke with Inoue about his time-driven process, his inspiring childhood, and his garden.

What first motivated you to start using natural elements to make art?

One day, three years ago, it was windy and the fragile petals of roses in my backyard were blown off to the ground. I picked them up and made my first floral insect: a small beetle. The fascination for the crawly creatures is something that goes back to my childhood growing up in Japan, where I used to catch kabutomushi (Japanese horned beetles) with my grandmother. I also remember spending wonderful time inside encyclopedias, feeding my curiosity and learning about many things that exist on this planet, including plants and insects. So I think it was only natural that I find myself gravitating toward these subjects for inspiration.

What materials do you especially like to work with?

Most of the time, I purchase them from a local flower shop. Occasionally they kindly donate leftover flowers. I had a flower farm in Ecuador shipping me flowers in the past, which I used to create some of the most colourful work, and those were a delight to work with. With the northern climate of Canada, most outdoor plants and flowers are not available throughout the year, but when they are, I use them quite regularly and it adds to my creations a sense of seasonality. Some of my favorite flowers are seasonal and grow right in my backyard: daffodils, hydrangea, clematis, plum tree flowers. I bought a house six years ago and one of the selling points was that it came with a spacious backyard. At that point, I never had a garden to take care of or maintain, but I have witnessed my mother working hers, and that definitely influenced me to start my own. Come mid-summer, plants and flowers will have completely swallowed the entire landscape, and surrounding trees will have completely separated us from our neighbors. The city life can be overwhelming at times, so it is nice to have a retreat where I get to disconnect. Currently, due to the pandemic, all nonessential businesses are closed, including flower shops, so I am glad that the blossoming season is upon us. This year's first floral bloomers were daffodils. But sprouts and shoots were starting to thrive a little ahead of time. I used these to make the micro-insects series. The ingredients vary, from shoots of a kiwi tree to lilacs to tulips. Us humans may be on lockdown but nature is not, fortunately.

Can you describe your process?

It really depends on the complexity of the work. It can take 20 minutes, more or less, for a regular-sized arrangement. For something more ambitious, it can take up to a week or more. The most important factor that needs to be considered every time I’m creating is that I am using ephemeral materials that are destined for decomposition. Therefore it is a race to the finish line, and the end goal is capturing with my camera the freshness and the liveliness of the materials before they wither away. Once the whole process of creation has been completed, I discard the used materials in the compost bin. It is a give-and-take relationship with the precious ingredients.

Do you have a particular favorite among your work?

One day I was cleaning my backyard, collecting pine cones, and suddenly it hit me. How these round cones could be glued together to achieve any shape imaginable. First I thought about a human face, then I thought about the pine cone scales and how they look rough and tough. So I ended up choosing a gorilla for a subject. All this was a lovely reminder that inspiration can come from anywhere. For me, finding inspiration is not an action to take but rather a state of mind where you become sensitive to everything that surrounds you. Anything can be inspiring, and with time this becomes a part of who you are. Finding inspiration becomes more and more natural.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

When it reached America, Sunkist marketers recommended hot lemonade.

In the fall of 1918, as influenza spread across the globe and the world clamored for a cure, the price of lemons skyrocketed. From Rome to Rio to Boston, residents desperate for any small measure of protection hoarded the yellow fruit, which was said—by whom it was, even then, unclear—to be both a prophylactic and a remedy for the deadly virus. Newspaper articles promised the citrus was a “flu foe,” and advised, “If you are not a flu victim deny yourself that glass of lemonade.” In New York, the Federal Food Board stepped in to prevent price gouging.

Hot lemonade was an old folk remedy for the grippe, and even though doctors knew it would not stop the Spanish flu, the soothing sugary liquid could at least keep the afflicted hydrated. The newer fad of sucking the bracing juice straight from the fruit was harder to justify, but that did nothing to stop its spread. There was pretty Chamber of Commerce spokesperson Marie Cooney on the front page of the October 23 Los Angeles Herald, between an accounting of influenza deaths and an accounting of war casualties, demonstrating the technique with a smile. “Lemon sucking now hailed by science as influenza cure,” the headline announced. It wasn’t true, of course, but the story was still good news for one segment of the population: California’s lemon farmers.

Life in the upstart lemon business wasn’t easy. The fragrant orange groves that blanketed Southern California had been a part of the landscape for several generations, but commercial lemon farming hadn’t taken root until the turn of the century, and growers were still learning to cultivate—and sell—the delicate fruit. The 1913 crop had been nearly wiped out in the Great Freeze, four January days of record cold temperatures, and the 1917 crop had been cooked on the trees by a June heat wave. Worse still for the farmers was the prospect of a successful harvest. Each spring, more of the saplings planted across 40,000 acres reached maturity and began producing citrus. Within just a few years, the lemon yield would double, but consumer demand was on the decline. Americans had little use for these sour things; on average, they bought just 12 a year. “Consumers must use two lemons where they now only use one,” advised Don Francisco of the California Fruit Grower’s Exchange in April 1918.

Francisco had started working for the farming cooperative—better known by its brand name, Sunkist—as a fruit examiner in 1914. Now the 27 year old was the Exchange’s advertising manager, and he was already a legend in the citrus industry: Francisco had invented orange juice. It had been a ploy to get consumers to eat an orange, or two or three, every day. Francisco had noticed that squeezing oranges by hand was too much work for busy soda jerks, who either didn’t offer orange juice or charged exorbitant prices. So, he helped to design heavy-duty electric juice presses for soda fountains and, for mornings at home, produced 3 million milk-glass reamers embossed with the Sunkist logo. Advertising firm Lord & Thomas added the campaign tagline: “Drink an Orange.” The juice was already chasing Coca-Cola to be the county’s most popular beverage. Sunkist’s lemon growers wanted some of that marketing magic.

Lemons were a challenge, the usually cheerful Francisco warned. “With lemons, an appeal to the appetite is difficult,” he said. (He also believed it was near impossible to make them look tempting.) Instead, the slogan “Lemons for usefulness” appeared in every advertisement. Francisco would teach America to ask for a slice in their tea and a wedge with their green vegetables. Lemons could also be advertised as healthful, he said, months before the first appearance of the Spanish flu, “but always with care not to suggest that lemons are to be classed with medicines.”

Everything changed in September 1918 when news broke of an epidemic ravaging, first, the Commonwealth Pier barracks in Boston, then the city, the state, and the country. By late that month, more than 1,000 people had died of the Spanish flu in Boston alone.

The telegram first arrived at Sunkist’s sales office in Los Angeles: The East Coast needed lemons. The arrival of cheaper, Sicilian imports had been slowed by the war, and America’s new go-to citrus, the orange, had suffered a poor growing season. Demand for the little-used lemon was high and supplies were low. In Boston, wholesale prices had more than doubled in a month. Meanwhile in California, leafy lemon trees, finally recovered from the sweltering 1917 season, were heavy with fruit.

Countless home remedies emerged as Americans grappled with the disease, some placebo, some actual poison. From the pantry came the promise of health in the guise of red onions or black coffee or watered-down molasses or brandy with asafetida, a pungent spice common in Indian cooking. But only the lemon had the advertising know-how of Don Francisco and Lord & Thomas behind it.

Within an hour of the telegram’s arrival, Sunkist’s long-planned marketing campaign was tossed aside in favor of an unusual ad, wired to 149 newspapers. “A direct appeal to use lemons might have aroused resentment and disapproval,” the cooperative’s newsletter, edited by Francisco, explained. Instead, the austere advertisement offered “precautions against colds and the grippe”: “Avoid crowds,” “take adequate exercises,” “get plenty of sleep,” “keep your feet dry and warm,” and, oh yes, “drink one or two glasses of hot lemonade.” The public-service announcement, which never mentioned the Sunkist brand, reached an estimated 22 million people in October. Entrepreneurial grocers were more direct. “Nature’s cure for Spanish influenza,” promised one in Norwich, Connecticut, which sold Sunkist Lemons for an outlandish 35 cents a dozen. That month total sales of the individually tissue-wrapped, logo-stamped California fruits rose 80 percent.

By December 1918, the danger of the disease had seemingly passed, and the lemon frenzy subsided. But the combination of panic and marketing genius had given lemons a permanent place in the American pantry. What had been, at best, a luxury now felt essential. “It is gratifying to know that citrus fruits have come to occupy so important a place in the national diet,” Francisco’s newsletter reported.

Lemon sales peaked again with later influenza outbreaks, but Francisco, who was by then overseeing the brand as an adman for Lord & Thomas, advised against another public-service campaign. He had always had bigger dreams for the crop: “To advertise the uses of lemon is not to advertise one product, but a long line of products. We might talk about lemon pie or a lemon shampoo … lemons for garnishing fish or for scouring pots and pans … lemon juice for bleaching the skin, lemon juice instead of vinegar or a mouth wash.” He was envisioning the lemony-fresh world we inhabit now, a century later.

An artist talks about his environmentally responsive artwork—the first installation in an underwater museum at the intersection of coral and culture.

How can we see the impact of rising ocean temperatures? For the residents of Townsville, a vibrant city on Queensland’s coast, a new public artwork just off their shores reminds them each day of the challenges facing Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The enormously biodiverse reef, named a World Heritage Site in 1981, is unlike anywhere else on the planet—a serious drawcard for scientists, tourists, and divers, who flock to Australia for a chance to experience the world’s largest coral reef formation. But in recent years their flocking has taken on a new urgency. The Great Barrier Reef’s health—like that of coral reefs everywhere—is at risk from rising ocean temperatures, pollution, and coastal development.

When coral gets stressed by temperature fluctuations or sediment deposits, it can change from a vibrant-hued wonder to a sad white shade. Known as coral bleaching, this phenomenon was first recorded on the Great Barrier Reef on a massive scale in 1998—which also happened to be the hottest summer in a century. It can take decades for coral to recover from this kind of bleaching (if it does at all).

But how to raise awareness of something that can’t be seen above water? Enter the “Ocean Siren.”

Unveiled in late 2019 off Townsville’s Strand Jetty, the “Ocean Siren” sculpture changes color, reacting to the fluctuating water temperature on the Great Barrier Reef in real time. Made of welded plate stainless steel and translucent acrylic, it contains 202 internal LED lights that change color as the water heats up or cools down. Visitors can see it go from a dark blue to a lighter hue, then to yellow, orange, and finally a dark red—a distinct warning that the reef is in danger. Now.

The sculpture—modeled on local Wulgurukaba descendent and student Takoda Johnson—is the first installation of Queensland’s new Museum of Underwater Art (MOUA). It’s also the only part of the museum that’s visible above the surface. The MOUA’s other three sculpture gardens—featuring artworks made of nontoxic, pH-neutral marine-grade cement—are all anchored underwater.

Created by underwater sculptor and conservationist Jason deCaires Taylor and the Queensland government, it’s the first—and only—underwater art museum in the Southern Hemisphere.

To learn more about the sculpture and the nonprofit art museum—and to find out how one becomes an underwater sculptor—Atlas Obscura recently spoke with Taylor.

How did you get involved in underwater sculpture?

I trained as a sculptor many years ago, and I used to work on public projects ... I'd build a big exhibition, and then at the end of it, I'd have to pack it away, and store it. It all just seemed so wasteful, and it felt like it needed another reason to exist.

So when I realized that if I started working underwater, [my sculptures] would have this … secondary benefit of also creating a reef and encouraging marine life to inhabit them. I started around 2006. I think I'm approaching almost a thousand [underwater installations].

I [also] love the idea that these sculptures aren't static. [They are] completely evolving, changing. And ultimately, nature is one of the best artists in the world.

Can you explain how the concept for the “Ocean Siren” came about?

I think part of what's happening in our underwater world is that it's sort of forgotten and misunderstood. If we saw a forest that was on fire, degrading, I think we would be very quick to act. It would be right at the forefront of our minds. Whereas underwater, it's out of sight and slightly forgotten ... Yet major changes are happening [down there], and major ecosystems are being lost.

So I wanted to bring that threat right in front of our faces ... and to convey in real time what's happening.

What was it about Townsville that made it the perfect spot for the installation?

Townsville's probably the marine-science capital of the world. It has two huge marine institutions there: James Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. It's a great launchpad to the Great Barrier Reef.

You worked with local student Takoda Johnson on the project, and used her as the model for the sculpture. What did you learn from working with her?

I was really fortunate to be able to find someone like her, who was willing to be part of the project, and she was wonderful.

I think she added a whole extra layer of connection to [the] place. [Her statue] looks out over the Great Barrier Reef, but she also looks out on Magnetic Island, which is where her great-grandfather is from. It really gave [the project] a personal connection, and a very important connection to indigenous lands rights.

There are so many pressing environmental concerns for our planet at the moment. What role do you see art playing in raising awareness of these issues moving forward?

I think facts and figures are not enough to engage people. I think we've seen that around the world in many, many different things. Artists play such a vital role [in] conveying science [as] something that's emotive.

There's a very famous quote by [an environmentalist who] sort of said, “I used to think that the world's problems were habitat loss, global warming, and species destruction." And then he goes, "But then I realized that no—the greatest problems of the world are greed, apathy, and denial.”

People could walk past [the “Ocean Siren” sculpture] and instantly know what's happening out [in the water]. The temperature logger for that piece is right out on Davies Reef, which is, I think, 50 kilometers [about 30 miles] away.

I quite like that direct connection to the underwater world.

What do you hope visitors, after seeing the “Ocean Siren,” will take away from their experience?

Ultimately, I just want to convey that everything is connected. We're all one big organism that is cyclical. I hope people [understand that] … what happens in the sea affects us directly, and affects our livelihoods, and the future of our species.

And I think [one] of the best ways to inspire people is to show them how incredible it is—and how important it is to continue to conserve it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

The fearsome fighters of Greek mythology have a very real, very fit regimen to share.

Exercising during a pandemic—or trying to do so—can be among the most potent reminders that things aren’t normal. There’s the serpentine new path you may take on your run, to minimize contact with other people. There’s the yoga mat that had been collecting dust in your closet, now receiving you daily. There’s the delicate matter of doing high knees in an apartment, when you have to land softly enough to avoid a complaint from the downstairs neighbor.

But for all the difficulties of working out at home today, it’s a lot easier than it was for some folks in the 5th-century BC. Back then, being fit often meant being a fighter, and some of the warriors of the day were fit enough to inspire awe—even entire mythologies. Like the Amazons.

The mythical Greek counterpart of Scythian warriors of the Caucasus region, the Amazons were fierce, fit steppe nomads—and early adopters of horseback riding as a way of life.

“Their whole lives revolved around horseback riding and archery,” says Adrienne Mayor, a classicist at Stanford University and author of The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Woman across the Ancient World. “Because women can be just as good riders and archers as the men, and ... just as fast, just as deadly.”

The Scythian tribes differed in some respects from the Amazons. Men were part of their communities, for instance, but unlike most other cultures of the day, social responsibilities were shared, and women and men fought side by side. The Scythian women wielded a bevy of battleaxes, swords, javelins, and spears, and were pioneers of the composite bow.

They threw lassoes too, functioning as a horse-mounted arsenal free-roaming across the Iron Age Caucasus.“The Scythians were mentioned by [the Greek historian] Herodotus as being flexible,” Mayor says. “They could do acrobatic tricks on their horses and on the ground.”

When Herodotus visited the Scythian tribes, he dutifully reported many of their intimidating ways. And some of their other, less aggressive tendencies as well. For one thing, the Scythians smoked cannabis—something to do while stuck at home, perhaps (but better left for a different series than this one).

But where does all this leave you, O quarantined exerciser of the 21st century? You can’t make your way to Scythia, especially under the current circumstances. How can you bring Scythia, and the ways of its women warriors, to you?

Stretching may be a good place to start. (Unless, of course, you’re self-isolating on a ranch.) Known for their so-called Parthian shot—in which the Scythian women would essentially kick the enemy while they were down, firing a parting arrow as they galloped away—the warriors had to be bendy, for all manner of archering activity.

“They [could] shoot bows and arrows upside down with their feet,” Mayor says. “That’s akin to yoga! That is something you can do in an apartment during quarantine.”

As the summer heats up, it’s certainly something to consider. With hot-yoga studios shuttered, you can turn off your fan, close your eyes, and try to channel your inner Amazon to stay fit indoors.

It may not be the steppes, but it's a first step.

The Soviets made it to carry spacecraft. Now it's zooming medical supplies around the globe.

It was so big that Travis Hammond thought surely it should fall out of the sky. It seemed inconceivable for something so massive to take flight.

Hammond was standing at a viewing area near the end of the runway at Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, Alaska. Scads of other planespotters stood by, eagerly awaiting an aircraft so rarely in flight that glimpses of it are almost mythical.

“This plane is it,” Hammond says. “I mean, it’s like the great white buffalo. A unicorn of airplanes.”

Hammond used to be in the Air Force, and now works for the Federal Aviation Administration at the fifth-largest airport in the world in terms of cargo. He has seen myriad planes throughout the years. Nothing compared to this massive bird: the Antonov An-225 Mriya (Ukrainian for “dream”), the world’s largest cargo plane.

“There’s nothing else like it in the world,” says Doug Moody, an air traffic controller in Anchorage, who watched the plane depart the following day. “That’s what draws people out to look at it. It’s rare that it makes appearances up here. In 10 years of working at the airport, I’ve only seen it twice.”

After over 18 months of repairs, the An-225 was refueling in Anchorage en route to Montreal, Canada to deliver medical equipment needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s had a busy year so far, with several other medical supply missions spanning the globe.

But back in the early 1980s, Mriya was conceived for a completely different purpose: to help the Soviet Union dominate space.

The Soviets ran into a problem in their attempts to rival NASA’s space shuttle program: their Buran space shuttle and Energia super rocket were too big to be transported from where they were being built in Russia and the Ukraine to where they’d be launched in Kazakhstan. The Russians considered reworking existing planes, as well as revamping the railroads or building a new highway system, but tests showed none of these approaches could move the massive rockets.

Enter Mriya.

The aircraft is so big, says Moody, that air traffic controllers need to make sure there are no other airborne planes within 10 miles of it. Its sheer mass is enough to kick up a big wake, causing nasty turbulence for other aircraft.

The An-225 has the largest wingspan of any aircraft in service at 290 feet (picture seven-and-a-half school buses end to end), and is 276 feet long. It’s the heaviest plane ever built, so it needs six turbofan engines to lift off. And its cargo hold measures 142.2 feet by 21 feet by 14 feet—big enough to transport (multiple!) tanks, trains and smaller aircraft. The Wright Brothers’ first flight (120 feet) could have taken place in the An-225’s cargo hold, with room to spare.

At 50 percent larger than any other aircraft at the time of its construction, the An-225 would have been able to move massive rockets and shuttles from various construction sites to their launch pads easily.

But the plane’s original assignment never came to fruition. The An-225 did a short test flight with the Buran shuttle piggy-backed on top, but the Soviet Union’s space operations soon became moot—because the USSR dissolved. The An-225 spent the following decade in storage. Ideas for the aircraft were tossed around, ranging from follow-up space programs to a triple-decker passenger plane complete with a shopping mall and a casino.

Eventually it was decided the one-of-a-kind aircraft would simply be a cargo carrier for extraordinarily oversize payloads.

“I wouldn’t ever turn down an opportunity to go see it,” Moody says, adding that on the day it landed in Anchorage, he and his coworkers were eagerly texting friends to tell them to go check it out while they had the chance. “It’s a piece of history.”

Without knowing Mriya’s history, those lucky enough to catch sight of the plane likely wouldn’t be able to guess its origin story. The only details on the outside that give clues to the plane's roots are the rails on top (for mounting another aircraft) and the Ukrainian name splashed across the sides.

The cockpit, however, is an aeronautic time warp.

Located on top of the plane to maximize space in the cargo hold, the vast cockpit is painted a steely Soviet-era green and employs early aerospace technology. The command center looks about as similar to its recently crafted peers as brick cell phones to modern iPhones, with old-school computers and enough buttons and levers that it requires six crew members. Reportedly, Bono, the lead singer of Irish rock band U2, once toured the inside and declared it “bigger than a rock star’s ego.”

Still, it stands the test of time and after renovations, Antonov says they plan to use the An-225 until at least 2033. Not bad considering most aircrafts are retired at about 27 years.

Though the plane only makes a handful of trips a year it is not because of its age. It’s not often that a company needs the kind of heavy lifting that Mriya’s stupendous size allows. It’s also costly—use of the An-225 generates invoices of roughly $30,000. An hour.

In April, Mriya came out of a long hibernation to deliver COVID-19 medical supplies. Before landing in Anchorage, it first flew directly from the repair hanger in Kiev, Ukraine to Tianjin, China to pick up personal protective equipment, medication, and testing supplies, before landing in Warsaw, Poland on April 14. The volume of medical gear on that flight contributed to the biggest ever recorded cargo volume at about 100 tons. In the weeks since the plane has run a handful of other COVID-19 related missions.

This isn’t the first time the An-225 has been used for humanitarian aid. In 2001 it carried 216,000 ration packs to US military personnel serving in the Persian gulf. In 2002, it brought 80,000 shoeboxes filled with Christmas gifts to children in Uganda. And in recent years, it’s delivered relief materials to Mozambique, Saipan, and Guam after natural disasters.

Various watch groups track the whereabouts of Mriya online. Both Moody and Hammond said they use websites like Flightradar24 or follow other aviation nerds on social media to know when bucket list planes are in their area.

Sam Chui, who runs a popular flightspotting blog, said that if there weren’t flight restrictions due to COVID-19, he would have flown from his homebase in Los Angeles to Anchorage, just to see the An-225.

“It’s so different and so rare,” Chui says.

Mriya might not be an only child for long, though. In 2016, the Airspace Industry Corporation of China signed a deal with Antonov for the An-225 program. They’re not interested in the existing plane, but are looking to use it as a rough draft for a modernized fleet capable of transporting cargo and spacecraft. In a few years, spotting planes as massive might not be so elusive.

But there will always be only one Mriya.

Its stunning mosaic floor luckily escaped root damage. 

Nestled between the Alps and the city of Verona, the Valpolicella—literally the “valley of many cells” in Latin—has been a renowned winemaking region going back at least to Roman times. In the first century, Pliny the Elder wrote about how people near Verona made wine: “They gather their bunches into stone barns and let them dry until winter, when they make wine from them.” Some places still make it like they used to: Regional wines, such as Amarone, are still made using partially dried grapes, a technique that was common during the Roman Empire.

Recently, archaeologists have unearthed signs of the former Roman residents of Valpolicella—appropriately right below an operating vineyard. In May 2020, a team of government archaeologists unearthed an intricately patterned mosaic pavement dating to the third or fourth century. But it wasn’t an entirely unexpected discovery.

Archaeologists have been looking for this mosaic since at least 1922,” says Alberto Manicardi, head of operations for the dig, near the town of Negrar. “We knew it was there but were not able to exactly locate it.”

The villa, dating to the third or fourth century, was first discovered by chance in 1887, when farmers came across Roman-era remains, including fragments of an elaborately decorated mosaic pavement, just inches below the surface of a field.

The first archaeological excavation there was conducted in 1922, and an area of 885 square feet was unearthed. But the then-owner of the property reburied the remains and planted vines on top.

In recent decades, archaeologists have resumed the quest for the full mosaic and the rest of the large villa. Renderings based on that first excavation indicated that those mosaic fragments belonged to a much wider floor, probably part of the main reception room.

But looking for mosaics in a fully functioning vineyard is not easy. “Luckily, winemakers understood the importance of our search and allowed us to work in their fields,” Manicardi says. To avoid unnecessary damage to the vines, the archaeologists used a mix of noninvasive techniques, such as ground-penetrating radar and limited trial trenches, to explore what was beneath the surface without a full-blown excavation.

“In summer of 2019 we located a portion of the mosaic, as well as structural elements like walls and stairs,” explains state archaeologist Gianni de Zuccato, who lead research efforts in the vineyard. Inspired by the promising findings, the team kept looking, but had to stop when harvest season came along in early fall, and again during the coronavirus pandemic. Works could only resume in early May, when Italy’s nationwide lockdown was eased.

On May 18, the long-lost mosaic pavement was finally located, under around 4.5 feet of fertile earth. “For the most part it is really well preserved,” says Manicardi, adding that only small portions of the 29-by-22-foot surface were disturbed by sprawling vine roots—fortunate, since they can grow down to 30 feet.

This part of Valpolicella is known for its volcanic soil—with violent and pink pebbles—that results in distinctively smoky and meaty red wines such as Amarone. Some of those same pebble colors appear in the mosaic—small white, pink, yellow, and violet stones resulting in remarkably vivid designs, says De Zuccato.

The mosaic design, featuring a series of twisted shapes known as “Solomon’s knots” inscribed in octagons and rhomboids, will help experts investigate the identity of the homeowner. As explained by archaeologist Federica Rinaldi in a recent study, he was probably a wealthy Roman officer. Other notable finds include a ring, a bracelet, and a coin with the emblem of Lucius Verus, who co-led the Roman Empire with his adoptive brother Marcus Aurelius between 161 and 169.

But the century-long coexistence of winemaking and archaeological exploration may be at its end. To fully unearth the 10,000-square-foot villa, the archaeologists may need to ask winemakers to stop production entirely. “Thanks to these findings the area was finally declared of national cultural interest,” De Zuccato says. “We now need to secure funds for a full excavation.”

The mayor of Negrar, Roberto Grison, hopes that the vineyard will become an archaeological site open to the public. “We will work with local cultural institutions and property owners,” he told local newspaper L’Arena. “We will find a way to make this treasure accessible to the public.”

From crispy popovers to artful bird cakes, take a carb cruise around the world.

Though many quarantine baking trends have dominated Twitter and TikTok recently, one of the most unusual has to be frog bread. Using instructions from a 2005 online tutorial, thousands have crafted their own golden, crusty amphibians, proudly posting the results despite distended eyes and spiky limbs.

The floury frog armies marching across social media have joined lavishly decorated focaccia, banana bread, and ubiquitous sourdough in bringing people pleasure in isolation. But quarantine trends fade quickly, and perhaps you are looking for a new edible project. People have long made lovely loaves to amuse, welcome in new seasons, and to mark special occasions. Though celebrations have been cancelled and holidays put on hold, there's no reason you can't enjoy spending time making something beautiful and delicious. Here are seven bready endeavors that run the gamut from everyday pleasure to edible works of art. Best of all, most rely on the staples already in your cabinets.

Jordan Pond Popovers

Crispy clouds of dough with a side of jam and butter come to nearly every table at Jordan Pond Restaurant in Maine’s Acadia National Park, as they have since 1895. After opening a teahouse on the edge of Jordan Pond, Thomas and Nellie McIntire served up the eggy miniature loaves, a derivative of British Yorkshire pudding. Many changes came to the teahouse over the years. John D. Rockefeller Jr. purchased it and donated it to the National Park Service in the 1940s, and the original building burned down in 1979. But the popovers persist, and the recipe is fairly simple, calling for flour, milk, eggs, baking soda, and salt. Those without a dedicated popover tin can still make them with a muffin pan, but are advised to pour the batter only into the cups at the corners of the tin, to allow their billowy tops to spread.

Staffordshire Oatcakes

Flour is a scarce resource these days, as is yeast. But you can stretch your supply by making Staffordshire oatcakes, which have fueled workers in North Staffordshire, England, for centuries. The main ingredient is oats, giving these soft pancakes their unique flavor. While the flat paddles may remind eaters of a crêpe or even Ethiopian injera, there's speculation that British soldiers who had returned from India also brought back a love for chapati, leading them to try to recreate the flat breads. Use this recipe to recreate the Staffordshire oatcake at home. Feel free to stack it high with bacon, cheese, and a fried egg.

Pineapple Bun

While pineapples and pineapple buns share a sweet interior and a bumpy exterior, that's where the similarities end. Hong Kong's famed pineapple buns are named for their golden appearance only, and contain no fruit. Instead, these soft buns have a sweet, crisp hat of custard powder and butter that’s applied before baking. Shellacked with an egg wash, the result is a contrast of textures, usually amplified with a slab of cold butter slipped inside the warm bun. The pineapple bun reached the apex of its popularity in the mid-20th century, but they're still available in bakeries and the diner-like cha chaan tengs across the island. Should you have the simple ingredients for this bread in your pantry, it can be available from your kitchen too.

Zhavoronki

In Ukraine, spring is welcomed in when children fling birds into the air. They have to be caught on the descent, though, since the birds are made of bread. Making and eating tiny zhavoronki heralds a good harvest, but families usually bake them in batches of 40, a tribute to 40 Roman soldiers who died after refusing to renounce Christianity in the early 4th century. Both Russians and Ukrainians have traditionally made zhavoronki during springtime, coinciding with Lent, which traditionally is 40 days long (minus Sundays), another nod to the martyrs. This particular recipe for zhavoronki results in 40 birds, meaning a hefty amount of flour is needed. But there's nothing wrong with cutting the recipe in half. For shaping help, there are lots of YouTube tutorials.

Cottage Loaf

Once one of England's most popular breads, the cottage loaf is a domed wonder. Looking like two loaves stacked atop each other, with the top one often slashed in decorative patterns, the unique shape of this bread was likely a space-saving option in small ovens. This bulbous beauty was also a literary favorite. Virginia Woolf was said to have made a perfect cottage loaf every time, and George Orwell included it in his Defense of English Cooking. To make it at home, Paul Hollywood has a recipe. And here's the same recipe with American measurements for bakers across the pond.

Longevity Peach

Birthdays typically call for spectacular treats, whether that means a layer cake or a longevity peach bun. These soft, steamed pastries are delicately brushed with red food coloring, giving them the pink-and-white blush of a fresh peach. Often stuffed with lotus seed paste, they're a meaningful way to celebrate turning a year older. The peach, after all, is a symbol of longevity in Chinese culture. The Queen Mother of the West, a Chinese goddess in the Taoist tradition, was thought to grow the peaches of immortality in a heavenly orchard. The longevity peaches that us mortals eat are generally found in bakeries or as special orders, but they can also be made in your kitchen.

Hiyoko

Technically, hiyoko are cakes. But don't let that stop you from baking these adorable birds. For one thing, they call for only five ingredients. And they look like a dream, which is appropriate, since the idea came to their inventor in a dream.

In 1912, the heir to Yoshinodo, a bakery that fueled miners by selling them sugary treats on Japan's Kyushu Island, had a dream about tiny pastry birds. He soon made his vision a reality, calling the birds "baby chicks" (hiyoko) and filling them with a sweet lima bean paste. The tiny golden birds were a hit, and soon became emblems of the Fukuoka region. This particular recipe for hiyoko calls for red bean paste, rather than sweet lima bean.

Explore a captivating compendium of cosmic illustrations.

Humans have long regarded comets with a swirling mix of wonder and fear: The cosmic characters figure on Babylonian tablets and a sprawling, 11th-century European tapestry. Before scientists knew exactly what caused these bright smears across the sky, comets were often interpreted as portents of doom or destruction. (Occasionally, they were blamed for less-dramatic shenanigans, such as inspiring chickens to lay oddly shaped eggs.) Given their rich history, it makes sense that an unknown artist in 16th-century Flanders compiled a lavishly illustrated compendium of comets blazing as humans cowered or gawked.

The French-language manuscript, which now resides at the Universitätsbibliothek Kassel in Germany, is colloquially known as The Comet Book. As the Public Domain Review points out, the book is preoccupied with symbolism and significance over science; its full title translates to Comets and Their General and Particular Meanings, According to Ptolemy, Albumasar, Haly, Aliquind and Other Astrologers. The Comet Book leans heavily on folklore about the objects’ supposed consequences, from fires to famines.

Today, we know that comets are essentially ‘dirty snowballs.’ They’re made up of frozen clumps of gas, dust, and rock that are billions of years old, remnants of the early days of our solar system. As these cold, sediment-studded masses hurtle closer to the Sun, they warm—and then fling that no-longer-so-icy material behind them in bright, smudged “tails” that can wag millions of miles across the sky.

But none of that was known when The Comet Book was created. This volume, the Public Domain Review notes, drew on an abridged, 15th-century version of a 13th-century treatise, originally written in Spain. Long before telescopes helped bring the heavens into focus, the artist of The Comet Book depicted comets in ways that emphasized the feelings of fear or awe that they stoked. One is drawn as a sharp blade; another appears to be a sun or a blisteringly hot sunflower, petals flapping cheerfully in the wind. In some images, the sky and ground are flecked with billowing flames, suggesting that the comet was seen as a harbinger of disaster.

Here, Atlas Obscura has compiled some of the remarkable images from The Comet Book. Once you’ve surveyed these historic offerings, check out some contemporary counterparts—photographs of the comet known as C/2020 F8 (SWAN)—that lit up the sky in April and May 2020.

For North Carolina researchers, every starter is more data.

There’s something a little magical about sourdough. You mix flour and water, and in just a week or two, you have a starter that’s bubbling with invisible life.

Humans have taken advantage of naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria to bake bread for thousands of years, yet we still know relatively little about these organisms. Do they come from the flour we use, or do they come from the water or the air or the bakers’ hands? How do different microbes affect the bread’s texture and taste? And why do some starters thrive while others turn into moldy sludge?

To help answer these questions, researchers at North Carolina State University’s Public Science Lab asked home bakers to send them their sourdough starters, or observations about them. Many other groups have researched sourdough microbes, says microbial ecologist Erin McKenney, but the crowdsourced aspect of their Science of Sourdough project contrasts with other initiatives’ lab-grown specimens.

“It’s not clear if their findings are directly relevant to what bakers are doing in their homes or in their bakeries,” says McKenney.

In an earlier phase of the project, which launched in 2017, more than 500 citizen scientists from Alaska to New Zealand sent in sourdough-starter samples. “You don’t go to the zoo to find out the true nature of wildlife,” says McKenney. “We wanted to study these microbes in their natural habitat.” Enlisting the help of citizen scientists also allows the team, which is led by Rob Dunn, to access larger data sets. “I’ve taken care of 24 sourdough starters at a time,” McKenney says. “I can’t imagine how long it would take to grow 500.”

Even though their research questions seem straightforward, the answers are often complicated or elusive. For example, the team has identified many species of bacteria and fungi present in sourdough starters. But the function of most of these microbes—whether they help the starter grow or improve the flavor, or are they just along for the ride—is still unknown.

While making new discoveries is an important part of the project, McKenney says that engaging members of the public is also a key component. She is especially interested in making microbiology more accessible to students.

Last year, hundreds of middle-school students in North Carolina participated in the Science of Sourdough project. “It got the students thinking about science and microbes without having to have access to fancy lab equipment,” says McKenney. “One of the great beauties of this particular system is that you can learn about microbial ecology in a way that’s personally engaging and relevant.” Even when people can’t see the microbes, they can observe the gas bubbles they produce and appreciate how they influence the flavor and texture of bread.

The Science of Sourdough’s Facebook group has more than 1,800 members, who share their experiments and seek advice, offer encouragement, brag about successes, and commiserate over failures. “They’re also so keenly interested in what we’re finding, and they offer us new ways to think about sourdough,” says McKenney. In an earlier phase of the project, participants’ questions about why their starters failed led the scientists to realize there had been little scientific research on the topic.

In the current phase of the project, McKenney, Dunn, and the team want to figure out how the type of flour, the part of the world the baker is in, and the site where the starter is stored (inside or outside) impact how starters grow. Which factors determine if the starter rises quickly or slowly? Do these factors determine if the starter will be a bubble-less failure or a success that makes tasty bread? Do they impact what the starter smells like?

With yeast hard to find in stores—due to the quarantine-fueled interest in baking bread—there’s no time like the present to get started with sourdough and contribute to the Science of Sourdough project.

Getting started is easy: All you need to do is mix some flour and water together in a jar, then feed your starter with more flour once a day for 14 days. (Or more often if the microbes are extra hungry!) By reporting to the Public Science Lab how much and how fast your starter rises, as well as what it smells like (yeasty? fruity? earthy?), you’ll contribute to their research and be ready to bake your own bread. (And even if your starter fails, your data will still be valuable.) Naming your starter Betsy, JarJar, or Joan of Starch, like members of the Sourdough for Science Facebook group, is optional. You can review the Public Science Lab’s full instructions here.

The project has been incredibly popular so far, McKenney says, garnering submissions from about 1,200 people since the project’s launch on April 16. Perhaps this is unsurprising given the surging interest in sourdough. But the Science of Sourdough project is also a reminder that you don’t have to go to the moon or the deep ocean to make scientific discoveries: Your own kitchen is the site of a millennia-old mystery of how microbes help humans turn water and flour into bread.

99 years later, a community works with archaeologists to answer longstanding questions about a brutal tragedy.

Just north of downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, Greenwood once had one of the most successful African-American commercial districts in the country. By 1921, it was home to numerous black-owned businesses—beauty shops, grocery stores, restaurants, and the offices of lawyers, realtors, and doctors.

Residents caught silent films and musical performances at the Dreamland Theater. They could choose between two neighborhood newspapers. Greenwood offered a place to get bootleg liquor or attend church services. Although many people lived in the district’s spare wooden homes along unpaved streets, enough wealthy African American entrepreneurs called Greenwood home that it earned the nickname “Black Wall Street.”

All of that changed on the night of May 31, 1921. White mobs, armed with shotguns and torches, terrorized Greenwood in a horrific expression of racial violence.

The attackers killed an unknown number as they reduced a vital neighborhood to ashes. The official death toll recorded was 36, but some historians estimate the figure at around 300. No one was held accountable for the Tulsa race massacre. Its memory was both ignored and actively suppressed for years, despite the tragedy’s consequences for subsequent generations.

With the 100th anniversary approaching next year, Tulsans are grappling with how to acknowledge and honor the experiences of victims and survivors, especially as gentrification threatens to further erase Greenwood’s African American history. There’s also a national spotlight on the massacre and its aftermath—and not just because the violence has been dramatized in the HBO series Watchmen.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum announced that the city would search for the lost graves of victims in October 2018. A previous investigation took place from 1998 to 2000, in which researchers interviewed hundreds of local residents and conducted preliminary ground-penetrating radar surveys of potential grave sites. The results at that time were inconclusive and excavations never materialized. The renewed effort will probe longstanding oral histories that suggested the massacre’s untold dead remain buried in the city.

In December 2019, archaeologists presented new radar results that indicated possible mass grave signals for at least two sites. Early this February, a public oversight committee gave their blessing for archaeological excavations to begin. Trowels were supposed to break ground at Oak Lawn Cemetery on April 1, but the COVID-19 outbreak delayed the initial test excavation.

Those involved in the investigation have tried to temper high expectations and sensational headlines. The process could be slow and tedious, and the digs’ results could be inconclusive. But the search for remains in itself is unprecedented in several ways—including its extraordinary emphasis on community involvement.

“We had 300 years of slavery, we had 100 years of Jim Crow, we had thousands of people who died as a result of racist violence,” says historian Scott Ellsworth, who advised on the Oklahoma commission to study the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and wrote a comprehensive account of the event called Death in a Promised Land. “But this is the first time ever in our country where a government at any level—federal, state, local—has intentionally gone looking for the remains of victims. That, to me, is astonishing.”

The Tulsa race massacre investigation doesn’t look like a typical archaeological project. While the mayor’s office is spearheading the effort, the city has ceded much control to the community. Local civil servants, activists, cultural leaders, and descendants of massacre survivors make up a public oversight committee that has been involved at each step.

In packed, live-streamed meetings, committee members ask archaeologists about how remains will be treated and whether DNA analysis is possible. They press for answers about whether Tulsa police lost or destroyed evidence on the massacre decades ago, and why the landowners of one cemetery have been slow to allow archaeologists to survey their site. (In late March, the graveyard’s owners finally granted permission for the investigation.) The members vote before any new phase goes forward.

The process is a far cry from more traditional ways of doing research, wherein a group of scholars comes up with their research questions, writes grants, secures permits, and collects data. In that approach, researchers might engage the community only once the work was underway.

But in academic spheres around the world, there is a push for new modes of research done with, by, and for communities that may have been previously treated like study subjects or whose stories and knowledge have been ignored, says Sonya Atalay, an archaeologist with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

“The thing that I’m excited about is that I really see archaeology as leading the way in this area,” says Atalay. “In the last decade, this type of research has been growing and continues to grow.”

For example, some Indigenous communities are engaging in collaborative projects with both Native and non-Native archaeologists. The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe recently found archaeologists at Central Michigan University to partner with to look into the history of the boarding school at Mount Pleasant, one of the many U.S. government–mandated institutions built in the 19th and 20th centuries to force Indigenous children to “assimilate.” Atalay is developing a portal to match communities with relevant scholars to facilitate these kinds of partnerships.

The search for mass graves in Tulsa is intended to build toward restorative justice and reconciliation, though it’s not clear yet whether the findings will affect political discussions on reparations for the descendants of massacre victims.

After the destruction, insurers refused to compensate many home and business owners; some rebuilding efforts were blocked. Of Greenwood’s 11,000 residents at the time, 9,000 were left homeless.

Calculating the loss to the families who saw their homes and livelihoods destroyed has proved just as challenging as confirming a death toll, says Alicia Odewale, a University of Tulsa archaeologist. Property loss may have amounted to between $50 and $100 million today, without taking into account the loss of heirlooms and family records, the loss of a sense of safety, the toll of displacement, or the stark inequality that exists in Tulsa today.

In December, when addressing a question on possible reparations, Mayor Bynum told the public oversight committee: “What this investigation yields in the end, I can’t say. The goal of this is to clarify the truth of what happened as best we can. If that leads to further action that needs to be taken on the city’s part, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

Archaeological examinations of mass graves may help validate oral histories about the Tulsa race massacre and help identify victims. But it won’t change the fundamental truth about the tragedy.

“Whether the official death toll is accurate or whether it’s 150 or 300, this was a horrific incident of domestic terrorism and systemic racism,” says Hannibal Johnson, author of Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District.

Johnson is on the historical context and narrative committee for the graves search. He’s also part of the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, a grassroots collective that is building a history center and revising school curricula related to the massacre. The commission is funding its own archaeological effort to look for the remnants of structures, foundations, and artifacts in historic Greenwood, and to map how the neighborhood changed over time. The group intends to conduct noninvasive geophysical surveys to identify sites of interest, then plan an excavation for 2021.

“We don’t want the narrative of the Greenwood community to be based solely on sites of death but [to also] incorporate sites of life, wealth, struggle, and family connections as well,” says Odewale, who is helping to lead the collective’s project. Odewale, who grew up in Tulsa, is currently the only black archaeologist living and working in the city with expertise in African diaspora archaeology.

“Digging into a certain area can reveal periods of change—loss and prosperity, destruction and growth—and these don’t have to be two separate stories of the Greenwood community, but allow us to see a clear connection between what happened in the past and what Greenwood looks like today,” Odewale says. “The great thing about archaeology is that it’s designed to have multiple truths be able to coexist in the same space.”

Not everyone welcomes the performances, but they're traveling far and taking risks to get by.

On a normal afternoon in an apartment in the Del Valle neighborhood of Mexico City, open windows let in a cacophony: taco vendors calling out to passersby, low-flying aircraft, loudspeaker advertisements from fruit trucks and junk trucks and gas trucks. But since coronavirus made its way to this prosperous community, vendors have been replaced by quiet grocery delivery men, button-downed professionals are now working from their condos, and kids ride bikes in the driveways of gated privadas instead of at the neighborhood’s parks. All over Mexico City, red “Save Lives, Stay Home” posters have gone up on shop shutters, and a hush usually reserved for Sundays has come over the city.

Then, a slinky bolero rhythm starts up on the sidewalk below, and strains of “Bésame Mucho” float through the trees. Jorge Galindo is playing trumpet along to a backing track coming from a portable speaker. He aims the bell of his instrument up at the buildings, and people begin to appear at their windows and step out onto balconies to applaud and throw coins, whooping like they’re at a concert.

“I wasn’t going to come here today, but I let destiny guide me,” Galindo says, pausing to accept a coin from a couple in matching green fabric masks, walking their dog. “I came here when I was a boy, helping out my father. He played the trumpet, and I played the drums.” Galindo’s been playing music for tips on the streets of Mexico City for 20 years, though never quite like this. “It transports me, when I play. I live the music, feel it, and sometimes I even cry,” he says. “It’s wonderful to be a musician. If I didn’t do it from the heart, I’d be better off as a street sweeper or driving a truck.”

He’s one of many Mexico City musicians now serenading those who can afford to practice social distancing. Some days, for those apartment dwellers, staying at home is like flipping through radio stations: Two young men hammer out a tropical Coldplay cover on a marimba, a trombonist with only one working key plays “Perfume de Gardenias,” a flute-and-violin duet perform Tchaikovsky with choreographed dance moves—the violinist, David Sosa, wearing a mask but no gloves, the flautist, Dante Fernando, wearing gloves but no mask. “We hope these little songs we brought you have livened up your afternoon a bit,” they announce. “May this quarantine go by quickly!”

Francisco Lopez plays a drum with one hand as he drags a finger down a line of doorbell buzzers. He’s wearing two black baseball caps stacked on top of each other, one to shade his face from the sun, the other to catch coins or the occasional blue or pink bill that flutters down from a balcony like a jacaranda petal. Before the pandemic, he and trombone player Felix Peral played at parties and festivals with their 12-member banda group Triple R, but their gigs have all been canceled. Now they travel two hours on public transportation from the suburb of Chimalhuacán in the neighboring state of Estado de Mexico, a “nest of musicians” where Galindo also lives, to play music in the city’s upper-middle-class neighborhoods. At first the long days made Peral dizzy, and his back and legs hurt from walking. But now he says his mouth is used to playing trombone six days a week. His 12-year-old son Cruz Angel lags behind, beating a drum with the enthusiasm of any kid whose dad has asked him to help him out on a Saturday.

“He doesn’t like music,” laughs Peral. “He’s going to study. He wants to be something better, and I’ll support him as much as I can.”

Omar Martinez wears a thin blue mask with the emblematic khaki uniform and cap that identifies him as an organ grinder, just like his father, grandparents, and great-grandparents. He lives about an hour and a half away in Iztapalapa, a borough in the eastern part of the city that has become a hotspot for COVID-19 cases. “The father-in-law of one of my fellow organ grinders just died of it. They took him to the hospital at 10 p.m. and by 4 a.m. he had passed away,” says Martinez. “So now when we come here on the metro we wear gloves, masks—even double masks.” He shouts “Good morning!” up at the apartments, while his father cranks the wooden barrel organ they rent for 150 pesos ($6.50) per day. It warbles “Las Mañanitas,” the Mexican birthday song we’ve been told to sing while washing our hands.

Not all musicians are concerned about the risk of being out on the street. There is very little testing happening in the country, and many don’t personally know anyone who has gotten sick. “You hear so many voices that you don’t know which to believe and which not to,” says Martinez. Others cite conspiracy theories or simply deny that the virus exists. For those who can’t afford to stay home, this attitude might be an essential armor to keep going out day after day. “Personally, I don’t believe in the pandemic,” says Galindo, the trumpet player. “The bigger pandemic is hunger.”

“We’re not going out to take a walk in the park, we’re going out because it’s necessary,” says Roberto Yagüe. “We couldn’t take it anymore.” Yagüe belts ballads down the street as long as the battery on his speaker holds out. Earlier this year he spent his savings preparing to launch an app for a water-saving car wash service, but it has now completely stalled. He grew up with music, and even sang at weddings years ago. “But, unfortunately, here the truth is that to dedicate yourself to music is to die of hunger,” he says. Now it’s his last option.

Mexico City is the only place in the county that has an unemployment benefits program, but to qualify you have to be a resident of the city. You also have to have lost a formal job registered in the national social security system; musicians are part of the 56 percent of the Mexican labor force who work in the informal economy, according to El País. “Most of the people I know live from day to day,” says Galindo. “If they don’t find work one way, they look for it another way.”

Some musicians now out on the streets have always made their living on tips, setting up on the corners of downtown streets (now mostly empty) or playing the lunch hour circuit at restaurants (now takeout only). Others used to play at dance halls (shuttered) and private parties (postponed). With life on hold, all are making significantly less than they used to. But even the 200 to 300 pesos ($9 to $13) they estimate that they can make in a day playing music for people at home comes out looking better than the 2,641 pesos ($112) per month they would get if they could qualify for unemployment.

One of the organ grinders says he did get a prepaid card loaded with 400 pesos ( $17) from a government worker to buy food at Walmart, but most musicians say they haven’t received any part of the federal government’s economic stimulus plan, which has been criticized as too frugal and too late. “Nor are we going to receive it,” says Yagüe, the karaoke singer. “I don’t know where that money is going, to whose pockets.”

“Everything that we get is from the people,” says Peral, the trombone player. “The people support us; the government doesn’t.”

A man in a second-story apartment quietly slides his glass door closed. Not everyone welcomes the background music. Sometimes they yell out the window about interrupted conference calls and sleeping babies, or threaten to call the police. “Many people don’t view this as work, but it’s a job like any other,” says Martinez, the organ grinder. “They say, ‘Hey, shut up, I’m working!’ Well, so am I.”

But by the end of the day, the musicians’ backpacks are often heavy with donated food: oil, rice, sugar, packets of cookies, cans of tuna. Children with faces pressed between window bars toss out notes that say, “Thank you, you brightened our day.” A family on a rooftop chants, “Otra! Otra!” (“Encore! Encore!”) and there are three green flashes as someone drops apples, one by one, from a third-floor window. Neighbors bring out plastic plates of fresh fried empanadas or melting popsicles, and the offer of a moment’s rest on their stoop. Sosa and Fernando, the flute-and-violin duo, have received non-edible donations, too: healing crystals, amulets, a new violin bow for Sosa. An old man in a suit stops to ask the name of the song; his father used to sing him to sleep with it.

Before the shutdown began on March 20, Galindo, the trumpet player, says that people would walk right by him while he played. “But since the 20th, the people changed—they changed a lot. This has made them more sensitive, more understanding, more generous. Maybe because in all of this, we see death nearby,” he says. “If only there were another pandemic so that we would stay united like this.” Few are likely to agree, but as COVID-19 cases continue to mount in Mexico, it may take as much of this kind of optimism as desperation for musicians to keep putting themselves at risk day after day.

Until there are parties and weddings and sidewalk cafe lunches again, the musicians are staggering their routes so that they only come to this neighborhood, where the streets are named for philanthropists, every two weeks, hoping that their audiences won’t get bored and their generosity won’t wear out. “Maybe it doesn’t keep the world turning, but yes, music is essential,” insists Sosa, the violinist. “It makes us more human.”

A time-lapse shows that, before they unleash storms, the clouds look pretty soothing. (At least from space.)

Cumulonimbus clouds often portend gnarly weather—but when spotted from satellites as they swell, the white, puffy, towering clouds look incredibly soothing. NASA’s Earth Observatory recently shared this image and time-lapse gif of the clouds building above China’s Hainan Island in May 2020. Consider it a few seconds of solace for world-weary eyes.

Hainan Island sits off China’s southeast coast. Its waters appear tropical and turquoise, and its ground is thick with rainforest and stippled with mountains that rise above plains. The humid climate and steep landscape make storm clouds right at home—and as a result, the sky frequently crackles with lightning.

A few types of clouds are typically associated with such rugged terrain. Lenticular clouds, for instance, often sit downwind of slopes; one also often hovers above Lítla Dímun, a tiny Faroe Island that looks as though it has been topped with a dollop of crème fraîche.

Cumulonimbus clouds build on sticky days, NASA notes, when hot, wet air rises. On Hainan Island, this convection process is dialed up as humid sea air rolls across the plains and smacks into the mountains, where it’s forced skyward and then condenses into clouds.

The process unfolds over the course of several hours, notes Kathryn Hansen at the NASA Earth Observatory; the sky might be clear in the morning and crowded by clouds in the afternoon. The still image at top was taken on May 11, 2020, at 2 p.m. local time from NASA’s Aqua satellite, and the accompanying animation shows the change over the course of the day, as seen by Japan’s Himawari-8 satellite. Whatever time it is where you are, set aside just a few seconds to put your head in the clouds before returning to Earth.

Yet vegetation persists there. And as the first large-scale algae map reveals, "green snow" acts as a carbon sink.

Photosynthesis and Antarctica. It may not be the most intuitive combination, but the icy continent—famous for sculptural icebergs and marching penguins—is also home to communities of blooming algae, mosses, lichens, and even one species of grass.

They’re rare, of course: Less than one percent of the entire continent is permanently ice-free to begin with. And what terrestrial vegetation does exist must rely largely on melting snow and ice for its water supply.

It’s all part of a fragile ecosystem that scientists are eager to understand as global temperatures rise, affecting not only large sheets of Antarctic ice but also the delicate balance of life there.

A team of U.K. scientists recently created the first-ever large-scale map and estimate of the extent of green algae on the Antarctic Peninsula—a mountainous extension that stretches more than 800 miles toward South America and has experienced one of the most rapid rates of warming in the world. The study results, published in the journal Nature Communications, show that the “green snow” is a significant carbon sink for the continent, absorbing approximately 479 tons of carbon a year through photosynthesis.

“On a global scale the carbon-dioxide absorption is tiny, but at the same time it’s extremely significant for Antarctica,” says Matt Davey, who led the study by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey. The tonnage, he adds, is roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon emitted by 875,000 car trips averaging 10 miles per journey.

The amount of carbon absorption from Antarctica’s algal blooms—which come in green, red, and orange varieties that can make the snow where they dwell appear colored—is likely to be much higher, Davey says, as scientists gain a fuller picture of their total biomass across the continent.

Photosynthetic life on Antarctica also includes those mosses, lichens, and two flowering plants (Antarctic hair grass and Antarctic pearlwort), which contribute further to the total carbon uptake.

Algae communities tend to be relatively abundant along the coastline of the Antarctic Peninsula during the austral summer months of December through February, when the average temperature is just above freezing. The green algae included in the study favor wet, slushy snow, because the microorganisms need liquid water to reproduce, says Davey. They also thrive near penguin colonies, bird nesting sites, and seal hangouts, as animal poop offers nourishing nitrogen and phosphate for the blooms.

To achieve greater accuracy in their results, the scientists supplemented data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 2 satellite with measurements from the field. Information from the satellite, which measures specific wavelengths of light reflected off the Antarctic surface, could be hampered by cloud cover and false signals that could be misread as green algae, says Andrew Gray, the paper’s lead author.

The researchers also invited citizen scientists to send photographs of algal blooms taken over several summers. “It’s great data for us because we can’t be everywhere,” says Davey, who recently started a new position at the Scottish Association of Marine Science in Oban.

Red and orange algae were excluded from the study because they have pigments that can interfere with the satellite, says Gray, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and the NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility in Edinburgh. “There are red species and green species,” he says. “But you also get green species turning red in the same way you get trees turning red in the autumn.”

(The study notes that the green blooms detected by satellite may include some red and orange cells, but its findings are based on readings of chlorophyll, a green pigment, and assumes the blooms were predominantly green species.)

Gray and Davey say their future research goals include incorporating red algal blooms and, eventually, extending their mapping across the whole of Antarctica. They also want to better understand the algae’s life cycle and physiology. Says Davey: “The more we can understand about the biology and physiology, the better we can understand the [broader] ecosystem.”

A big question for scientists studying all types of vegetation on Antarctica is how its ecosystem will fare as higher temperatures encroach on this remote region of the planet. (In February, Brazilian scientists reported the hottest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica: 20.75 degrees Celsius—or nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Current predictions forecast an expansion in algal blooms and plant growth as snowmelts accelerate and new ground opens up. But like so much in nature, a number of dynamic and interconnected factors are at play. Among other things, the impact of climate change on penguins, birds, and seals may also affect the survival of algae, mosses, and their brethren—interwoven links of life whose future is now shifting at a not-so-glacial pace.