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The Perks And Pitfalls of Being a Famous Tree

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A notable tree in southeast Alaska (Photo: Joseph/Flickr)

To be recognized as a Great Tree, in New York City, is not just a matter of having the correct heritage or coming from the right family.

There's a certain meritocracy and populism to it, although the Greats do tend to live in some of the most desirable sections of the city—Central Park, Washington Square, Prospect Park, or up in wealthy Riverdale, in the Bronx. Also, it helps to have put down roots here decades, even centuries, ago. But when the New York City Parks Department first listed the city's Great Trees, in 1986, it recognized all manner of celebrity trees—not just stately old elms and giant oaks, but trees that were associated with Jacob Riis or Boss Tweed or Revolutionary War hangings.

As impressive as New York's Great Trees might be, there are other ways to measure greatness, too. Champion trees, for instance, are notable for one reason: they are very large, some of the largest known specimens of their species in their country. There's a list of those, too—a "National Register of Big Trees"—although anyone who wants to find some of these Big Trees may have a hard time: Like human celebrities, the country's most notable trees can be elusive.

"We try to be very sensitive about where they are,"  says Bryant Smith, of American Forests. They don't want to send flocks of tree-spotters and paparazzi to harass the trees and ruin their lives, so, says Smith, "we don’t post the location data for a lot of these trees."

For a person, achieving fame or prominence comes with both perks and pitfalls. But what are the advantages of being a celebrated tree? And what are the dangers? While humans have long venerated old and large trees, we've also cut them down and razed whole forests of their less superlative brethren. Around the world, tree lovers have compiled lists of the tallest, largest, oldest, most interesting and most charismatic trees—often with the idea that these registries will either help preserve the lives of these extraordinary trees, or help prompt people to take more care of trees in general. But, like human celebrity, it's not clear that tree celebrity is really good for anyone involved.

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(Photo: Unsplash/pixabay)

It's not just Americans who have compiled a Who's Who list of their most popular perennials. London's Great Trees, Hong Kong's Old, Valuable Trees—OVTs, for short—and New Zealand's Notable Trees are all roughly equivalent to New York's list. Australia, Britain, Belgium, Hungary, Poland and Germany all have lists of champion trees, and every year, Europe crowns a Tree of the Year. This year, it's an oak tree that lives on a soccer field in Estonia.

These celebrity trees usually have a long history. In New York, for instance, Great Trees tend to be old trees. "Usually they’ve been around for many centuries," says Leslie Day, author of the Field Guide to the Street Trees of New York City. "That makes them venerable. They’re survivors. They’ve survived the changing city, they’ve survived war and fire and drought, and bacteria. They're strong, and they're great things of beauty."

Champion trees earn their place on these lists by earning high scores in formal systems that calculate the size of trees. But size and age aren't the only qualities that attract people to trees. Other celebrated trees—whether they're called great trees, notable trees, monument trees, heritage trees or legacy trees—might commemorate a fallen soldier or mark a battlefield. Or they might have been planted by someone special—a head of state, maybe, or a famous author. They might have survived through intense deforestation or been used as a ossuary. They may have an interesting story to tell. Or maybe they are just shaped like a large bird.

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A lime tree (Photo: Penny Mayes)

But, for whatever reason they make the list, celebrity trees do tend to be large and old. And that makes them particularly vulnerable. The ecologist David B. Lindenmayer has found that large old trees are often targeted for destruction, either for their wood or because they threaten human safety in densely populated places. Their size and age also makes them particularly valuable to their ecosystem: with their big, small and middle sized branches, their nooks and crannies, their deeply riddled bark, they can provided a multitude of habitats, to plants and animals that would not survive without them.

Protecting these trees, then, can have an outsized impact. And making them into celebrities may be one way to protect them. Some scientists argue that this is one of the best ways to make sure humans take good care of trees—that casting trees as "charismatic megaflora," the arboreal equivalent of polar bears and snow leopards, could inspire people to conserve those trees' homes and indirectly benefit many more species. Since trees' celebrity often depends on their relationship with human society and history, it may be that "framing the conservation of large old trees from a human perspective," as biologist Malgorzata Blicharska writes, may lead to policies that do better by trees in the long run.

It's a simple enough idea. "If people value something they will fight or stand up for it," says Brad Cadwallader, who manages New Zealand's tree register. "Trees can’t speak for themselves, and unless some speaks for them they often get pushed aside. The higher the profile a tree has the greater ‘voice’ it has."

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A 600-year-old oak tree in Japan (Photo: Chi King/Flickr)

There are several cases of maturity helping trees survive. In New Zealand, for instance, a large Tasmanian blue gum was set to be removed from Havelock North, a suburb of Hastings—until the town found out that the tree was the second largest of its kind in New Zealand and had been there for as long as the town had.

But these lists have their limits. "One should be cautious not to make it all too 'narrow,' not to focus just on individual trees and not to treat other (smaller) trees and other elements of ecosystems seem less important," says Blicharska. In Auckland, New Zealand, for instance, Sarah Wyse, a research fellow at the University of Auckland, who specializes in forest ecology, and her colleagues looked at what types of trees were actually protected by the notable trees list, and where they were located. 

"Really common trees were protected quite well," she says. "They’re the ones people see and identify with. But really rare plants were not. Vulnerable trees aren’t being protected." The notable trees list is the main conservation tool Auckland has—and it turns out many of the trees it's protecting aren't particularly notable. A significant portion—about 10 percent—were actually recognized weed species. "It’s better than nothing," Wyse says. "There are trees that can’t be chopped down. But it’s not quite doing enough at this point." 

And even being on the A-list not always enough. In Hong Kong, for instance, the South China Morning Post found that old, valuable trees were being cut down more frequently since the city had created an official list, due to concerns about disease and public safety.

Marking a tree as something special might be one way of warning other human beings to play nice; it's an admission that people have dominated the world so thoroughly that if we want these impressive specimens to survive, we need to pay attention to them and protect them. But even when we put trees on a list, we don't always do a great job of respecting them. And if that's what happens to our Great Trees. . . you have to feel bad for the C-list trees, and the anonymous woody biomass that doesn't make it on any list at all.

article-image(Photo: Jim Bahn)


The World-Famous Researcher Who Tried to Find the Loch Ness Monster with Dolphins

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Dr. Robert H Rines at Loch Ness in Scotland. (Photo: Elijah T. Ercolino) 

 The 2009 New York Timesobituary of Robert H. Rines logs enough accomplishments for the eulogies of several people. An M.I.T. graduate, he was an inventor and sonar pioneer. He was an internationally celebrated patent attorney who held many of his own. (Among them are a process for fish growth acceleration and a light communication system for “secret signaling”.) Rines composed music for the stage, including a song for “Hizzoner!” a television play about New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.

But perhaps his most fantastic pursuit was for that of the fabled Loch Ness Monster. Over his lifetime, Rines organized many high-profile expeditions to the loch. Once with funding from the New York Times.

He even tried to use dolphins.

Rines was on his honeymoon in Scotland in 1972 when he spotted a shape in Loch Ness that he believed could be the famous creature. A sonar and radar expert, he was uniquely equipped to pursue his obsession—often on expeditions armed with academic experts and state-of-the-art technology. Not the type to swat away the unconventional, Rines employed eclectic methods in his search. In the book Search at Loch Ness, which documents a highly-publicized 1976 hunt, Dennis L. Meredith writes that Rines had spent part of one summer trying to ply the animal with tempting smells and sounds:

“There were sex glands of eels, sea cows, sea lions; there were substances known to attract fish; and there were tapes of various sea animal sounds to be fed into underwater speakers.”

In 1979, Rines enlisted new team members in his quest: a pair of bottlenose dolphins.

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A Plesiosaurus from the 1896 book "Extinct Monsters". The Loch Ness Monster is often depicted as looking like a Plesiosaurus. (Photo: Biodiversity Heritage Library/flickr)

The New York Times News Service reported that Rines was training the dolphins at a Florida facility to wear harnesses and vests tricked out with strobe lights and miniature cameras. According to an account in a June 1979 issue of New Scientist, special lightweight cameras were designed to fit inside a cylinder just 10 cm in diameter. Everything was “falling into place,” according to Rines, and the dolphins had succeeded in trailing sea turtles and sharks.

“The obvious problems of using the dolphins in fresh water and at relatively lower temperatures have received very careful attention,” Rines told the news service. “With unanimous agreement by our Navy and other institutions and other experimenters in this area that there is absolutely no danger or discomfort or strain on the dolphins in operating as we propose at Loch Ness.”

After training, the dolphins were slated to go through a period of “acclimation to colder water” before being spirited away to the chilly shores of Loch Ness.

And according to declassified documents, Rines and his cohorts had a possible high-profile conspirator in the plan, namely the British government. 

In 2006, The Sunday Timesreported that declassified documents revealed a 1979 letter penned by David Waymouth, a civil servant at the Department of the Environment to an official at the Scottish Home and Health Department. (The National Archive of Scotland has many official records on file pertaining to the Loch Ness monster, from communications parsing techniques for discovering Nessie to whether or not legal protection should be extended to the cryptid.)

“This department is presently considering the issue of a licence to import two bottle-nosed dolphins from America for the purpose of exploring Loch Ness, a scheme which has already resulted in opposition from the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Animals.” He went on to write, “Clearly, however there are other factors, mainly political, that you might wish to consider before the licence is issued.”

Per The Sunday Times, no response to the proposal was recorded. And in the end, it didn’t matter, because tragedy cut the project short.

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Anthony Shiels's 1977 photo, also known as the "Loch Ness Muppet". (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

On June 27, 1979, wire news reported that one of the dolphins had died. The dolphin “was organically sound and died from unknown causes” according to an inconclusive necropsy.

In a Boston Magazineprofile of Rines, the monster-hunter recalls the troubling incident:

"He was constructing a saltwater pool he planned to float in the loch that would allow the dolphins’ skin to recover from the freshwater exposure when one of them died on a stopover at the Hull Aquarium. Rines believed the dolphin, who had never before been separated from its handler, had died of  ‘a broken heart.’ He was so upset that he shipped the other dolphin back to Florida and called off the scheme." 

Rines’ obsession may sound incredible today, but taken in historical context it doesn't seem so fringe. While plenty of experts and publications scoffed at the idea of a large aquatic reptile swimming around a Scottish loch, plenty did not.

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 Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle. (Photo: Sam Fentress/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Rines’ 1976 expedition to hunt Nessie, for instance, was funded in part by the New York Times. The 1977 book documenting the expedition was published by a Times owned imprint. From the book:

 “The Times, known as the ‘Gray Lady,’ was apparently ready to kick up her skirts a bit; she would give Rines and the Academy $20,000, and in turn would receive first newspaper rights to any pictures, a 24-hour head start on any major stories, and the sole rights for her reporter and photographer to go out in the research boats with the expedition members.”

Experts from M.I.T and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto were members of the expedition and zoologists from Harvard, Cambridge and the Smithsonian Institute were advisors. The scientists employed black and white color underwater cameras and lights, sonar, and 24-hour video surveillance. The National Geographic Society was concurrently sponsoring a Nessie hunt, and the two teams celebrated July 4th together with a fife and drum parade, according to one report.

Rines died at 87 and taught at M.I.T. until the penultimate year of his life. He never gave up his belief in Nessie, but eventually concluded after so many years of searching, that she had finally died. So far, though, no one seems to have found her bones. 

Update, 6/23: An earlier version of this story incorrectly used the word "autopsy" to describe the necropsy performed on the dolphin. As one reader noted, if it was an autopsy, another dolphin would be the one performing it. We regret the error.

 

The Lesser-Known History of the Confederate Flag

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article-imageSome designs "as unlike as possible the Stars and Stripes," nonetheless rejected by the Committee on the Flag and Seal in 1862. (Image: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

“We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer,” said Governor Nikki Haley, speaking of the Confederate flag flying above the South Carolina statehouse at a press conference yesterday.

But what, exactly, is that flag symbolizing? Those who want to take it down point towards its reappropriation, in more recent years, by segregationist groups, the Ku Klux Klan, and other perpetrators of racial violence, like accused Charleston gunman Dylann Roof. The people who want to keep it flying say it stands, instead, for South Carolinian values—heritage, pride, and history.

Historically, though, the flag meant something very different. 

The flag that many now consider the "Confederate flag" is just one of many designs the Confederacy used over its four-year tenure—there were three state flags and numerous battle flags. The design that hangs in South Carolina was never actually one of those state flags. And if you look at its particular history, it becomes clear that those whom its supporters supposedly seek to honor—the flag’s designer, the soldiers who fought under it, and the Confederates who flew it—would probably not recognize its current use. 

In fact, if you consider how they thought of their own flags, it starts to seem likely that they might be among the first to take it down.

article-imageThe Confederate Battle Flag over the South Carolina Capital in 2008. (Photo: Eyeliam/Flickr CC BY 2.0)  

All parties can agree that the Confederate flag that flies above the South Carolina statehouse grounds is very, very difficult to lower.

For one thing, it’s padlocked to its pole—a decision that has seemed somewhat shortsighted since last Wednesday, when the state and national flags were taken to half mast to honor the victims of the AME church shooting in Charleston. For another,  thanks to the South Carolina Heritage Act of 2000, the flag cannot be moved without two-thirds approval from both the state Senate and the state House of Representatives. Since getting this approval requires convening meetings of each, the Confederate flag will likely be fluttering in its controversial place for many more months.

In some ways, this is an old fight, although not perhaps for the reasons you'd think. “The battle over the battle flag represents one of the most intensive and extensive ongoing public dialogues about U.S. history,” says historian John M. Coski in The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem, his comprehensive 2009 book on the subject.

Flags meant a lot to the Confederates. After the first seven states seceded, one of the first things they did was appoint a Committee on the Flag and Seal, chaired by South Carolina’s William Porcher Miles. When they sent out a public call for suggestions, the Committee was overwhelmed by entreaties to “preserve the principal features of the Stars and Stripes,” so as to not let the Union “monopolize” a symbol that still held power for both sides.

It “does not represent to the world [the] oppressions & wrongs [done to us],” said one letter-writer, “but the independance [sic] & prosperity of a great country.”  In response, the Committee commissioned the “Stars and Bars”—two thick red stripes with white in the middle, and a blue field in the top left corner with a circle of stars. This served as the official flag of the Confederacy for a little over two years, from 1861 to 1863.

article-imageWilliam Porcher Miles, designer and champion of the Confederate Battle Flag. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

It also made committee chairman Miles furious. The Stars and Stripes, he told anyone who would listen, was a flag of “tyranny,”  and for the Confederacy to base their own flag on it was a decision that contained “no propriety.” Although Miles was “terribly abused” for these opinions, he kept advocating for a different flag—one of his own design. This flag kept the colors red, white and blue (which, Miles said, were not inherently tyrannical), but arranged them instead into a now-familiar design—red, with a blue X and white stars.

His fellow committee members told him it looked like “a pair of suspenders.” But after the war actually started, Miles and his flag finally got their big break. As it turned out, the Stars and Bars looked too similar to the Stars and Stripes, especially when lack of wind left it slumped down on the pole. “At least one Confederate regiment fired on another Confederate regiment, possibly because it was unable to distinguish between battle flags,” says Coski.

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The first Confederate National Flag, the original seven-spangled Stars & Bars, flies over Charleston in April 1861. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

A high-ranking general named Pierre Beauregard proposed that the Confederacy increase their symbolic arsenal to include “two flags — a peace or parade flag, and a war flag to be used only on the field of battle.” The peace flag was taken care of—but what about the war flag? Miles had just the thing, and his Battle Flag came onto the scene, introduced to soldiers with a rousing call to “under its untarnished folds… find everlasting immunity from an atrocious despotism.”

As the war grew bloodier and more protracted, Confederate soldiers and citizens started to turn on the Stars and Bars, whose echoing of the Union flag, said Southern Illustrated News, had become “suggestive of the detested Federal Government and its oppressions.” An 1862 Committee on the Flag and Seal meeting, convened to address the problem, and ended up agreeing “that the Flag should be as unlike as possible the Stars and Stripes of the United States.”

Inspired by Miles’s now-popular battle flag, they settled on what they called the “Stainless Banner”—made up of a smaller battle flag “on a pure white field.” At least one newspaper saw this as a symbolic sponsorship of white supremacy, calling it the “white man’s flag” and praising it as thus “emblematic of our cause.” 

article-imageVarious Confederate battle flags. Regiments were proud of their own flags, and not everyone adopted Miles's. (Mary A. Livermore/Public Domain)

After the “Stainless Banner” fell out of favor—it got too dirty on the battlefield—the Committee took up one more redesign. Named the “Blood-Stained Banner,” it was identical to the last incarnation, but with a big swath of red on the right side. A month after its adoption, the Confederacy surrendered.

This history is revealing on a number of levels. First, it shows that the flag flying over the grounds of the South Carolina capitol started as a battle flag, not a peacetime flag—it stood originally not for a collection of states or for a non-partisan national identity, but for a war. Second, it suggests the importance of leaving old symbols behind.

The first Confederate flag, the Stars and Bars, got its initial popularity from nostalgia: Confederates who had lately left the Union wanted to stay connected to it, and to look past the tyranny they had, in their minds, wrenched themselves from. But this was short-lived, and the flag that lasted was one that represented, as Coski puts it in his book, “a separate and independent nation,” one that planned to create its own history rather than remain in transition. To move on from “oppression and wrongs,” one must eventually move past the signs that flew above them.

Even the original Confederates could agree with that.

article-image"The Stainless Banner," somewhat stained. This flag design was used from May 1863 to March 1865. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

 

FOUND: Is This a Photo of Camera-Shy Vincent van Gogh?

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(Photo: Jules Antoine/Romantic Agony Auction)

This photo—technically, a melainotype—was taken in 1887, likely by the amateur photographer Jules Antoine. A few years ago, a couple of European art enthusiasts purchased it at an estate sale. And they thought they recognized some of the people in it. They took the photo to expert Serge Plantureux, and he agreed: All the way to the right? That's the artist Paul Gauguin. Second from the left? Post-impressionist painter Emile Bernard.

And that mustachioed man, to the left of the standing guy? That person, they think, could be Vincent van Gogh.

The experts at the Van Gogh museum aren't so sure: the tempestuous artist hated to be photographed, so why would he agree to this one? Also, a photo expert at the museum asserts it simply doesn't look like him.

But it's pretty hard to say for sure: there are only two photos of van Gogh as a young man. There is, however, one photograph of the artist in his later years, where he is posing with Emile Bernard, who is also in the melainotype found at the real estate sale. 

Otherwise, we've got his self-portraits. The new photo has some similarities to those: the hair swept back to reveal the the widow's peak, and the beard and mustache. But Van Gogh tended to paint himself with a drawn face and pointy chin.

The man in the picture does seem to have an awfully square jaw. But those sharp cheekbones...

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Self portrait, 1887 (Image: Vincent van Gogh)

Bonus finds: An out-of-place, always terrifying pacu fisha 13,000-year-old human footprint

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

On Tour with The War on Drugs: Rochester's Church of Gear

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The church of gear: Rochester's House of Guitars. All photos by Jon Natchez.

For the next few weeks, The War on Drugs' Jon Natchez is going to be sharing his adventures on a current tour. Like any touring musician, Natchez experiences a very specific form of travel, the kind where you usually have 24 hours, tops, to explore a new city. This is the first installment in his Atlas Obscura tour diary.

Today got off to a bit of a slow start; over the weekend we played a couple big festivals, which are always manic and draining. So we slept in a bit and puttered around the bus. Standard morning activity: drinking coffee, eating breakfast, discussing Game of Thrones. (Thrones discussion has become a central part of the band experience, but I haven’t seen any of the show. So I just sit there, feeling like I’m hearing a recap of a very dramatic D&D campaign. )

This is first proper show of the tour and we have a couple new crew members plus some new gear. So we wanted to get set up early to give folks a chance to get their bearings. The venue is the somewhat storied Water Street Music Hall, right in downtown Rochester, a classic example of the type of venue our drummer Charlie calls a “rock toilet”. Decades of grime caked on floors and walls, broken everything in the bathrooms, a smell of rust, mildew, cleaning products, and stale beer. It’s a symptom of my touring-musician Stockholm syndrome that I love this smell. 

The early load-in left the entire afternoon free for the band to go to House of Guitars. Most musicians love to nerd out about gear, and I can usually nerd out with the best of them, but this band takes gear worship to another level. I’ve never known anyone who knows more about guitars and amplifiers than Adam (the band’s lead singer, guitar player, and songwriter), and everyone else in the band runs a close second.

The House of Guitars is the perfect venue to indulge such passions. And going on local explorations is my favorite tour activity—hence this diary. So a few of us—Adam, Charlie, Anthony, our other guitarist, and I—piled into our runner’s car and drove about 20 minutes from the venue to the shop.

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Anthony smiles as he hears about some of House of Guitars' most prized instruments. 

Calling the House of Guitars a “shop” doesn’t really do the place justice; it’s some mix of museum, funhouse and hoarder’s garage. The building is a warren of passages and strange half-staircases, mirrored cabinets filled with gear, boxes of unsorted music-related miscellanea, and endless displays of music memorabilia, running the geeky gamut from a Les Paul guitar signed by Les Paul to a flute signed by Ian Anderson to a violin signed by Charlie Daniels. Some of the guitars—such as a 1953 Les Paul Goldtop, a 1966 12-string non-reverse Firebird, a 1954 Esquire—are literally priceless.The store (also literally) overflows with unique instruments, both hard-to-find vintage pieces and new custom guitars built by Fender and Gibson for the shop. And while the upper floors are divided into a maze of rooms, the bottom floor is a giant open warehouse-type space crammed with a dizzying array of vinyl, CDs (many still in longboxes), piles of sheet music, rows upon rows of used band and tour t-shirts, and other various genres of music-related detritus. It’s an overwhelming amount of EVERYTHING, and you want to paw through it all in search of the undiscovered gem that is surely somewhere right in front of you. And then you want to submerge your entire body in a tub of Purell.

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Top: Charlie digs for 45 rpm gold. Above: The overflowing basement.

The employees are all lovable gearheads who were excited to chat with a group of interested musicians. Their vibe (and for that matter, our vibe) was neatly expressed on a t-shirt one of them was wearing: “All I Care About Is My Guitar And Maybe Like 3 People”. On one hand, the world of gear obsession of is eminently mockable: obsessives with Vitamin D deficiencies endlessly arguing over their toys. But, on the other hand, that obsession is a direct outgrowth of a passion for music; once you fall in love with making music, you’re always searching for and excited by the possibility of new tones and new sounds. Every new guitar or new keyboard or new pedal promises a new world to explore.  Plus, there is an intrinsic magic to a vintage, high-end instrument. Holding a beautiful old guitar, or bass, or horn, or whatever, you can just feel the heft and elegance of great craftsmanship. And there’s even more magic in the wear of an old instrument: the slickness of a guitar neck that has been played for three decades, the way your fingers will just slot into little grooves on the fretboard that have been subtly worn in over the years.

article-imageMemorialization of one of the great moments in Rochester rock history: David Bowie's outrageously dapper mugshot. 

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A small sample of the instruments on display.
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One of many haphazard piles of amps.

Even if instruments/equipment aren’t your thing, House of Guitars is still one of those institutions that has accumulated a fascinating history. A 50-foot long wall, once painted white, is completely covered with thousands of signatures of visiting bands and musicians visiting over the decades. A fun game: searching for the names of musicians you love (hey there’s Steve Diggle from the Buzzcocks!) scattered among the hundreds of dustbin-of-history bands (hey there’s Buxx!) that never made it. I’m a little bit obsessed with band lore, particularly the almost/should have/never made it stories of obscure groups, and it’s kind of wonderful and tragic and overwhelming to look at the sheer volume of all the Buxxes on the wall. Each one traversed an complete arc, writing songs, practicing, getting out on tour, recording and releasing albums, dreaming of a big breakout, ultimately not breaking through and then breaking up, experiencing some measure of glory and tragedy along the way. A novel, or at least a short story, behind every one of those fading signatures.

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Photos of the shop's owner posing with various visiting luminaries over the years.

There’s also a pretty fantastic photo wall-of-fame, dozens of shots of various visiting music luminaries posing with the shop owner, Armand Schaubroeck. Schaubroeck himself is an essential part of the House of Guitars experience: He founded the store out of the basement of his mother’s house in 1964, and still is at the shop daily. He regaled us with tales of his late ’60s band, Armand Schaubroeck Steals. I haven’t checked out their music, but on display in the store are two of their album covers and they are spectacular. According to Schaubroeck, they moved to New York City, where Andy Warhol became enamored of them, but it all fell apart after Valerie Solanas shot Warhol, and they moved back to Rochester.

Again: every band has some weird and fascinating (and probably not exactly factual) story. Also worth noting: the wonderfullow-budgetcommercialsSchaubroeck has madeover the years for the shop, which are legendary among Rochester locals.

article-imageWall of signatures featuring various notables and not-so-notables.

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Steve Diggle! 

Anyway, Adam ended up trading in a Telecaster he doesn’t play any more for a really sweet old Gibson Discoverer amp, and then we went back to the club for soundcheck. At this point in the day—4pm or so—the working day for the band really starts: soundcheck, a break for dinner, getting ready for the show, playing the show, breaking down and loading out. All that activity takes us to about midnight. At that point, I headed to the somewhat musty Rochester Plaza Hotel, where we had our day room. I wanted to grab a shower before retiring to the bus. The hotel was dark and quietand on the door to room 540 was this crumpled sign: “No one is allowed in this room. Do not open it for any employee or contractor no matter what. The only person allowed in this room is Paul Kremp.” That detail seemed like a very Rochesterian thing to see before bed.

 

Smile! It's the Fish With Human Teeth

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A sheepshead fish. (Photo: Andrea Westmoreland)

Over the weekend, a fisherman in New Jersey caught a fish that he described to local news as "different." He'd "never seen anything like that before in the lake," he said. What made this fish so notable? It had teeth—but not the sharp, pointed teeth of a piranha.

Pulling back the lip of the fish revealed a row of large, dull choppers. Human-looking teeth.

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The fish in question. (Image: Screenshot via 6ABC)

This fish was a pacu—a freshwater Amazonian fish that is related to piranhas. They're both big, flat fish, and they both have jaws with teeth growing out of them. But while the piranha uses its teeth to snap bites out of other fish, the pacu uses its bony protrusions to eat aquatic plants, nuts that fall from trees and snails.

Knowing that doesn't keep those teeth from being deeply uncanny, though. They look like they could have been stolen from a human.

American encounters with pacu are more common than one might imagine, given that the fish's natural habitat is a continent away. But since 1970, the US Geological Survey has documented a total of 114 sightings. The reports have come from across the country, but most commonly from Florida (21), Texas (13), Georgia (6), Indiana (6), and North Carolina (6).

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Yellow dots denote one pacu sighting; green dots mean 2 to 5 (Map: U.S. Geological Survey)

These fish have been found in canals, ponds, lakes, rivers, creeks, gullies, brackish tributaries, bayous, reservoirs, and, once, in a gravel pit. But before they were found out on their own in the world, every single one of them most likely lived in an aquarium. Pacu can survive in relatively chilly water, but even in Texas, the water gets too chilly for them to overwinter. Really, the only way for them to end up in American waterways is via a pet store: they grow fast, and it seems that many a fish owner has bought a pacu only to find that a large fish with human teeth was not a creature they could handle.

Once, though, there were fish with human-like teeth that made their homes, of their own accord, in America. Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay was named for the sheepshead fish, whose teeth are even more disturbing, as they look like human teeth but come in multiple rows. These teeth are perfect for grinding down the shells of shellfish—like the oysters that used to grow in passels in the waters around New York City. Here's what they look like:

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Yeah. (Video: nancydavidphd777/Youtube)

If this seems like a nightmare-inducing abomination, it might be helpful to think that fish pioneered teeth. Right now, the best theory of tooth evolution posits that the exoskeleton armor that fish had developed moved towards the perimeter of their mouths—the first fish teeth were likely something like spiky lip scales. These spiky lip scales would have provided their owners a significant advantage in diet. With the power to rip other living creatures apart, they could move beyond life in the mud and filter feeding.

Or, as one fish-tooth researcher put it to Nature a few years ago: "We now have to assume our teeth evolved from the armor of mud-slurping fish." And while evolution took that idea in a different direction for many fish—which often have equally creepy shell-crushing dentition pads further back in their throats—the pacu just happened to evolve teeth that look disturbingly like our own. So eat up?

 

Why the 'Sixth Extinction' is Always in the News

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article-imageRemains of the dodo, a relatively well-known victim of this latest extinction. (Photo: Semihundido/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

As you may have heard, humans are killing everything. According to a study published last week in Science, the earth is practically hemorrhaging mammals, birds, and reptiles, and Homo sapiens might not be far behind. The paper, which The New York Times called “blunt and frightening,” set out to “assess . . . whether humans are causing a mass extinction” by comparing current extinction rates with pre-human background rates—how quickly species disappeared before we came along. Its authors found that yes, we’re in the middle of a huge die-off, and yes, it’s our fault.

If you read this and felt a sharp jab of familiarity, it’s not the ghost of the Western black rhino back to exact revenge. It’s likely a sign, instead, that you’ve heard something similar before. Perhaps you recognize the conclusions of, supporting evidence for, and tenor surrounding this discovery from Scientific American in 2014, or Newsweek in 2013, or The Guardian in 2012, or the The Huffington Post in 2011, or New Scientist in 2010, or The New Yorker in 2009, or BBC News in 2008, or Nature in 2007. If you’re into books, maybe you spotted it in Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction this year, or in works of the same name by Terry Glavin (2007) or Richard Leakey (1996).

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A sampling of sixth extinction headlines throughout recent history. (Atlas Obscura)

Most of these articles and books center on journal articles published by biologists, geologists, and paleontologists. This isn’t, in itself, too strange—studies are done on the same subjects all the time, because that’s how knowledge progresses. What’s surprising, says Dr. Stuart Pimm, is how little the conversation has changed—especially since the science driving it has actually changed a lot.

Pimm, who serves as the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation at Duke University, has studied extinction for his entire career, and authored one paper on the current mass extinction, in Science, as far back as 1995. “This is a story that crops up every year,” he says. “If I might draw an analogy, it’s as if the world woke up one day and said ‘oh my god! people are dying! and they’re dying from disease, and this is really terrible!’. . . there is this tendency for people to rediscover the appalling news.”

article-imageThe golden toad, last seen in the wild in 1989. (Photo: US Fish and Wildlife Service/WikiCommons Public Domain)

This is unfortunate, Pimm says, because there are more encouraging developments that the public could be discovering for the first time instead. For example, those increasingly accurate, attention-garnering extinction rate estimations are the result of innovations that also make active conservation efforts more effective. “We now have much better technology to study where species are, where they’ve been moved by global warming, and where they are likely to be threatened,” as well as where they’re more likely to be saved, Pimm says. This has led to recent resurgences of whales and bald eagles, as well as other less well-known species, and a vast increase in protected areas.

When you take this into account, conservationists aren’t just doomsayers, they’re doctors, too. “What happens when you go and see your doctor?” says Pimm, continuing an earlier analogy. “She doesn’t say, ‘You’re going to die’. . . she says, ‘These are the following things we can do to make your life better, longer, more productive.’ We in the conservation profession spend our time looking at ways in which we can prevent species from going extinct.”

article-imageScientists put a tracker on a sea turtle in the Tropical East Pacific. (Photo: NOAA Photo Library/Flickr Public Domain)

Pimm published another mass extinction paper in Science last year diagnosing the current crisis, as well as pointing out how much better we’ve gotten at mitigating it, and offering suggestions about where to focus next (namely, on reconnecting and protecting ecological hotspots). But, he says, many reporters missed that second thread. “I was disappointed that much of the media coverage insisted on calling it the sixth extinction, and spent less time than I would have liked in talking about the fact that we are now following what’s going on with very much better information than we had in the past,” Pimm says. Of this latest headline-stealing paper, Pimm says he thinks it “reiterates the fact that we have an extinction crisis.” He then does some of his own reiterating: “I am disappointed that it doesn’t talk about solutions.”

Perhaps because many of the reporters he is disappointed in were quoting him directly, Pimm has since moved away from the term “sixth extinction”—"it has this air of cataclysmic finality,” he says, “and I think it misses really the important things that are going on."

And while emphasizing cataclysmic finality is a good strategy for getting attention, it’s not so great at precipitating change—even if knowledge inspires action, apocalyptic knowledge can cancel it out. As environmentalist Edward Abbey once wrote, “when the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about.”

article-imageAn Eastern Black Rhinoceros in Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. This species is critically endangered, and its last Western cousin was killed around 2001. (Photo: Ikiwaner/WikiCommons GFDL)

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The Photographer Who is Getting Inside Abandoned Rural America

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The abandoned Island Grove Methodist Church, built circa 1885 in North Florida. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

Photographer Kelly Micheau started out as, in her words, an “armchair explorer.” After watching a documentary about Paris’ famous catacombs about five years ago, she began scouring the internet for stories of old, abandoned places. Eventually, she got the urge to hit the road and started mounting her own expeditions in and around north Florida. The Far Enough Photo project, which documents the decaying 19th-century structures she stumbles upon, was born.

Urban exploration (or “urbex”) is a popular term for the scoping out of old buildings, but Micheau’s pursuit is a bit more specific. Her niche, she says, is "in the homes, churches, and schools of the rural South, referred to as 'rurex' until someone coins a better term!”

In addition to finding and photographing these abandoned buildings around North Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, Micheau researches their history in great detail. She answered questions about her project via email. 

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Inside an abandoned Methodist church, built circa the 1870s in south Georgia. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

Atlas Obscura: What is it about abandoned and historic buildings that fascinates you?

Kelly Micheau: How could they not be fascinating?! 

Remnants of another time, left to rot in this one. Like memorials to their builders’ hopes and intentions, these places represent so much more than just four decaying walls. 

I enjoy the peek into what life was like for someone from a different time. 

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An abandoned Presbyterian church in southwest Alabama. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

How do you find the structures you document? Once you've located them, how do you decide to go inside? Do you ever take mementoes? 

The process of finding these places can be tedious, but is also part of the fun. 

Sometimes I know of an exact building that I have seen previously documented and I will spend hours, days—or, in one case, two years—trying to find it for myself. This generally involves lots of Googling, hunting through Flickr, digging through archived old images, and scanning satellite images looking for the needle in a haystack!

But If I don’t have a specific structure in mind, I usually find them by good old-fashioned wandering. I avoid highways like the plague and I almost always refuse to take the same way home. 

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An abandoned home in North Florida. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

Ideally, I would have the chance to see inside each of them, but realistically, its just not always possible. I respect “No Trespassing” signs, I don’t break windows, and I don’t pick locks. If a structure appears reasonably safe for entry (like the roof isn’t going to collapse and the floors aren’t falling in) and I can find an open entry, I generally go for it. With all that being said, I will first exhaust every opportunity I have to get permission. I won’t hesitate to knock on a neighbor’s door, visit the local gas station to ask locals for information, and in many cases handwriting letters I’ve mailed to the property owners. 

As curious as I might be to see the inside of a location, I am just as concerned with respect to the place’s original builders and current property owners. Just because a structure is abandoned does not mean that someone somewhere doesn’t own it. The building and its contents are not mine to do with whatever I want, regardless of the fact that many seem to think so. 

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An abandoned boarding home for railroad workers in North Florida, built circa the early 20th century. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

Is there a fine line between an explorer and a trespasser? How do you decide where that line is?

In my mind, I would like to think that there is a difference between explorer and trespasser, but I would be lying to myself. Legally speaking, if you are on any private property without permission, you are trespassing. It’s not as if the rules don’t apply to me, just because I have a camera in my hand. I just have to be okay with the consequences. 

Many of these buildings are beginning to decay. Do you ever feel unsafe? Have you had any close calls?

Most of these buildings are already in advanced stages of decay, so safety concerns are always something I need to consider. I often feel concerned about the structural integrity of these places, and although I’m pretty brave, I’m not reckless. Paying close attention to buckling floorboards, leaning walls, and caving ceilings is obviously important. Because I’m careful in this regard, I haven’t had any close calls with building safety, per se. 

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A worker's boot, left behind in a rural Georgian farmhouse built circa the 1870s on a cotton field. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

Once you've documented a house, you do historical research into the house's history. How do you conduct your research? What are some of the most interesting histories you've uncovered? Do you have a favorite?

Ah, the research! Like hunting for places, this can be tedious, too, but adds so much more to the experience for me, and hopefully my readers as well. My starting point is almost always on the county property appraisers' site, where I will use a physical address (or the closest one I know) to track down the property owner's name. Often with historic homesteads, the property will still be in the same family and I can track how it has changed hands from one member to another, often ending up in trust. From there, I will scour the internet for information on the family through local historic sites, genealogy forums and so on. I can follow a family’s movement through census records and, any time I can, I try to track down descendants who may still be in the area and willing to share history with me. 

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Inside an abandoned home in Georgia. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

Each place has a unique history to uncover and I feel just as compelled to find out about the modest shack that housed tenant farmers as I do the grand plantation estates. Because of the time frame that I focus on (early 1800s to early 1900s) each home had many people who took their first and last breaths inside. I am acutely aware of this when I get to visit a place that undoubtedly has incredible history to one family somewhere.

In their own ways, each property grabs my interest and becomes like a pet project to me until I have uncovered all that can be uncovered. Whichever I am currently researching tends to be my favorite. 

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A military jacket inside an abandoned home in North Florida. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

What's the strangest or most surprising artifact/structure you've come across?

Often the buildings I find are empty, having been cleaned up by the owners, or scrapped and looted. But about 20 percent of the time, I will find mementos and artifacts left by the original owners. And in more instances than you might imagine, I find homes that are completely full with the material possessions of someone who stood where I am standing. Clothes in the closet, photos on the mantel, dishes in the sink, as if something so drastic and so immediate happened that it stopped time in this space. 

The most surprising artifacts I have found are written letters that have been left behind. Very personal communications between loved ones when things had to be written down and sent by post. Important messages that, today, I cannot imagine taking days to arrive. Messages that, as I read now, I am offered a most intimate glimpse into the past. 

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Old technology on an abandoned porch in Georgia. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

Are you a homeowner? If so, do you wonder about what will happen to your home in 100 years? If you aren't a homeowner but hope to be some day, will you live in an old house?

I am a homeowner and I often think about the structures where I live and work and what will become of them. Will some random woman being touring my decaying home one day, wondering about who I was or why I left? Snooping around my remnants, calling it curiosity and research?

This project began as an opportunity for me to see and interact with the past, but also provides a chance to see what’s to come. What our places look like when we’re gone. It’s like having a rewind and fast-forward button. 

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Letters left in an abandoned home built circa the 1890s in North Florida. (Photo: Kelly Micheau)

What tips would you give to anyone who is interested in exploring old buildings?

Exploring should be just that. Get out there, drive, and find stuff for yourself. 

Slow down. Open your eyes. Be safe. Be respectful. Take photos. Get to know the world around you.

See many more images from the Far Enough Photo project on Flickr and at Kelly Micheau's website.


FOUND: A 3-Mile-Tall Pyramid Mountain, in Space

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 See, there at the bottom? (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Since NASA's Dawn probe arrived in March at Ceres, a dwarf planet in our asteroid belt, it's been seeing some strange stuff. Bright spots, mostly. But now it's also found a pyramid-shaped protrusion—NASA describes it as "a mountain with steep slopes" in the middle of a "relatively smooth area" of the planet's surface. And it's huge—three miles tall, NASA says. You can see it in the image above, sticking out of the planet's surface, like a giant pimple on a chin.

Naturally, all of humanity is taking all this very calmly.

But even NASA scientists aren't sure what to make of all this. We should have more answers later in the summer, when Ceres creeps in closer to the planet. 

article-imageAnother view of the mountain, seen in the top right corner (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Bonus finds: A Roman shipwreckgold braceletsISIS golden coins

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

 

These Skiers Don't Need Mountains

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Ahmet Dadali in Utah. (Photo: Brent Lafleur/Flickr)

The freestyle skiers of the 1990s were incredibly jealous of snowboarders. By that time, skiing competitions had become highly regulated affairs, banning certain tricks and mandating the use of safety gear. But snowboarders were unencumbered by strict rules and competitions, free to ride as they pleased. Adding insult to injury, snowboarding was slowly usurping skiing's position as the most popular mountain sport. It was clearly time for something new in the ski world.

Enter street skiing. 

The Canadian Olympic freestyle ski team was the first to experiment with merging skateboarding–a quintessentially urban sport– with skis. After practice, the team would goof off, and try to copy the same tricks they saw the snowboarders doing: half-pipes, sliding rails, landing backwards, and flips and spins off of jumps. 

The problem was, the skis at the time were not made for doing tricks. Knowing this, the team's coach, Mike Douglas, decided to take matters into his own hands. He shopped around an idea to many ski manufacturers: a ski that could go backwards just as easily as it went forwards—and also be durable enough to slide over metal rails in the snowboard parks that were cropping up on mountains all over North America. The ski manufacturers, unconvinced of this design's appeal, responded with a healthy dose of scorn. 


Tanner Hall's extremely punk-rock segment from Propaganda, a 2001 ski film.  


Nick Goepper's winning run from the 2014 X-Games.
Goepper and his peers are the first generation of trained, Olympic-caliber "pro freeskier."


JP Auclair's street segment from "All I Can" Sherpa Cinema's 2011 film

In 1998, Salomon, a ski company, finally appeased Douglas, and debuted the first purpose-built trick ski, which created a movement toward the new style of skiing. Four years later, "freeskiing" was included in the X-Games, and by then it had developed a series of sub-disciplines, including slopestyle (where skiers perform tricks over a series of jumps, rails, and other obstacles on the slope), big air, and halfpipe. 

As metal rails multiplied in snowboard parks (now called "terrain parks" to be more inclusive), skiers started to look at their home cities and towns a little differently. If they could slide metal on the mountain, why not slide on handrails in urban settings? 

Instead of mountains, freeskiers perfected their craft in stairwells, parks, and schoolyards. It’s both a logical progression of adapting to the surrounding environment, as well as a bold attempt at reclaiming the "free" of freeskiing. The first challenge is in finding a suitable location. Street skiing is, by nature, a group venture, and different skiers like different things. Some prefer to hit dangerous features high off the ground, while others prefer more technically-oriented skiing in which speed and danger take a backseat to performing a difficult trick or sliding the rail. 

Using shovels, street skiers painstakingly sculpt the snow around the spot to their liking. This is where it gets creative—where civilians see a simple railing, or stairwell, the skiers see something to jump off, slide on, or ride over. It's a new way of looking at the urban landscape: equal parts creativity and athleticism, all connected through skiing and snow. 


Atlas Obscura chatted with two of the world's best street skiers, Mack Jones and Cory Vanular (both based out of British Columbia) to talk about the finer points of skiing in the streets, and how they do what they do. Mack, and fellow skier Rob Heule, along with snowboarder Pat Slimmon and filmmaker Graeme Meiklejohn, recently completed a 30-day tour of the Canadian north in a rented RV where they skied pretty much anything that wasn't on a mountain, and created the film Ski The North. Last year, they drove across Canada in an RV skiing in cities along the way and producing the film, Meanwhile in Canada.


Karl Fostvedt in Detroit, 2014. Courtesy of Poor Boyz Productions

Atlas Obscura: In terms of your most recent films, how do you decide where to go in the RV? What goes into deciding the itinerary for these trips?

Mack: Last winter we filmed Meanwhile In Canada, where we drove across the country to Halifax. So this year was a little bit different, because we didn't really know what we were getting into. The first year, we had a bit more of an organized plan—we put the word out, so we had kids on Facebook messaging us the spots in their town, and we kind of hit up everyone we knew, so at each spot we had like four or five options. But that one was pretty organized. We didn't really know what we were getting into in terms of RV life—like, it was pretty damn cold in the prairies.

Haha, yeah I could imagine.

Mack: But, this year for Ski The North we had literally no plan, we were planning on, and told our sponsors that we were going to produce three different webisodes, and going out to the Kootenay Mountains. But the weather sucked, so we decided, screw it, we're just going to make one big video. So we just decided to go up to Whitehorse [Yukon], with literally zero plans—we didn't know of any good rails to hit, anywhere. So that was pretty hack in the way we found stuff.

 
Charles Gagnier using walls as landings. Quebec, 2011. Courtesy of GSL Productions

For your skiing style, what do you look for at spots? What do you like to ski, versus other people?

Mack: We just look for really cool rails. Or jump spots. I really like urban jumping right now. We kind of just discuss it, driving around a new city in the RV. But I mean, even if it's something that we don't particularly want to ski, that doesn't fit our styles, but it will look legit on film, we'll hit it. Some things are really fun to ski on, but they look bad on film. Other things are really awful to ski, but those are the ones that produce the best shots because it's scary, or has high consequences if we fall. 

 

           Andreas Hatveit shreds his backyard rail park, 2013. Courtesy of Andreas Hatveit

So what kind of questions do people ask you when they come across you guys shooting? What kind of conversations come out of that?

Mack: Well they always ask the trump card question, "Why don't you guys just go to a ski hill?" And they are totally right: the ski hill is safer, there's actual snow, and it's not nearly as dangerous. But usually people just ask us what we're doing, or what were doing it for, and, "Can we find you guys on YouTube?" Most people like us, but it's best to just be really nice. 


Tom Wallisch, one of the best competition skiers today, playing in the streets of Salt Lake City in 2008. Courtesy of Level 1

Right, right, that makes sense, try not to ruin the spot if more people want to come try it.

Mack: Okay, so here's a story for you. We were in Brandon, Manitoba. We were skiing this cool double-elbow rail [a rail with two sharp bends in it] ... and the janitor comes out, and he's like, "What the hell are you guys doing? It's minus forty, and you have your ski gear on."

And were like, "Yeah man, just having some fun, doing a bit of skiing." I think he literally thought we were trying to make little turns down the hill. So we sessioned the rail for another few hours, got all of our shots. Literally thirty seconds after Rob got his shot, he [the janitor] comes back out, and goes, "Are you guys actually serious, skiing on the handrail? I thought you were just skiing down the little hill." So we got kicked out instantly after that. But yeah, just goes to show being ambiguous is the best way.

You gotta give other people a chance to hit the spot, and if you are respectful to the security guards, maybe more people will get to do it. 

 
Will Wesson flips through trees in Colorado, 2015. Courtesy of the Line Traveling Circus

What kind of equipment do you usually bring on shoots?

Mack: You need a winch. They are pretty rare though. We'll take it to a mechanic, and some have never even seen one. It's literally like a motorcycle motor attached to a spool of rope, with a wakeboard handle. And they pull you pretty fast. You also need all the stuff for the shoot—generator, shovels, cameras, lights if you're shooting at night. The winch allows us to hit features that would have been unimaginable ten years ago.

Tanner Hall in Salt Lake City,  Utah, in 2004. Courtesy of Steven Rozendaal

In terms of the ski industry, how much support do you get? You obviously aren't a competition skier. Has your support increased or decreased, or changed at all in recent years?

Mack: I'd say support has gone down. I get a budget to pay for projects. I have a travel budget from my sponsors—it's there, but sometimes hard to make it work. It's like the one percent versus the masses. There's seriously only like 10 guys that have viable enough contracts with their sponsors to support their life. Skiing to them is like a legitimate career. For the rest of us, it's just fun, and it's still competitive. Even though you're not in competitions, you want to get the coolest stuff done so you can get more money to do more projects. 


One of the most acclaimed ski-movie segments of the last few years was filmed in abandoned factories and warehouses in Detroit.

Cory: I mean, no one is really trying to make money off of this, they just want to produce a good film. People just want the budget to do what they want to do.

Mack: It's dangerous, and usually uncomfortable, so you wouldn't do it unless you really loved it. Like, why would you go freeze your ass off and risk injury? It's not for money. I don't know anyone that's in skiing because they see it as a way to make money, and the people that do make money, they love it, and they're really good at it, and they are just happy to ski, and making income on the side is just a bonus. 

Combining frisbee golf with flips. Norway, 2015. Courtesy of Real Skifi

Alright, so if you had to explain what you do to someone who's never skied before, what would you say?

Mack/Cory: Haha, that's actually a really hard question.

Mack: I'd say it's the result of a natural progression. It started with moguls in the '70s, and then park [terrain park skiing on mountains], and then obviously people want to explore options, so the street skiing scene grew as the sport grew. It's like, we've done these tricks on the mountain, and we look around, and there's all these handrails and ledges and stairs around us, of course we are going to try our tricks there, too. It's cool to branch out into the cities, and having to work a little harder and be more creative to ski well. It's definitely shaken up skiing, what was a pretty traditional, old sport.


Real Skifi doing the most insane tricks, always. Norway, 2015. Courtesy of Real Skifi

It's definitely an interesting idea: Urban skiing is cool because kids that are growing up in non-traditional ski areas, finally have the resources and the inspiration to get out there and ski. You don't have to be in British Columbia or Alaska to have a great day on skis.

Mack: It's so cool. And that's the whole point of the RV projects that Rob and I do. You can go to places that aren't ski towns. One of my favorite places to ski is Saskatoon [in Saskatchewan]. They have awesome rails, really friendly people, and no one skis there. You can make something from nothing—as little as a stair set or handrail.

I think it makes skiing way more accessible to everyone. If you have ski gear, you can ski. You don't have to go and spend hundreds of dollars on lift passes or anything. It's cool you can go out and ski on a thing that was never designed to be skied on, and you can build it with snow that falls from the sky. You don't have to pay for that either, you shovel it up, sculpt it however you imagine. You get to spend time working with your friends outside, and then you start doing tricks. It's that feeling of accomplishment that makes everything entirely worth it, even though it's not really glamorous or fun at the time. it's freezing cold out, usually, but the results are always great. 


Mack and Rob's 30-day ski adventure across northern Canada.

FOUND: A Fossil That Shows How Turtles Got Their Shells

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Meet Pappochelys. (Image: Rainer Schoch, Stuttgart Natural History Museum)

Turtles, if you stop to think about it, are really strange and amazing creatures. They're like mini-dinosaurs that have somehow grown part of their skeleton on the outside. How in the world did that happen? 

That's actually been a pretty big mystery. As curators Rainer R. Schoch and and Hans Dieter Sues write in a new paper in Nature: "The origin and early evolution of turtles have long been major contentious issues in vertebrate zoology." But they think they've found part of the answer: an extinct species of reptile that they've named Pappochelys.

Pappochelys is not quite a turtle yet—but it's on its way. It could grow up to 8 inches and used its "tiny, peg-like teeth" to eat worms and insects, Smithsonian Institution explains. But it also has turtle-like features, including, most importantly, bones on its belly that are starting to fuse together into something like a shell. 

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Gotta get those belly bones working together (Image: Rainer Schoch, Stuttgart Natural History Museum)

Pappochelys also lived right in between creatures we recognize as turtles and extinct creatures that not all scientists were convinced were turtle ancestors. Pappochelys "is far older than all so far known turtles," by 20 million years, Schoch told Reuters. It's a "missing link" that allow scientists "to tell this really cohesive story on the origin of the turtle body plan," another curator told NPR. And it'll help turtle experts answer the ultimate mystery in the shell game: Why, exactly, did some reptiles end up wearing their bones on the outside?

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There's a turtle ancestor in there somewhere(Image: Rainer Schoch, Stuttgart Natural History Museum) 

 

Bonus finds: A new dinosaur named Sefapanosauruswater ice on the surface of comet 67P, weapons that Swiss peasant used to defeat the army of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1315the only known egg  specimen of a rare birdhairy-chested yeti crabs

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

 

The Elaborate Case for Where the Best Birds in the World Live

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A view of a beach on an island in New Caledonia. (Photo: By my LifeShow, CC BY 2.0)

Ornithologists are very helpful in helping the public understand birds. These scientists have taught us how they behave, what they eat, how they think, how they communicate, how they’ve evolved, how they fit into our ecosystems as a whole, and what needs to be done to save them from such scourges as the domestic cat.

But one major flaw in the thinking of ornithologists is that they typically do not engage in debate about which bird is best or where to find the best birds. This is where Atlas Obscura can help: Species for species, the French territory of New Caledonia, in the South Pacific, has the world’s best birds.

To crown the area with the best birds, first, we have to decide our criteria for what “the best birds” even are. First up: there must be several interesting bird species that occur nowhere else on Earth. Second: To be a “good” bird, a bird must have something superlative. It could be very large or very small, very bright, very loud, very smart, very weird, very cute, or very threatening. No matter how you get there, there must be something about it that makes you say—"hmm, good bird."

New Caledonia is a series of dozens of islands, many of which have no permanent population, in the Pacific Ocean, over 600 miles east of Australia. In land area, the territory, which at some point in the next three years will vote on whether to become independent of France, is just a bit smaller than New Jersey. (It’s unlikely to become independent just yet, given the preferences of its elected officials.) Yet in terms of biodiversity, New Caledonia is a giant among giants—it’s commonly referred to as a “hotspot,” boasting an obscene number of plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth.

That’s largely due to its particular geologic history. Our best guess is that the islands that make up the territory, along with New Zealand, separated from Australia somewhere around 80 million years ago, and that they further separated from New Zealand, according to some recent studies, as long as 37 million years ago. There are only a few islands on the planet that have been isolated from a continent for that long, and perhaps only Madagascar can equal New Caledonia in terms of the strange forms evolution took in isolation.

Without the ability to cross the substantial waterway between New Caledonia and Australia, the species that found themselves on these islands multiplied and evolved to take advantage of every conceivable ecological niche. Some animals grew absurdly large; the New Caledonia Giant Gecko is the largest gecko the world, known for the strange growling noises it makes while perched in trees. Many species known as “living fossils,” like the nautilus, make their homes in the New Caledonia Barrier Reef, the second-largest barrier reef in the world. Dugongs, which look like a cross between a manatee and a vacuum cleaner, patrol the shallow waters around many islands. Giant clams, which can grow to weigh over 200 pounds, thrive there. New species are regularly discovered and the World Wildlife Fund classifies the area as under-studied. New Caledonia is basically Jurassic Park.

What does this mean for the birds, though? There are no native land mammals in New Caledonia (though there are a few bat species and several marine mammals, like seals, in the rich surrounding seas). Without mammals, many bird populations evolved to take advantage of particular food sources and habitats, which means that there are many birds in New Caledonia that are unlike any other birds anywhere else in the world. Here are some reasons that this island chain’s birds are the best:

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The New Caldedonian Crow: wicked smart. (Photo: Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum Volume 3/Wikimedia)

The Smartest Crow in the Room

The New Caledonian Crow does not look particularly unusual; it’s a medium-sized, all-black crow. It’s a bit smaller than the American Crow, though you’d be forgiven for confusing the two species upon first glance. What makes it so impressive, and such a strong argument for New Caledonia as the territory with the world’s best birds, is in its behavior.

This crow is widely accepted to be one of the most intelligent birds on Earth. Both in the wild and in captivity, this crow has proved capable of using as well as creating its own tools, and studies in laboratory environments have found that the crow is able to solve complex cognitive puzzles using tools. Very rare for any animal, it can make tools out of materials it’s never seen before and would likely never see in the wild, like bending metal wire into shapes to retrieve food, and it’s also capable of using tools to retrieve other tools.

This makes the New Caledonian Crow the only non-primate species able to create new tools or new uses for tools and teach them to its peers. Suck it, parrots.

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Top: The Kagu. (Photo: By Scott Meyer). Above: The Kagu is the only bird with a membrane covering its nostrils (Photo: By Frank Wouters, CC BY 2.0

An Adorable Flightless Bird

The Kagu is one of those birds that figured out an ecological niche that would have normally been taken by mammals, and exploited it. Long-legged and nearly flightless, the Kagu rarely leaves the ground, and spends most of its time rooting around under leaf cover for insects and reptiles to eat. It lives only on Grande Terre, the largest island in New Caledonia, where it frequently delights photographers by raising its head feathers and looking surprised.

The Kagu is a very ancient bird and has resisted attempts to find any close relatives. It’s the only member of both its genus and its family, and though it’s generally grouped in with crane-like birds like the Sunbittern of South America, it has no close relatives still alive.

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Great pigeon, the Goliath Imperial Pigeon. (Photo: By Jean Ravau et Léa Hatteschweiler, CC BY-SA 3.0

Excellent Pigeons

The pigeon and dove family is perhaps the most underrated of all the bird families; even our own domestic pigeon (and the feral populations thereof) has its charms. But in the South Pacific, the pigeon family is not just widespread, but beautiful, with spectacular plumage. In New Caledonia, there are two notable species of endemic pigeon: the Goliath Imperial Pigeon, which is one of the largest in the world, and the Cloven-Feathered Dove, a lovely green-and-yellow bird with nice neat bands.

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An uncommon sparrow, the Green-Backed White Eye. (Photo: By Papier K, CC BY-SA 3.0

Even the Little Common Birds Are Cool

One of the more common endemic species in New Caledonia is the Green-Backed White-Eye, the size of a house sparrow and about as frequently seen. But look how cool this little bird is! Most white-eye species are dull, but this particular species, often found in large flocks searching for papaya to eat, is unusually vibrant, with a ring of tiny white feathers around its eyes.

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Top: The largest parasite of its kind: the Channel-Billed Cuckoo. (Photo: By Bilby, CC BY 3.0.) Above: The Shining Bronze Cuckoo (Photo: By Aviceda, CC BY-SA 3.0

Shitty But Interesting Parasitic Birds

New Caledonia is home (for at least part of the year) to several parasitic bird species. They’re not parasitic of people; instead the birds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, which incubate the parasite’s eggs until hatching. After hatching, some of these birds, like the Shining Bronze Cuckoo, the smallest cuckoo in the world, will murder all the other birds in the nest. Others, like the Channel-Billed Cuckoo, the largest cuckoo (and largest brood parasite) in the world, will simply outmuscle its unrelated nestmates for food, ensuring that they don’t survive.

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Top: New Caldedonian Parakeet (Photo: Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1882) Above: The Horned Parakeet (Photo: By TP ONG, CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Parrots

Heavily forested, tropical islands usually bring to mind one thing in the bird world: brightly colored parrots. New Caledonia has some excellent ones; among others, the Horned Parakeet boasts an unusual black-feathered face and two sinister-looking head feathers that give it its name, and the New Caledonian Parakeet likes to hang out in groups and eat mussels, much like humans.

There are also lots of visitors to New Caledonia, birds that may also be spotted in Australia or New Zealand or other islands in the South Pacific but that are commonly found within the French territory. Some of these are very very good birds.

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The small falcon, the Nankeen Kestrel (Photo: By Jim Bendon, CC BY-SA 2.0
 

Very Big Raptors and Very Small Raptors

A key argument for the avian supremacy of any given place is its birds of prey, and a further distinction should be given to those places which boast both a very large and scary raptor and a tiny and adorable raptor. New Caledonia has this distinction. The White-Bellied Sea Eagle, an enormous bird that likes to fly upside-down underneath other birds and grab them while screaming like some kind of Greek nightmare, is sometimes seen in New Caledonia. Same with the Nankeen Kestrel, a very very tiny species of falcon that makes occasional trips to the islands.

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Aptly-named Enigmatic Owlet-Nightjar. (Photo: By Joseph Smit

Ah, A Mystery

Because New Caledonia is not really adequately studied, there are lots of bird species whose continued existence is unknown. One of these is the Enigmatic Owlet-Nightjar, an extraordinarily strange bird that was last seen, maybe, we think, in 1998. Owlet-nightjars are very confusing birds; they look quite a bit like the nightjars, a family of birds that includes the Whip-Poor-Whills of North America, which in turn look (and act) like weird alien owls. Like the nightjars, the owlet-nightjars have flattened heads and very short but wide beaks which open improbably and scarily wide, and are mostly carnivorous.

But the owlet-nightjars are different enough from regular nightjars in their DNA to be classified as their own order, and every species that has yet been placed in the owlet-nightjar order lives in Australasia. Close analysis of their skull shapes finds that they might well be recently evolved from...wait for it...the hummingbird family. What the hell.

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Top: Masked Booby. (Photo: By Duncan Wright) Above: Little Pied Cormorant (Photo: By Benjamint444, CC BY-SA 3.0

Fishy-Smelling Seabirds

Seabirds move back and forth from the islands of New Caledonia to New Zealand and Australia and back, sometimes, but that doesn’t disqualify them from consideration in our Best Birds Ranking. New Caledonia is often home to the Little Pied Cormorant, an adorable penguin-colored diving bird which, like other cormorants, is often found spreading its wings like Batman to dry them. The Masked Booby, a spectacular diving bird, is the largest species of booby and known to breed on a few of New Caledonia’s islands. And the Sacred Kingfisher, which breeds in Australia but lives the rest of the year on islands like those in New Caledonia, was ascribed by the Maori to have many powers over the waves and oceans. It probably does, too.

New Caledonia is a spectacularly strange place; there is nowhere on Earth with more totally unique species given the small size of the islands. And there are almost certainly more to be discovered. If you know of a place with better birds, come at us: info@atlasobscura.com.

 

Burn It? Crush It? The Historic Problem of Seized Ivory

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article-imageConfiscated ivory in Times Square on June 19th. (Photo: Heidi Ruffler/FWS/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Last Friday, Times Square, usually a center and symbol of commerce, hosted an event dedicated to the opposite. Milling crowds snapped pictures not of electronic billboards, but of an enormous industrial rock crusher parked in front of the American Eagle Outfitters store. And instead of taking home tchotchkes, crowd members systematically picked from a pile of souvenirs and placed their chosen items on a conveyer belt that led directly into the crusher’s mouth. As the machine ground the objects into dust, the onlookers applauded.

This was no ordinary New York City afternoon—this was the Times Square Ivory Crush. 

A co-production of the United States Fish and Wildlife Federation, the State of New York, and the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Society, the event on June 19th featured thousands of spectators waving signs and dodging chunks of tusk spit out by the machine. The 2,000 pounds of ivory destroyed at the Times Square crush came in the form of carved tusks, animal statuettes, and one very elaborate two-foot boat that drew particular attention as it sailed up the conveyer belt.

Although much of it was browned and looked antique, that's likely a result of false aging techniques dealers use to trick consumers and jack up their prices. Most of the ivory probably came from elephants killed within the last 10 years.
 article-imageJohn Calvelli of the Wildlife Conservation Society prepares to set a tusk on the conveyer belt at the Times Square Ivory Crush. (Photo: Julie Larsen Maher/WCS)

Ivory crushes like these are part of the contemporary plan to rescue the world’s largest land mammal from the jaws of the international wildlife trafficking trade. African elephant populations are declining drastically. Habitat loss and a burgeoning illegal ivory trade have combined to reduce overall numbers by hundreds of thousands over the past quarter century. Poaching accounts for 65 percent of these deaths—bad news for the elephants, and for those African countries, like Kenya, whose economies are closely tied to safari tourism.

Ivory trafficking networks stretch across oceans and political borders—although many states and countries have already banned the sale of ivory, those who still have legal trades serve to “mask the much bigger illegal trades,” says Joe Walston, the Vice President of Global Conservation for WCS. This trade endangers not only elephants and park rangers, but the poachers themselves, who are often poor and at the mercy of the warlords, drug cartel leaders, and other international kingpins who call the shots.

One of these kingpins is Victor Gordon, the ivory dealer whose illegal stockpile was crushed on Friday. He “has never been to Africa,” reports National Geographic, but spent years hiring Gabonese smugglers to do his dirty work. On June 4, 2014, Gordon received a 30-month jail sentence after being caught during Operation Scratchoff, which "probed illegal ivory sales by a New York City jewelry distributor and two Manhattan retailers." By contrast, poachers on the ground in Africa sometimes get life sentences, or are killed by anti-poaching squads

article-imageThe conveyer belt at work as the crowd looks on. (Photo: Tylar Green/FWS/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

With their marriage of spectacle and activism, ivory crushes and "burns," in which a pile of ivory products is set alight, seem tailor-made for social media: the Times Square crush featured speeches by politicians, conveyer belt photo ops for celebrity guests, and even its own hashtag, #IvoryCrush. But though they may seem built for millennial consumption, the first one actually happened 26 years ago. 

In 1989, Dr. Richard Leakey, newly named director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, needed a way to draw attention to his country’s rapidly dwindling elephant population, which had decreased by half—from 1.2 million to 600,000—over only 10 years. It was a particularly crucial moment: the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was set to meet that October in Switzerland to determine whether to put elephants on the international endangered species list, and thus ban ivory trade worldwide.

Rather than lobbying in the traditional way, Leakey decided to draw attention to Kenya’s poaching problem by burning the country’s entire stockpile of confiscated ivory—12 tons of tusks, worth around $3 million (the equivalent of $5.75 million today). South Africa and other countries who hoped to keep ivory trade intact decried the burn as a “publicity stunt”—which was the whole point.

article-imageThe US stockpile, ready for crushing. (Photo: Kelsey Williams/FWS/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Leakey hired a Hollywood pyrotechnics expert to arrange the tusks, enlisted a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm to drum up press, and convinced Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi to light the pyre and give a speech. “Actions speak louder than words,” Moi told the hundreds of gathered officials, journalists, and diplomats. The event made headlines worldwide, and the ban was passed.

“The idea was to communicate that ivory has no value, except to the elephant,” says Dr. Paula Kahumbu, CEO of the Nairobi-based conservation agency WildlifeDirect. “Like the PETA fur campaign in the 1960s, those who owned ivory began to feel guilty and uncomfortable, as their trinkets and jewelry represented death. The destruction led to a public shaming, and demand collapsed, leading to a drop in the price of ivory. In turn, this meant profitability for poachers. Traffickers evaporated and poaching stopped.”

The collapse in demand for ivory that followed the first ivory burn reversed when CITES allowed several countries to sell their stockpiles in 1999, and then again in 2008. Elephant numbers dropped once more—and countries who wanted to show their support for conservation started to crush in earnest. In July 2011, the Lusaka Agreement Task Force, which protects African flora and fauna, burned five tons, again in Nairobi National Park. Gabon torched its entire stockpile in June 2012, and a year later, the Philippines became the first country outside of Africa to destroy theirs—after clean air groups objected to a public burn, government officials hacked up the tusks with backhoes and saws, and then incinerated them in a crematorium.

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An unknown person of importance lines up to destroy a piece of ivory in Times Square. (Photo: Cara Giaimo/Atlas Obscura) 

Denver crushed six tons in November 2013 (a few months after President Obama established a task force to address wildlife trafficking), and China pulverized exactly one-tenth of a ton more in January 2014. Chad, which has lost an estimated 97 percent of its elephants over the past 50 years, threw its hat in the ring in 2014, as did France. That same year, Hong Kong began a quieter process, burning its 28-ton stockpile bit by bit in private.

The U.S. crushes ivory because it’s more efficient and effective than burning it. U.S. National Wildlife Forensics Lab tests have proven it can take months for ivory that is set on fire to be totally destroyed. Fires in Nairobi and elsewhere are guarded day and night until they burn all the way out, for fear that poachers will come and re-steal the ivory. On Friday, Times Square sounded and smelled like a stone-cutting factory, and pigeons pecked at ivory fragments littering the ground.

If 2013 set the pace for ivory destruction, 2015 is keeping up. In addition to the Times Square crush, this year has seen burns in Congo-Brazzaville and Ethiopia, as well as Kenya’s largest ever—15 tons, the start of what President Uhuru Kenyatta promises will be complete stockpile eradication by the end of the year.

Contemporary organizers are quick to point out that a burn can’t really untangle, let alone solve, the complex problems of the ivory trade. But criticizing ivory crushes for not directly reducing demand for ivory, Walston says, is “like criticizing a car for not making coffee in the morning.” Instead, they’re “a symbolism of commitment [that] needs to be followed up by action.”

The past few years have seen many African countries becoming a “stronger voice in the international community about this,” says Walston, with strong new anti-poaching laws in the most afflicted countries. Now, even holdouts like China–where a huge portion of ivory from recently poached elephants ends up–are announcing unilateral ivory trade bans. The Times Square crush was designed to be another symbolic blow. “If one of the world’s great consumer nations in one of the greatest consumer cities makes a show that it’s no longer willing to consume ivory,” Walston explains, “that becomes a very powerful statement.”

A statement that is, by design, difficult to miss. As one #IvoryCrush spectator said, “Now they just have to bring the elephants back to life.”

article-imageThe remains, which will be made into a memorial. (Photo: Tylar Greene/FWS/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

This Computer Dreams of Electric Sheep (If You Tell It To)

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article-imageHey, we all have dreams about badger head slinkies sometimes. It's normal. (Image: Jonas Degrave/Twitch.tv)

Think of everything computers do for you. Great news—you can finally give back. Mouse over here, take a few minutes and a few keystrokes, and help a computer program dream.

Today on the live streaming platform Twitch.tv, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is letting viewers influence its subconscious creative process—and the results are mesmerizing. Heads of cauliflower shade into patchworks of peacocks, labyrinths become flamingos, and tarantulas suddenly emerge from globs of ice cream, all in glistening technicolor. See for yourself:

Watch live video from 317070 on www.twitch.tv

The program was built by Jonas Degrave and a few collaborators, all PhD students in the Reservoir Lab at Belgium’s Ghent University. After Google’s crazy neural net doodles took over the internet last week, the students spent a few days creating their own program so that people could watch this robo-art get made in real time.

article-imageThe ANN cooks up a sea star. (Image: Jonas Degrave/Twitch.tv)

Last week we went through how these Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are trained to recognize images, and how this training process can be reversed so that the ANNs draw their own pictures, or enhance them into impossibly detailed memory-collages.

This ANN works in a similar way, remembering the recognizable features of a spoon or a panda and squishing them all together. But instead of carefully pastiching based on one theme, it’s constantly taking suggestions from Twitch viewers and using them to change its own landscape. Twitch users can choose from a list of things the ANN has been trained to recognize, like Dalmatians, space heaters, and meatloaf.

 article-imageAnd snakes. (Image: Jonas Degrave/Twitch.tv)

When the ANN randomly accepts a suggestion, it chats back something like:

"@thelazerpanther: AAAAAah. Ocean liner, that's weird, dude. Props for writing stuff to steer my trip.”

Then, it quickly gets to work turning everything into ocean liners. You can tell what it’s digging at a particular moment by looking in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

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Centipedes leading into trolleybuses. (Image: Jonas Degrave/Twitch.tv)

But you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy watching this network tow us gently through its mind, an ever-shifting, ever-spiraling wormhole in which a jumble of pizza slices slowly becomes a pile of sharks. As the programmers write in their blog post about the project, “We hope other trippers in the world can dig it as much as we do.”

The Vortex of Lake Texoma

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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers posted this video of the vortex on June 5th.

Like a scene straight out of a sailor's worst nightmare, an eight-foot wide vortex opened up on Lake Texoma, Texas earlier this month. But no, this isn't a portal to a horrific Lovecraftian world, and no, it isn't the entrance to the Kraken's lair. 

According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who spoke with Business Insider, the vortex is caused simply by excess water. Flooding on the Red River, the source for Lake Texoma, has caused the lake to increase to record levels, to the point where it has flowed over the Denison Dam spillway - for the first time in history. Because the lake water is so high, the Army Corps needed to open the dam's floodgates to let the water out.

The immense amount of water draining through the floodgates is what caused the whirlpool, much like pulling the drain on your kitchen sink. Only this time, it's capable of swallowing a small boat. 

 


Forgotten Heritage: Subterranean Cisterns of Victorian England

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article-imageA Victorian cistern beneath North London. (All photos: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

The word "cistern" conjures a rather humble image: toilet tank. But to residents of Victorian England, the term had another, much more majestic definition: a cathedral-like subterranean reservoir built to store rainwater.

Unlike the Basilica Cisterns of Istanbul, the disused cisterns beneath London and Leicestershire, located in the English Midlands, are not open to the public. But armed with a camera and caving lamps, Matt Emmett, the urban explorer behind Forgotten Heritage Photography, found a way in to three of these 19th-century reservoirs. These photographs reveal what he saw, but location details are scant in order to prevent a stream of visitors from following in his footsteps.

"All of these locations are not public access and from experience would not be possible via requesting permission," says Emmett. "In all cases we made our own way into them, photographed them and left without incident. I am of the opinion that they need to be photographed as part of their historical preservation."

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The circular cistern above, located in London, "was built in 1844 to supply clean water to a large historic naval hospital," says Emmett. This part of the cistern, the central hub, is notable for its acoustic features. According to Emmett's experience, "standing at the curved outer edge, you could whisper and hear [what you said] returning to you seconds later."

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The cistern above, built in North London in 1868 to store drinking water, has a dozen arched corridors identical to the one pictured. Each such passage measures about 120 meters long, or 394 feet. It, too, has marvelous acoustics.

"The echo in here had fantastic delay to it, my whoop coming back to me around four seconds after it left my mouth," Emmett recalls.

Assuming you don't shout, the vast space would be eerily quiet if not for the Tube line that runs directly beneath it. "Every now and again there is a rumbling that builds and then fades before the silence descends again," says Emmett. 

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The above reservoir, located in Leicestershire, about two-and-a-half hours' drive north of London, "was not used for storage of drinking water and so not technically a cistern," says Emmett. "Instead, this was part of a waterworks and served as a filtration mechanism." The structure was built in 1896.

Find more of Matt’s photos of abandoned sites at the Forgotten Heritage Facebook pageTwitter account, and on forgottenheritage.co.uk.

The 'Unfathomable' Pursuit of Personal Tunneling

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Why dig a tunnel? (Photo: Eugene Sergeev/shutterstock.com)

When Leanne Wijnsma digs a tunnel, it needs to be in a public place. She marks the spot where it will begin and the spot where it will end, and she begins. Normally, when she digs in Amsterdam, where she lives, she uses a small shovel. But when she travels to dig holes—she's dug in Germany, Italy, Belgium and South Africa—and can't bring her tools with her, she'll buy a shovel there, and it'll tell her something about the quality of the dirt.

"Every time, when I start digging, I'm super nervous," she says. "Not one tunnel is the same, and you don't know if it's going to work out. Will something happen? Is the soil ok? Is it too hard or too soft? Will I find something crazy?"

Wijnsma, a designer and artist, dug her first hole after she hit a block with another video project intended to explore freedom. Her tunnels are not long, nor are they very deep underground. She starts by digging around four to five feet into the ground and burrows maybe a dozen feet before emerging on the other end. "I was so much in my head, thinking, a lot of theory," she says. "I just had the urge to dive into the soil and find something really basic."

She thought she would dig one tunnel. She's now worked on a total of 13.

There are practical reasons to dig a tunnel, like to reach a deposit of coal, or diamonds, or some other vein of precious material; to move people, maybe on subway trains, more efficiently than is possible above ground; to transport water or sewage long distances; to make it through a mountain or under a river; to reach your car through a pile of snow. Sometimes, there are reasons to dig a tunnel in secret—to hide drugs or guns or money, to smuggle yourself into a country where you're not supposed to be, to smuggle yourself out of a place you're trapped inside. (Or, according to one recent conspiracy theory, to take over the state of Texas from underneath a Walmart.) Humans have dug so many impressive tunnels that, last year, one paleobiologist argued that tunnels will be humanity's lasting legacy on Earth: no other species has dug such extensive tunnels, of such large circumference, as we have. They could still be there tens of millions of years from now.

But sometimes people dig tunnels for more inscrutable reasons. There was the Toronto man whose tunnels scared the police. The Costa Rican whose tunnel system is bright and cheery. The Russian who tried to create a subway system by hand. The Armenian who had visions that guided his digging. The British "Mole Man" whose tunnels extended in all directions from the basement of his house. The Californian miner who dug a tunnel as a short cut (though no one else was sure what it was a short cut to). The D.C. entomologist who dug two sets of tunnels— one at the house where he lived with his first family, one where he lived with his second.

Like Wijnsma, these men had an urge to dig. But some of their tunnels extended far beyond the scale on which Winjsma is working: they reached multiple stories underneath the ground, or stretched half a mile long. Some of these men worked on their tunnels for almost two decades, using only simple tools to excavate, day after day, foot after foot, creating along with their physical labyrinths another puzzle: Why would a person want to—need to, even—dig a personal tunnel?

ESCAPE from Leanne Wijnsma on Vimeo.

There is a certain cool factor to digging a private tunnel. Just ask any kid who's tried to dig one in the backyard. Technically, many backyard tunnels do not become actual tunnels, which should have an entrance and an exit or, at least, a destination; they are holes in the ground that aspire to be more. (My childhood tunnel was actually in my friend Amanda's yard; we had big plans for our underground clubhouse, before we hit a root and then a rock, and eventually gave up—or maybe grew up.)

It's easier to acquire a tunnel as an adult, especially as an adult who has enough money to hire a professional to build one. Henry T. Nicholas III, who made his money in computer chips, had secret tunnel built behind a wooden panel in his Laguna Hill mansions: it was made to look like stone, with "impression of skulls carved into niches, which were lit by candelabras," Vanity Fair reported, and the contractors who built it claimed it was intended as a place for Nicholas to "indulge his appetite for illegal drugs and sex with prostitutes." The staff of Playboy found Polaroids and a blueprint of tunnels that, apparently, led to the houses of Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and other movie stars. More recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that secret tunnels are becoming more common as a feature of luxury mansions. Among preppers, there's some debate about the safety and utility of installing escape tunnels from a house's basement; it's not a priority for everyone, but some people do opt in to the idea.

The most intriguing personal tunnels, though, are the ones dug by individuals. When earlier this year Toronto police found a tunnel more than 30 feet long and six and a half feet high, with electric lights and a sump pump, the theories of its origins ranged wide—maybe it was a terrorist group, planning to attack the nearby stadium? Maybe it was a drug lab? Eventually, the police announced that it was dug by two men for "personal reasons"—a mystery of its own.

It turned out that the tunnel belonged to Elton MacDonald. (The second man, a friend, had helped him build it.) He was 22 and had worked in construction. He had spent two years building it out as far as he had and used it as a retreat of sorts: he lived nearby, with his family. But even MacDonald couldn't explain, exactly, what had kept him working on the tunnel. "Honestly, I loved it so much," he told Macleans. "I don't know why I loved it."

Like MacDonald, some of the men who've dug extensive personal tunnels have professional skills that have aided them. Manuel Barrantes, whose Costa Rican tunnel system extends over 4,000 square feet, worked as a miner before he started digging, for instance.

Barrantes' tunnels stand out in that they have a clear and practical purpose, namely that he intended to create an underground home for his family. His tunnels are decorated with carvings, of suns, faces, and characters including the Flintstones and, for a massive set of underground tunnels, are remarkably cheery. (The tunnels are now named Topolandia, and they're open for tours.) In Russia, Leonid Murlyanchik's tunnels also had a purpose: originally, he intended to visit a romantic prospect in a nearby town. But that was in 1984, and when he was warned away from the woman, he continued digging, about three feet a day, with the intention of creating a subterranean transportation system for his neighbors.

This is the strange thing about this diggers, though: even when they have a purpose, it's hard to understand how it can justify the effort. Before he died, Murlyanchik would spend a day digging out the next three feet of his tunnel and then another three days shoring it up with bricks and sealing those walls. He kept at this for almost three decades.

And some of these tunnelers do not claim to have a practical purpose. In Armenia, Lyova Arakelyan started digging because in 1985  his wife asked him to put a potato cellar into their house. But once he started, he didn't stop: he kept working on the system of tunnels underneath their house, until he died in 2008. He would sleep for only three or four hours and spent much of his time under the ground. He had, he said, visions of where the tunnels should go next, how they should progress through the earth. When he died, he had reached 70 feet beneath the house.

Visions aside, some other tunnels started similarly. Britain's Mole Man started his project with the intention of creating a wine cellar. And Harrison G. Dyar, the D.C. entomologist, began digging his tunnels after he volunteered to loosen the earth of the family's yard to prepare it for hollyhocks.. For some reason, they just kept digging.

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Lyova Arakelyan's tunnels (Photo: Atlas user littleham)

Marc Epstein has been trying to understand, for more than a decade, why Dyar dug. An entomologist himself, he's writing a biography of Dyar, and while it's about much, much more than tunnels, this strange habit of his subject has been a persistent puzzle.

"I still don't know how he did it," Epstein says.  "It's almost unfathomable, the amount of energy it would take, and he was a frail guy. It still doesn't add up, that's what's so fascinating."

Dyar's tunnels first came to light in 1924, when the alley behind his Dupont Circle house collapsed beneath the weight of a truck. The D.C. papers, like the Toronto papers would almost a century later, went wild speculating whether it was spies or smugglers who'd dug them. They were mysterious. Here's what the Washington Post reported finding there:

"On the ceiling were pasted numerous copies of German newspapers dated during the summer of 1917 and 1918.  Dimly seen in the feeble rays of the electric torches, it was possible to discern in the newspaper articles frequent references to submarine activities then employed by the imperial government of Germany.  Cryptic signs and engravings in cipher defaced the papers to some extent."

But soon Dyar fessed up, and achieved a certain degree of fame for his tunneling habit. In 1932, Modern Mechanix featured his second set of tunnels, which went 32 feet down into the ground and had three levels. He told the magazine that he dug them because it was "an appealing form of exercise to relieve the intense strain of his workday."

"Yeah, he got exercise it, but that doesn't quite explain it," Epstein says. One persistent rumor has been that the tunnels connected his two houses, the one in Dupont Circle, where he lived with his first wife, and the one below the Mall, where he lived with his second. There was a certain scandal to this arrangement: his relationship with Wellesca Allen, his second wife, predated their marriage, and it seems that her children were his.  

It's not true, Epstein says, that the tunnels connected the two houses. But he understands why people might want to think that. "It makes so much more sense that they would connect the houses," he says. "It gives it a sense of purpose."

Instead, it probably went something more like this. Dyar was an energetic guy, with a lot on his mind. He'd clash with other scientists—it was once rumored named an insect corpulentis after an overweight colleague—and his family life was a mess.* His mind, too, was overactive. In addition to his scientific work and his tunneling, he wrote science fiction stories, hundreds of them. Digging tunnels was, perhaps, mesmerizing, even meditative.

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The Burro Schmidt tunnel (Photo: Kurtis2014/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

For Wijnsma, the Amsterdam artist, tunneling is about escape, from a society where everything is planned and structured, from her less physical work, sitting at a desk in front of a computer.

You kind of stop thinking," she says, "There's just the smell of soil; you get blisters on your hands, and your muscles are sore. You only have one goal, and that is extremely relaxing."

Sometimes, she encounters obstacles. In Cape Town, there was a really huge stone. It was maybe 200 pounds, although maybe, in her memory, it's gotten larger. It was heavy enough that she couldn't lift it, and after an hour of trying to move it, she thought that maybe she would give up. She was sitting next to her hole, thinking, that, ok, she would go home, she would leave the tunnel unfinished. But then she got up. She went to the city, she bought a rope, and she came up with a system to pull that rock out.

"It was such a beautiful moment," she says. "I think that is the whole point of the tunnels"—taking on whatever challenge the earth presents and getting past it.

ESCAPE 150429.011 White Hole from Leanne Wijnsma on Vimeo.

 *This paragraph has been updated to make clear that it was Dyar who was energetic and only a rumor that he named the species out of collegial spite. 

FOUND: Deep in the Sea, There Are Corals That Glow

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Corals glow deep (Photo: Prof. J Wiedenmann)

Deep in the sea near Eilat, at the southern tip of Israel, a team of scientists found color—corals glowing an array of green, orange, yellow and red. 

At shallower depths, corals have been known to give off colors, but this is the first time anyone's found this sort of display this deep in the ocean, starting around 165 feet down. 

The team of scientists who found the coral tested them to see if they'd keep producing the colors even when kept in darkness. And some of them did, showing that their fluorescence is "independent of the exposure to light," the team wrote in their PLOS ONE paper. 

It's a little bit of a mystery why they produce these colors. Closer to the surface,  researchers speculate that corals use color as a sunscreen but this deep, very little light penetrates. So why do these corals glow? All we really know right now is that it's enchanting when they do.

Bonus finds: More mysterious goat headsnew firefly species

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

See 12 Miniature Stage-Sets With Vintage Barbies as Models

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(All photos: David Parise/Vintage Barbie and Ken Photos)

Barbie and Ken on the beach, doing yoga. Barbie and Ken with snorkels, underwater. Barbie and Ken in black tie, in the lobby of Miami’s Fontainbleau Hotel.  These images are the quirky creations of David Parise, a photographer who takes a humorous and nostalgic look at the world of Barbie. 

Atlas Obscura interviewed David Parise about his photographs, the appeal of Barbie and Ken, and timelessness of 1960s clothing and design styles.  

How did you start photographing vintage Barbie & Ken?

In 2009, it was Barbie’s 50th birthday and my wife and I were living in Miami at the time. I came across this book which was a chronology of all her and Ken's fashions over the years. As I flipped through the pages I came across the outfits from the early 60s. I was amazed at the quality and details of the clothing. I worked in the garment industry in NYC for many years, and always loved fashion. I also had been a hobby photographer for over 30 years and was always admiring the work of other photographers who shot miniatures. I began tossing around the idea of photographing the vintage dolls in their original outfits with the Art Deco hotels and the beautiful Miami Beaches as a background. 

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How do you choose the settings? 

I love the beaches one because they are virtually timeless. It could be 1960 or 2015. Its also the place that people remember the good times they had as a child. The beach I found out was just easier to create perspective when there is little reference in the background. I also like using the original vintage furniture that was made for the dolls back then and creating a scene of that era. 

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Where do you find the dolls and the original 1960s outfits?

In the beginning I searched online and found many vintage folks and outfits on Ebay. Once I was hooked I searched other resources like private collector websites. 

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What’s the appeal of the 1960s Barbie & Ken? 

At first I was worried about Barbie's bad connotation she has had over the years as a negative role model for young girls, but actually no one in six years has ever mentioned that. I sell [photographs] on the streets of New York now, and I hear stories all day long: "I had that doll and that dress" or "my grandmother passed them down to my mom  and she let me play with them,” all with smiles and that same nostalgia that I have of the 1960s.

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Do you have a favorite, and why? 

One of my favorites is "Girls Smokin' by the Pool". It's an homage to my mom and her sister sitting by the beach club pool smoking away back in the day. I also love the kitchen series; the colors for the original Deluxe kitchen made for Barbie and Ken in the mid-1960s is just amazing.   

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The First Evidence of Recognized Same-Sex Relationships is 4,500 Years Old

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(Photo: Michael Ruiz)

Today, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the Constitution guarantees the right to marriage, and ordered that same-sex marriages be recognized in all 50 states in the country.

This is a first in U.S. history—but far from a first in the history of the world. In fact, one of the oldest objects documenting a same-sex relationship looks something like this:

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Gilgamesh tablet (Image: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP/Wikimedia)

That's one of tablets that tells the story of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest written stories in the world. As William N. Eskridge, Jr., writes in the Virginia Law Review:

The epic describes the relationship between Gilgamesh, the great powerful ruler of Uruk, and Enkidu, a male created by the gods to divert Gilgamesh from wreaking havoc in the world. Gilgamesh and Enkidu become comrades, friends, and probably lovers before Enkidu dies at the hands of the fates.

Even before the time that some of the oldest versions or Gilgamesh (which, like the Bible, coalesced into one text over time) were being written down, in Egypt, two men were buried together in a tomb where bas-reliefs showed two men touching, embracing—in some sort of committed romantic relationship.

In his dissent to the Supreme Court's decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that marriage is "a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs," so that across civilizations, marriage has "referred to only one relationship: the union of a man and a woman."

But the world is a varied place, and over the millennia of human existence, marriage has meant more than that.

In Kenya, it's traditional in the Nandi tribe for women to marry women. In northeastern Brazil, some women would take on the roles of men and marry other women. Eskridge describes evidence that marriage between men was practiced during the Yuan and Ming dynasties in China, from the 13th to 17th centuries. Among Chukchi people, living in Siberian, male religious leaders would sometimes marry other men: "The marriage is performed with the usual rites, and I must say that it forms a quite solid union, which often lasts till the death of one of the parties," one Russian writer reported. And in America, before Europeans settled here, people across the Plains and the Southwest would cross gender boundaries and marry people of their own sex.

These are just a few examples of how civilizations around the world have been open, at times throughout history, to recognizing romantic relationships besides the ones between men and women.

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