Can you spot the black moon? This Friday, in the Western Hemisphere, a rare “black moon” will rise in the night sky, according to Science Alert. But don’t feel too bad if you miss it.
The exact definition of a black moon is something that astronomers are still debating. Some define the term as the new moon that skips February every 19 years, while others use it to refer to any new moon that skips a month. But the most widely accepted definition of the phenomenon, and what is going to occur this Friday, is almost the exact opposite, referring to the second new moon in the same month.
The opposite of a full moon, the new moon is the phase when it virtually disappears from the night sky. Now, it’s happening again, making a second moonless night in the same month, and for a rather dark September.
Those in the Eastern Hemisphere will have to wait until October to get theirs. It's currently scheduled for Halloween.
On the last day of August, farmer Ari Smith of Colorado Springs watched as a sow named Babe gave birth to a litter of six. As the piglets tumbled out, she noticed that one of them wasn't like the others—he had underdeveloped back legs, far too short to support even his tiny body. Smith figured his mother would leave him to die.
But this piglet wasn't giving up that easily. "I watched as he figured out how to walk on his front legs in a matter of a few minutes," Smith wrote on her website, Colorado Cutie Pigs. She named the little guy Miracle, and at nearly a month old, he's still going strong. Video footage from NBC4 shows him trotting nimbly among his boring, four-legged siblings, like a small pink and gray acrobat.
As Miracle gets older and bigger, he will likely need some assistance. According to her website, Smith is in the process of finding a wheelchair for him, but she's also looking for help supporting him more permanently. "I really want him to go to somebody that can deal with his issues on top of being a pig," she told NBC4.
For now, though, Miracle is hot to trot. "He doesn't know anything is wrong with him," Smith says. "He just thinks this is normal, how he walks."
We think you're normal too, Miracle. Normal, except better.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Imagine a dystopian scenario. You fall into a coma and wake up 50 years from today. Among many disconcerting changes (podcasts now download directly to your brain, “Florida” is the name of a sea), the America of 2066 is missing one very unexpected thing: a sport that in 2016 filled stadiums like Madison Square Garden, whose fans included movie stars and chart-topping musicians, whose players received obscenely high salaries, has vanished completely from the national consciousness. Basketball is no more.
Think that couldn't happen? Witness the shocking demise of a once equally beloved American winter sport: indoor bicycle racing.
Back in the day, indoor cycling was just as popular as basketball is today—and harder on athletes' bodies than Sunday night football. Cycling races got their start in the 1890s as endurance events in which cyclists pedaled for six days straight without food or sleep—a feat that made for good theater but often made cyclists go “queer in the head,” according to theNew York Times. After New York and Chicago passed laws prohibiting this exhausting race format in 1898, cyclists started racing in pairs that switched off every few hours, maintaining the popular six-day format while giving riders some chance to rest. (This was the format that, considerably shortened, became today’s madison.)
The partnered six-day races were still plenty exciting. Gripping the bike’s front wheel was the only way for riders to brake, and dramatic crashes were an everyday event. Broken collarbones and life-threatening skull fractures were common; one Chicago track with particularly steeply banked curves was known to fans as “the suicide saucer.” Add to that a nightclub atmosphere, in which betting was rife, live bands played, and cigar smoke flowed so thick it could obscure riders’ vision, and it makes a little more sense why this would be Al Capone’s favorite sport.
At their peak popularity in the 1920s, the six-day bike races at Madison Square Garden and Chicago Stadium were front-page news at The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune, and drew tens of thousands of fans including Barbara Stanwyck and Capone (who, predictably, liked to bet on the sprints). At least one American rider, Jimmy Walthour of Park City, IL, took home a $100,000 contract, making him as well-paid as Babe Ruth. Races in smaller cities across the country, including Newark, Minneapolis, and Detroit, drew substantial crowds, too. Madison Square Garden, however, was so strongly associated with the races that there’s a cycling event to this day known as a “madison”—or in French, the race à l’americaine.
But sometime around World War II, the fun stopped.
As early as 1938, the races at Madison Square Garden were being bumped for tamer, less gangster-friendly events like ice-skating shows. But it was the World War that was the real killer, as young men who might have kept the sport of cycling going were shipped to battlefields instead. Forty-four six-day bike races were held in Chicago between 1915 and 1942, but only one occurred after the war. The Basketball Association of America, which would later become the NBA, formed in 1946, and the management knew an opportunity when it saw one. Basketball teams began booking games at big stadiums, and our modern winter-sports schedule was born.
Today, there are only about 29 velodromes in the entire United States. At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Americans only took home two medals across 10 different track cycling events. (For comparison, Great Britain won 10.) If you ask an American about track cycling, they’re likely to answer: “You mean that weird European sport where they ride around in circles on really skinny bikes?”
Even calling it a “European sport” might be a bit of a misnomer. It’s true that in Europe the indoor cycling tradition isn’t forgotten: several cities including Berlin, Rotterdam, and Ghent still hold well-attended six-day races every year. But today, their popularity has largely been eclipsed by that of road races like the Tour de France. When it comes to indoor cycling as spectator sport, it’s Japan that really carries the torch. An indoor cycling event called the keirin, invented in 1948 as a betting sport, is still wildly popular there; cyclists who participate in the four-day-long meets can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
It’s hard to pin down the reasons behind bike racing’s precipitous decline in popularity among Americans, but the country's car culture seems to be a major culprit. By the early 1950s, Americans had begun tying their national self-image to big gas-powered machines, and dismissing bicycles as small, effeminate, and European. The Chicago Tribune was already hyping this reason in 1962, when it covered the destruction of the city’s main amateur velodrome in Humboldt Park. This was seen as a crushing blow for the sport, as many successful professional racers had gotten their start on this public track.
In the suburbs, however, there were still velodromes left. In the 1980s, a former six-day race mechanic and bike-shop owner named Oscar Wastyn, Jr. helped organize regular Thursday-night cycling races at the outdoor Ed Rudolph Velodrome in Northbrook, IL, not far from Chicago city limits. Though the riders were all amateurs, sometimes as many as a thousand spectators would turn out to watch, according to Wastyn’s son Scott.
It was Scott’s only taste of the fast-paced racing he’d heard so much about from his grandfather, Oscar Wastyn, Sr., who’d been a mechanic in the six-day races (as well as the previous owner of the family bike shop). But even then, he had a sense of missing out. “Six-day cycling was a different animal," Scott says. “Those were professional cyclists, that was their living. These people, it wasn’t their living. They were doing it for fun.” The Northbrook Park District eventually took over the Thursday night races, which still draw as many as 200 riders each summer according to its website.
Today, Wastyn still presides over his grandfather’s (and father’s, and great-grandfather’s) bike shop in Chicago. The walls are festooned with six-day memorabilia, including two brightly painted trunks used by the racers Bill Jacoby and Erwin Pesek. Former racers often donate keepsakes like this to the store, Wastyn says, “so their grandchildren won’t sell them in a garage sale.”
Coverage of the Madison Square Garden bike race from December 10, 1901, including the headline "Bobby Walthour says he'll win race without stimulants". (Photo: Library of Congress)
Neither car culture, nor the destruction of amateur velodromes, nor the NBA can totally explain why America’s Jazz Age obsession with bike racing goes so unremembered today. There is no gangster movie in which Al Capone meets his associates at the cycling track. And what American would consider track cycling their preferred spectator sport?
Maybe the problem was more to do with nationalism. Beloved as it was in America, cycling was never an exclusively American sport. Cities from Buenos Aires to Sydney to Berlin hosted their own six-day races in the 1920s, and many of the stars who drew big crowds at the Garden and Chicago Stadium were French, German, or British. This made sense in the europhile 1920s, when Paris was the center of the cultural world; not as much in the 1950s, when the US was a newly minted superpower and Europe was receding into the background.
The Cold War was when America wrote many of its myths about itself, myths that last to the present day. The international sport of indoor track cycling might have been left out of the collective consciousness simply because it didn’t fit the narrative of American exceptionalism. In a decade when it had to define itself on the world stage, America needed a winter sport that had been invented by Americans, the way that American football and baseball had been. And the glamorous, dangerous international sport of indoor cycling simply didn’t fit the bill.
The Olduvai Gorge, where the eggshells were found. (Photo: Noel Feans/CC BY 2.0)
There's a scale at which time stops making instinctive sense. What we call "ancient" civilizations existed just a few thousand years ago. The oldest piece of DNA that's been sequenced is 700,000 years old. The earliest remains of humans outside of Africa are dated to 1.7 million years in the past; the hominins who preceded humans were walking upright 6 million years ago.
Our ability to see clearly back in time gets fuzzier the further we look back; 700,000 years ago might seem as distant as 1.7 million. One of the most powerful tools we have right now to understand how the world has come together into the present is DNA analysis—but DNA only lasts for so long. Look back into "deep time," the millennia upon millennia, the millions and millions and tens of millions of years of life on this planet that came before, and it's almost like looking in the dark.
Other tiny bits of life, though, can have a longer shelf life than DNA. Proteins, for instance—earlier this year a team of scientist found traces of proteins 240 million years old, preserved in fossilized blood vessels.
Scientists are still debating, though, how much they can trust these very old proteins and which have been "satisfactorily substantiated," as the authors of a new paper put it. How well have they really been preserved? How much information have they retained?
In the new study, published in the journal eLife, a team of scientists was able to pull proteins from ostrich eggshells dated to 3.8 million years ago and authenticate their sequences, making these the oldest proteins ever "extracted and decodes," as Sciencereports.
These eggshells came from a site in Tanzania where the hominins australopithecines walked all those millions of years ago. In the past, scientists have had difficulty finding biological material that's lasted over these long stretches of time in Africa. The environmental conditions aren't conducive to preservation; that 700,000-year-old DNA came from a horse frozen and found in the Yukon.
These scientists investigated whether the calcite surface of a fossilized eggshell might have provided a more stable substrate for proteins to survive, and they found they were right—the proteins had survived.
What that means is that scientists may now be able to find little traces of animals going more than 50 times further back into the past than the oldest DNA takes them. It's as if they were looking in a microscope and all of a sudden could focus more clearly on a much, much smaller scale than they were seeing before.
For instance, this discovery opens up more clearly the possibility that scientists could extract and sequence proteins from ancient hominin bones, which could tell them in much more details how all the human-ish primates walking the earth were related to each other, or not. In an interview with the BBC, one of the scientists called these proteins the "biological barcodes of these relationships." In other words, they may have found a clue to clarifying how humans came to live on and dominate the earth.
At Bolsover in Derbyshire, central England is a restored structure known as a "Cundy House," or conduit house. It is a remarkable remnant of 17th century water supply engineering, built to contribute to the water supply for the nearby Bolsover Castle, which is about 300 metres away and is itself well worth a visit.
This Cundy House, restored in 2003 and currently in the care of English Heritage, was operational until the 1920s. A lead water pipe from the Cundy House used to go downwards towards what is now the main road and then up to the castle’s cistern house at a slightly lower level using a siphon effect. From there it was apparently pumped by hand to tanks at a higher level from where, among other things, it was used to feed a decorative fountain. The pump was severed by road building operations in the 1920s.
This wasn't the castle's only Cundy House, however. A number of similar structures were built south of the castle along the magnesian limestone escarpment that the castle was built upon. However as early as the 1930s these derelict structures were very popular with local children (including the father of the author) who called them “the sentry boxes” or “watchtowers” (understandable since the buildings including a slit-like window high up on the face overlooking the valley) and used them as a playground. The conduit houses have even been identified as watchtowers on official maps, but their non-military function as part of the water supply system is now well established.
The restored Cundy House is built into a steep slope to the north of the castle and, as with all the Bolsover “watchtowers,” at the line of the natural springs. It is separated from the castle by a steep valley containing a relatively busy road. The structure once had a lead water tank, later replaced by a brick tank that is still in place and collecting water, visible through the door grille.
These small functional buildings were clearly intended to have architectural value, too. This is in keeping with the design philosophy of the 17th century iteration of the castle itself, which is really a country retreat dressed up as a fortification. When viewed from a distance the castle keep is intended to (and does) give the impression of being a defensive structure, but close inspection reveals it has virtually no defensive capability. Perhaps mistaking the line of Cundy Houses for watchtowers was deliberate on the part of the builders.
The views west from near the Cundy House, towards the Derbyshire Peak District, are as impressive as the views from the castle itself and particularly so now that the blights on the valley landscape—two coal mines and the Coalite solid smokeless fuel production plant and bi-products refinery—are now closed and gradually disappearing.
Heading west on Interstate 80 in Iowa, you’ll come across a gigantic billboard proclaiming, “18 miles to WOW!” If you follow the billboard’s instructions and get off at Exit 284, that’s just what you’ll say.
In eastern Iowa, just west of the Quad Cities, lies the Iowa 80 Truck Stop, the largest truck stop in the world. Established in 1964, the Iowa 80 Truck Stop has been dubbed “A Small City” and “A Trucker’s Disneyland,” and to this day it serves as the ultimate one stop shop to make every cross-country trucker feel at home.
Spanning dozens of acres and advertised with the words “Iowa 80” in huge red lettering, the Iowa 80 Truck Stop is impossible to miss. Upon entering the two-story, 55,000 square foot facility, truckers will be greeted by the smells of eight different restaurants, from Dairy Queen to the home-cooked Iowa 80 Kitchen. Past the convenience store and rows upon rows of souvenirs, visitors will descend into the Super Truck Showroom, which has every truck part imaginable on display, plus a gift shop, a towering panel of flashing lights, a game room, and even an embroidery center. Three trucks are on display, including one that is painted with an Iowa-themed mural and another that is constantly rotating in circles.
That's just the first floor. On the building's second floor, nicknamed the “Trucker’s Loft,” truckers will find a workout room, old-time gas pumps, and even a walk-in barber shop waiting for them. The Trucker’s Loft also includes a laundromat, a miniature library, a certified chiropractor, the Trucker’s Christian Chapel, and the Driver’s Den, a small movie theatre. Also found at the Trucker's Loft is the “Interstate Dental,” a dentist shop which has been run by Dr. Thomas Roemer for 23 straight years.
Outside of the main truck stop building you'll find a hotel, RV camp, truck wash, and "Dog-O-Mat" dog wash. The 40,000 square foot Iowa 80 Trucking Museum, located a few hundred feet north of the truck stop, is home to the REO Theatre, 304 road signs, and 60 antique trucks. Wow indeed!
Fall is here, and farms are bustling with apple pickers. But at some candy and caramel apple factories, the sweet, crisp fruit comes in boxes year-round.
In the video above, apples are stabbed, dangled from a conveyor belt, and dipped and spun through bubbling caramel. Caramel apples are the successors of the bright red candy apple, a 1908 creation originally made with cinnamon candy around Christmas time. In the 1950s, it’s said that a Kraft Foods employee had been experimenting with leftover caramels from Halloween, melting the candy down and dipping in apples.
While many shops and factories hand-dip the apples, this machine swings the line of apples through the tank of piping hot caramel, bobbing through the melted sugar. Excess caramel is spun off to coat the apple evenly. Each are rolled in chopped peanuts before being taken off the conveyor belt to cool. These caramel apples are packaged and ready to be devoured as a sugary fall treat.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
In the mid-17th century a religious mystic, seeker, and occultist named Johannes Kelpius laid in his bed in Transylvania, and he dreamt of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And so, he went.
Today in the neighborhood of Germantown, a few miles north of Center City, you can see where Kelpius would eventually live and die. By the Wissahickon Creek in Fairmont Park you can enter the cave that the largely forgotten Kelpius called his home.
It's an unlikely spot to await the apocalypse, but religious fanaticism is not a new creation. Here, amongst broken beer bottles and graffiti, is what was once the anchorite’s cell where Kelpius and his band of mystical-minded, radical Protestant “monks” studied the Christian kabbalah, astrology, and magic. They awaited the apocalypse that they believed Revelation had foretold as beginning in this new city in a New World, on the western edge of everything, and east of Judgment Day. And while they waited that date (a 1694 which came and went without the end of the world) they prayed, they divinated, they meditated, they wrote, and they supposedly discovered occult secrets here by the shores of the Schuylkill.
For John Greenleaf Whittier, the Fireside Poet of the 19th century, Kelpius was “weird as a wizard” with command “over arts forbid.” In a province where the second book printed after the Bible was a volume of occult lore, Kelpius was still one of the “maddest of goodmen,” as Whittier put it.
He was born in 1667, only one year after a diabolically and auspiciously apocalyptic year, which saw widespread millennial excitement throughout Europe. He was raised amongst the German minority of Transylvania, then an independent kingdom known for both its religious freedom and heterodoxy (as indeed Kelpius’ future home of Pennsylvania would be as well). Perhaps Kelpius would come to see something similar to that which he learned in his upbringing, among the wilderness of America.
While still in Europe, Kelpius read the works of the Pietist Jakob Böhme, who was also a firm believer in the coming apocalypse. Based on both his reading of Revelation which spoke of an exilic remnant of the faithful that was as a “woman in the wilderness,” as well as glowing accounts of the colony of Pennsylvania, Kelpius became convinced that the “Philadelphia” which John of Patmos wrote of was not the historical settlement in Asia Minor, but rather this new metropolis on the American frontier. At the time, this proprietary English colony was the largest private land holding on Earth; it was also marked by an exceptional ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, truly a remnant of the varied faithful in this wilderness.
Welcomed by that similarly religious non-conformist Penn (even though Kelpius’ private diaries could be scathing to the point of ingratitude when discussing the Quaker), Kelpius would make his home among the growing German population around Philadelphia, such as Daniel Falckner who was advocate for the colony in his pamphlet Curieuse Nachrischt von Pensylvania, and the brilliant polymath Daniel Pastorius who functioned as the de facto leader of the German community. Yet Kelpius and his fellow pilgrims were as men apart from Pennsylvania German society, true to the principles living in the wilderness of the forest with natural caves as their cells, awaiting the end of the world.
While he and his followers lived in their monastic cells, here in what would be Germantown, Kelpius composed some of the first German hymns to be written in the New World, he trained his followers in the divine numerology of gemetria, and the community supported itself by casting astrological charts for the immigrants of Philadelphia. In this, his “Society of the Women in the Wilderness” attempted to create a perfect, communcal society—a utopia which would be present to witness the apocalypse.
Kelpius may have viewed himself as a prophet, but he was no founder of a new faith. Idiosyncratic though he may have been, he viewed himself as within the main currents of Protestant thought. The world did not end in 1694 as he predicted, but in many ways it did die with his death in 1708. His followers, always small in number, were largely dispersed with the magus’ passing. Whether the prophet died in his cave or not is unknown.
But, as a bit of local lore has it, that alchemist discovered the mythic “Philosopher’s Stone” capable of transmuting base metals into gold, only to toss it into the river before he died—even though some followers claimed that Kelpius never really did expire, rather elevating to a higher realm like the biblical prophet Enoch.
The utopian religious freedom promised by Pennsylvania would attract other pilgrims, like the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Moravians in the 18th century. The 19th century would see a young Joseph Smith believing that he had restored the Aaronic line upon the Susquehanna River, as well as other attempts to build a perfect society such as those at New Harmony and Ephrata, the later of which was directly influenced by the example of Kelpius. And the 20th century would see the arrival of the utopian Bruderhof as refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Over more than three centuries the state has been a haven for the searchers, the seekers, the eccentric, the dreamers, the divinators; Kelpius was simply an early one. Kelpius may have hoped for a Peaceable Kingdom in the wilderness, though paradise did not descend his prophesized year. That is not justification for turning one’s face away from Eden (or Philadelphia). You may yet see the gentle glow of the Philosopher’s Stone at the bottom of the Schuylkill River.
Late in the evening on Monday, a bright flash lit up the sky above Boyne Island, in the Australian state of Queensland, on the country's western coast. The flash was followed by a small earthquake.
What was it? Initially people on the ground had no idea, just the surprised witnesses to one of nature's more spectacular shows, what experts later said was a meteor—likely about three feet wide—crashing to Earth.
“[It] looked like a big as hell shooting star and lit up the beach,” one witness posted on Facebook, according to the Australian Associated Press. "Then about a minute later a big bang and a shockwave came over the water and shook my car."
A Harvard professor told a local outlet that it was probably the largest meteor seen hitting Earth in "several years." And it will probably be the biggest thing to crash into the planet for a while yet, unless the out-of-control situation with China's space lab turns out even worse than we thought.
The Chesterfield Canal in northern England will be celebrating its 240th birthday in 2017. It originally connected West Stockwith to Chesterfield over forty miles away, and like many canals of the pre-industrial 18th century, goods were transported by horse-drawn barges. To make their way up and down a 250-foot difference in altitude required locks – 64 of them all together – and one particular section is known as the Giant’s Staircase.
The Chesterfield and its locks represent the peak of 18th century canal construction, thanks in large part to the expertise of an engineer named James Brindley, master of staircase lock design. Multiple locks clustered together on a canal are known as “flights,” and grouping locks together so one directly feeds another, creates a “staircase.” In this case, one fit for a giant.
OK, so the term here is a little bit looser than is technically a lock staircase, but the name was locally coined, and it is a combination of two flights – with a rise of almost a hundred feet, nearly the height of a ten-story building. Even more impressive for canal enthusiasts (and yes, the world is full of canal enthusiasts), on this stretch of the Chesterfield there are twenty locks within a single mile, an engineering feat likely unequaled anywhere else on the British canal network.
The Chesterfield Canal is also known as the Cuckoo Dyke, picking up the name from cargo boats called “cuckoos," a unique type found only on the Chesterfield. They were never mechanically powered, but were horse drawn right up to the end of commercial traffic in the 1950s. Real cuckoo boats are long-gone, but an accurate reproduction has recently been built by members of the Chesterfield Canal Trust.
No one really knows where the “cuckoo” name came from, and seeing the replica (or any other boats) navigate the flights is relatively rare. But the canal is undergoing ambitious restoration plans, so check with Canal Trust to find out about their occasional boat trips. Plan it right and you can catch one up or down the staircase.
This magnificent and abandoned fortified city of Fatehpur Sikri was built for the Mughal Emperor Akbar. It was the capital of the Mughal empire from 1571 to 1585, and is considered the best example of Mughal architecture in existence. Akbar himself oversaw the construction of the fortress, ensuring that every detail of the city was befitting of an emperor's grandeur.
Unfortunately, the fortress was abandoned as soon as it was finished.
The grand city was comprised of several palatial courts, a harem building, a mosque, private emperor's quarters, residential buildings, the tomb of a Sufi saint, a giant outdoor board game, a pool, and utility buildings. These were colored a rosy hue by the local red sand used as construction material.
Fatehpur Sikri is also notable for the fact that it incorporated the many cultures of the Mughal empire—the name as well as the geometric layout drew on ancient Persian influences, whereas the buildings' decorative embellishments were classically Indian. Akbar was known for his tolerance of multi-religious culture, and the inhabitants of the city followed Island, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity without conflict.
Not long after the fortress was completed, the lake that provided water to the complex dried up, and life at Fatehpur Sikri was unsustainable. Emperor Muhammad Shah lived in the city between 1719 and 1748, and the Marathas warriors occupied the city for a short time after that. Once the British invaded India, their army used the fortress as a barracks, during which time it was badly damaged.
What remains of Fatehpur Sikri is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A town has grown up to the west of the ruins, and still uses the mosque for worship. Archaeological excavation has indicated that the significance of the site dates way earlier than Emperor Akbar and Fatehpur Sikri. Thousand-year-old Jain statues and buildings have been unearthed beneath the city, suggesting that some lost culture existed there prior to the Mughals.
Alan Turing is best known for being one of a team of codebreakers who cracked Germany's Enigma machines during World War II, which shortened the war by as many as four years. He was also the father of modern computing, and, evidently, the earliest electronic musician.
That's because in 1951 he created the world's first computer-generated music. It starts, of course with "God Save the Queen," the British national anthem:
Listening to the recording now is only possible thanks to some New Zealand scientists, who recently restored it, announcing their aural achievement on the website of the British Library on Sept. 13.
"It was a beautiful moment when we first heard the true sound of Turing's computer," the scientists wrote then.
Turing created the music on a machine in a lab in Manchester, England, according to Agence France-Presse. It survived in the form of an acetate disc, from which the scientists filtered out noise and changed the disc's speed, creating music that AFP compares to "electronic bagpipes."
Turing's original response upon hearing the music, according to another computer scientist from his era was stoic.
"Good show," he remarked.
Turing died three years later, killing himself with cyanide, after having been prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, when that was still illegal in Britain. He was officially pardoned in 2013, and has been immortalized in everything from statues to major motion pictures. Next time you're in Manchester, try having lunch with him.
The Swedish alternative rock band Broder Daniel's hit song "Shoreline" became an instant classic when it was first played on the talkshow Sen kväll med Luuk in 2001. Soon it became the soundtrack of a generation, and in turn, a much debated monument in a park in Gothenburg.
When "Shoreline" was first played to the public in 2001 it had not been released on any album. It became the most downloaded bootleg in Sweden until it was released two years later, and fans would ask DJs to play "Shoreline" over and over again. Broder Daniel split up in 2008, but the phrase "Play Shoreline" ("Spela Shoreline" in Swedish) lives on.
The phrase is still heard—and seen—throughout the country. There are stories of it being shouted at philosophy classes at Uppsala University, Iron Maiden concerts and nightclubs playing dance music. There's even a bar where they play the song right before closing time every day it's open. And in 2014, a Play Shoreline memorial with a plaque engraved with "Spela Shoreline" suddenly appeared in the park Slottsskogen in Gothenburg on the site of Broder Daniel's final concert. No one knew where it came from, but it became extremely popular among the band's fans.
Unfortunately the monument violated the rules of the city's Park and Nature Administration and was set to be removed. This stirred protests among fans, but also among well-known cultural figures in Sweden. A Facebook group called Låt Shoreline-Stenen VARA KVAR (“Let the Shoreline-rock STAY!”) was formed and 5,000 users joined in the first two days.
The city decided to let the monument stay, but soon found it lying on the ground—it's unknown whether as a result of vandalism or if it just fell over. The stone was removed and soon another monument dedicated to the Norwegian metal band Mayhem was erected at the same spot. This monument was also to be removed and another Facebook group was formed to save it, though it didn't attract at all as many members.
In the end the Play Shoreline was returned to Slottsskogen park and placed 20 meters away from its original position. The soundtrack of a generation finally has a monument to their beloved hit, at the site where the song was played by Broder Daniel for the last time.
SpaceX’s Elon Musk is certain that humans can travel to Mars. In his plan for Mars colonization, revealed today, the entrepreneur said it will take between 40 and 100 years to create a self-sustaining city on the Red Planet—once we manage to get there. But space-lovers who dream of setting foot on cold, red Martian soil don’t have to wait for scientists to conquer human spaceflight into deep space, or figure out how to grow potatoes on Mars. Some landscapes here on Earth are just as formidable.
These terrestrial landscapes have characteristics similar to the harsh terrain and extreme environment on Mars, from barren lava fields to dangerously cold climates. Some are even currently being used as Mars analogs by researchers with the aim of one day becoming an interplanetary species.
Others simply appear so alien as to be straight out of science fiction, the Martian landscapes of space explorers’ dreams. Here are eight places in the Atlas where you can visiting Mars without waiting for a SpaceX rocket.
The uniquely rippled sand dunes that cover much of Mars are unlike anything found on Earth, but these towering red dunes in the Namib Desert are about as close as you can get to that aspect of the planet's terrain. The rich red dunes in the Sossusvlei clay and salt pan, among the tallest in our world, owe their hue to age—over the thousands of years, the sand has literally rusted.
Among these old red dunes is an even more otherworldly landscape known as Dead Vlei or "dead marsh.” Some 900 years ago the climate dried up, and dunes cut off Dead Vlei from the river. It became too dry for the trees to even decompose. They simply scorched black in the sun, monuments to their own destruction. It is a strange and alien landscape indeed.
The average temperature on Mars is -80 degrees Fahrenheit—a freezing climate you would assume was too cold to support human life. But not so fast. Positioned deep in Siberia, just a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, the village of Oymyakon holds the distinction of being the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, reaching record lows of -96.16 degrees Fahrenheit. The hardy 500-some residents of Oymyakon certainly don't have it easy, however: If you were to go outside naked on an average day, it would take approximately one minute for you to freeze to death.
190 million years ago, one of the greatest geological formations began to take shape. In the Coyote Buttes ravine, some 5,225 feet above sea level, stands Arizona's The Wave. The Wave has a remarkable undulating appearance, with massive sandstone structures stretched like taffy, and cinnamon color strata domes. It is, in a way, a geological snapshot in time. Many describe walking through the dunes as an intensely strange experience, surreal and vertigo inducing.
This five-story, blood-red waterfall pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. Roughly two million years ago, the glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color.
The existence of the Blood Falls ecosystem shows that life can exist in the most extreme conditions on Earth. It does not prove, however, that life could exist on other planets with similar environments and similar bodies of frozen water, notably Mars. Even if it doesn't confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life, Antarctica's Blood Falls is a wonder to behold, both visually and scientifically.
If you've ever longed to walk upon the barren red terrain of Mars, experiencing Námaskarð will get you close. Situated on the north side of Iceland's Lake Myvatn is a geothermal wonder of hot sulfuric mud springs and steam springs (solfataras and fumaroles if you're a geology nerd).
Black rivers and bubbling pools of sulfuric mud cut through a landscape that's rich in colorful minerals and is continuously steaming. It is a magnificent example of how strange and unearthly our planet's natural landscapes can be.
For many years Ascension Island was a barren wasteland of lava fields whose dry climate and lack of fresh water made it inhospitable. It wasn't until 1815 that the island became permanently inhabited, as a military prison. But it was a botanist named Joseph Dalton Hooker, at the encouragement of Charles Darwin, who would devise a plan that would radically change the island's habitability in what was one of the most successful ecology experiments of all time.
The idea was that planted trees would capture rain and make the soil fertile, transforming the stark landscape into a lush garden. It effectively turned Ascension into an island oasis, and in the process became one of the very first experiments in terraforming. While Ascension Island remains relatively unknown today, the success of the island's artificial ecosystem, which is one of few large-scale planned forests in the world, has given hope that the colonization of Mars is possible.
Located on the other side of the Ring Road from Námaskarð, the Krafla Caldera is a 10 kilometer-long, two kilometer-deep active volcanic zone on the boundary between the American and Eurasian tectonic plates, and a key component of the eerily Martian-like landscape of the Myvatn area.
Black and red lava fields, the unearthly bubbling pools of mud, volcanic craters, and gently wafting thermal plumes lend the Krafla zone a distinctly sci-fi air, creating a scene where a primordial past appears to meet a sustainable future. This Icelandic lava field looks so alien that European researchers plan to use it as a stand-in for Mars; the Krafla zone will host the European Mars Analog Research Station, designed by the Mars Society to observe living conditions for human beings in Mars-like conditions.
The Haughton Crater is one of the world's northernmost impact craters, formed roughly 23 million years ago when a large rock hit the Earth near in what is now Northern Canada. It's also about the closest thing to Mars on Earth.
Situated in the Arctic Archipelago, the crater lies in a type of polar desert environment called a "frost rubble zone." It's the only impact crater known to exist in such an environment, and despite being 23 million years old, has undergone little erosion due to the lack of liquid water and vegetation in the area.
These factors, along with the crater's geology, make the freezing, desert-like landscape an ideal location for the base of the Haughton-Mars Project, where scientists will practice for a future Mars mission.
In 2016, this is what one vision of sending humans to Mars looks like:
At the 67th International Astronautical Congress, in Guadalajara, Mexico, the billionaire inventor Elon Musk gave a speech that was more anticipated than any other he's given. Musk has an incredible talent for making people feel like humanity is on the cusp of a new future (solar power! rad self driving cars! space travel!) and in this speech, titled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species," he explained, in detail, the vision summarized in the video above—he explained how he thought humanity could get to Mars and create a "self-sustaining city" there.
To get to Mars, aiming for a cost of around $200,000 per person, Musk said, would require four main technologies: reusable rockets, in-orbit refueling of spaceships, Mars-based propellant production, and the right propellant. The reusable rocket could return to earth in about 20 minutes, and it would take off three to five times to fill the tanks of the Mars-bound spaceship in orbit. Once flights started—and he's envisioning fleets of ships headed out—each could have at least hundred people on it and eventually 200 or more. He estimated that it would take 40 to 100 years to create a fully self-sustaining city on Mars, and that ultimately, trips to Mars could take as little as 30 days.
"If things go well," he said, this plan could send a ship to Mars in the "ten-year timeframe."
How revolutionary is this? Much of what Musk described is so ambitious that many smart people have doubts about its feasibility—just creating reusable rockets is a gargantuan task. But it's also familiar, in some ways. Elements of Musk's plan, including the image of a fleet of ships launching from Earth, have been part of visions of Mars colonization ever since scientists started seriously thinking about the possibility, in the 1950s.
Here are a few of the past visions of how humans will reach Mars and stay there.
1950s: Wernher von Braun’s Mars Project
The first detailed vision of American spaceflight to Mars was the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi scientist who worked for NASA after World War II. His 1952 book, The Mars Project, became the first widely disseminated Mars colony plan, in the form of a 1954 article in Collier’s Magazine and a Disneyland film.
In this plan, von Braun imagined that a fleet of 10 massive spaceships, assembled in space, would carry 70 people, along with the supplies needed to survive. In the Collier’s article, he wrote that space taxis would ferry people between the convoy’s ships and that one of the concerns of long-distance space exploration—radiation exposure—could be assuaged by the invention of “a drug which will enable men to endure radiation for comparatively long periods of time.”
The Mars Excursion Module, as imagined in the 1960s. (Image: Philco/NASA)
Once the convoy reached Mars, an initial exploration party would land on the planet’s smooth ice caps—the most suitable runway—and travel towards the more habitable equator. Once a better landing strip was constructed, two more ships would travel to the planet’s surface. On Mars, the explorers would live in inflatable, pressurized spheres about 30 feet across and mounted on tractors for mobility.
Estimated length of journey: 8 months Length of stay: More than a year Crew size: 70 Estimated timeline: Mid-21st century
In the late 1970s, after the excitement over the first manned mission to the moon had passed, a small group of scientists got excited about visiting Mars next. “The Mars Underground,” as they were called, started examining the “habitability of Mars” and convened a series of conferences to make “the Case for Mars.” By the mid-1980s, sending people to Mars had become a key feature of Pioneering the Space Frontier, a federal report on the future of space exploration.
One of the major features of this plan was a system of spacecraft that would travel in a loop between the two planets—like “ocean liners on a fixed route.” They would stop at transfer points close to Earth and to Mars, but would never land themselves. A permanent Mars base would be built with technology first tested on the Moon, and crews would cycle out, much like on the ISS, on regular schedules.
Estimated travel time: 6 months Length of Mars stay: about one year Crew size: 17 on the cycling ship, 20 on the Mars Base Estimated timeline: 2020s or so
All the momentum that Mars advocates created in the ‘80s, though, crashed in the early ‘90s when the first Bush administration looked at the potential costs of this project and blanched. But one Mars-minded man, Robert Zubrin started developing a new—and cheaper—vision for reaching Mars, in which lunar bases and exploration were cut out of the plan and ships were sent directly to Mars.
Zubrin’s plan evolved over many years: a key feature became small, cylindrical habitat units that would detach from the spacecraft that brought the explorers to Mars. There would be a dedicated section for science, for health and exercise, and a small lounge. Mars colonization would happen in stages—the first crews would stay for 18 months, but those missions could be extended for longer periods as ships started making regular journeys. The habitat units could gather into a small village on the surface of the planet.
Estimated travel time: 6 months, minimum Length of stay: 18 months (can extend to four or more years) Crew size: 4 Estimate timeline: Originally, 1999
Now that the early decades of the 21st century have arrived, it is looking more likely than ever before that humans will go to Mars. Besides Musk's plan, NASA is aiming to send astronauts to Mars around 2035, and Congress has actually taken steps to fund that vision. Mars One is still winnowing down applicants to crew a one-way trip to the Red Planet. One day after Musk's address at the IAC, Lockheed Martin is presenting its ideas for a "Mars Base Camp." Blue Origin, the space company created by Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, is thinking about Mars, too.
If we do arrive on Mars, that's not the end of the story. Notably, Musk's talk concentrated on how to get to Mars, not what exactly would happen once people reached their destination. But at the end of the video Space X released, the dry, red planet spin until there's splotches of blue and green—a hint at another idea Musk has talked about. Once we're there, he thinks, we should terraform the whole planet.
Gaping Gill is the largest underground cave chamber in Britain. It's often said, without exaggeration, that this dramatic chamber is big enough to fit a cathedral. It is so big that there has been an attempt to fly a hot air balloon inside the cave.
The vertical main shaft from the surface to the floor of the chamber is about 98m deep and normally contains a substantial waterfall, the route by which the surface stream, Fell Beck, finds its way to the chamber floor.
The chamber and the extensive cave system it is a part of are usually only accessible to experienced and properly equipped cave explorers. But for two separate weeks of the year (around the August and late May public holidays) two local caving clubs provide a winch to allow members of the public to be lowered down the shaft on a boatswain’s chair, and later winched out again.
Once inside you can just explore the chamber, or the slightly more adventurous can enter some of the easier and closer passages of the 16.6km cave system. It's a good idea to wear waterproof clothing as the winch passes you through the spray from the towering waterfall.
You'll have to excuse the exoticized Chinamen figures atop the Twinings tea shop doorway at 216 Strand. They've been sitting up there for about three centuries, in which time the cultural acceptability of such caricatures has lessened, and tea is more often associated with British gentry than with Chinese merchants.
As a young man Thomas Twining apprenticed under an East India Company merchant, importing goods from exotic locales, coffee and tea in particular. Twining's mercantile career began in 1706 when he opened a small storefront on a busy London thoroughfare called the Strand. He called it Tom's Coffee House, and it soon became a popular gathering spot for fashionable aristocrats.
Despite the fact that his shop was dedicated to coffee, Twining soon garnered a reputation for having some of the finest tea blends in London. Within a decade he ceased selling coffee entirely and almost exclusively sold dry packaged teas. This allowed women to partake in tea-drinking at home as well, as coffee houses were male-only establishments. Twining expanded his business, opening up more shops, and eventually growing it into the tea empire it is today.
Though we think of Britain's relationship to tea being as old as the nation itself, the drink had only been introduced in the 1660s by a Portuguese queen. With the expansion of East Indian trade and merchants like Twining though, tea quickly became the national beverage.
Today Twinings is synonymous with the history of British tea. Over 300 years later, the original Twinings shop on the Strand is still in business. The Twinings logo, a simple, gold sign bearing the company name, has remained unchanged since 1787, making it the oldest corporate logo still in use. In 1837, Queen Victoria granted the company a royal warrant, a merit which has given Twinings the honor of providing tea to the royal family ever since.
Welcome to the second installment of Atlas Obscura's new advice column, Ask Zardulu. If you have a life, love, money, family, spiritual, moral or myth-based dilemma, please email your question to askzardulu@atlasobscura.com, and specify if you want your name to be used. (For more information on Zardulu's mysterious work as a myth-making artist and media hoaxtress, look here.) Questions are edited for length and clarity.
ZARDULU: My daughter and I have a trip booked to Turkey and Jordan at the end of September and beginning of October. Because of the many bombings in Turkey and trouble in Syria, our loved ones are asking us not to go. We are very keen to shop the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, to swim in the Dead Sea, ride camels at Wadi Rum and have a cocktail at Petra. Will everything be all right?
Robin
ROBIN: I have drawn four cards from the tarot, one to represent your dilemma, one for the right choice, one for the wrong choice and the final card for the outcome. The first card is the Ace of Pentacles. It shows a hand appearing from a cloud holding a coin, symbolizing the wealth of experience available to you on this trip. In the background is an archway, the dilemma being whether you should pass through and travel to the mountains beyond.
The second card I have drawn, the Seven of Cups, represents the right choice. It shows a person standing before a collection of fantastic objects, symbolizing the architecture, artifacts and experiences you will have. However, in one of the cups lurks a fork-tongued dragon, suggesting that someone on your trip may attempt to lie and manipulate you.
The third card I have drawn represents the wrong choice, it is the Seven of Swords. It shows a thief stealing from an encampment as its guards seem to be conversing in the background. Perhaps this is the dragon from the Seven of Cups appearing to us in another form. This further emphasizes that you must be wary of people you meet on your trip and remain in charge of where you go and what you do. Change your routine on a daily basis, leaving and arriving at different times. Do not leave any of your valuables unattended.
The fourth card I have drawn represents the outcome: The Hermit. It shows an older man holding a lantern to light the way, symbolic of the wisdom you will gain and how it will illuminate your life's path. It is clear that you should go forward with your plans to go on this trip.
Blessed Be
ZARDULU: After 20 years of marriage my husband and I are considering a divorce. Is there any way we can move forward together and if so, how do we rekindle our love?
Dorothy
DEAR DOROTHY: Twenty years is quite an adventure and I imagine you've both emerged from it much different than when you started, and so has your relationship.
Unfortunately, there's no way to go back and do it all over again, but there are some good alternatives. Choose a place with a positive energy to meet your husband, away from the stresses of your everyday lives. Prepare to discuss all the things about each other that you fell in love with. While you're doing so, use the powerful expression of emotion to assist in the consecration of talismans dedicated to Venus, goddess of love.
You'll first need to acquire enough clay to make two silver dollar sized talisman (oven-fireable polymer is the easiest option.) Before you begin sharing, you will both carve the seal of Venus from Cornelius Agrippa's 16th century magickal grimoire, De occulta philosophia libri tres, onto one side of each talisman and your names on the other. Put a small hole at the top and lay them gently on top of each other with your names facing. Place them between you while you share. When you are finished, place your hands over the talismans and say out loud:
"I charge these talismans in the name of Venus, goddess of love, may they be consecrated by the love between us. So mote it be."
Now, separate the talismans, bring them home and fire them in whatever manner your clay requires. String them on a necklace or bracelet, each of you wearing the one with the other's name on it. Not only will this serve to call upon the blessings of Venus to heal your relationship, it will be a reminder, through all the stresses of life, of the love that was, and always will be, between the two of you.
Blessed Be
DEAR ZARDULU:
Why is the Earth dying?
Signed, Sad Woman
DEAR SAD WOMAN: Through most of our history there has been profound spiritual connection with nature. Our myths told of gods who lived among us on the top of mountains, in the forests and under the seas. They were embodied by the plants and animals that lived there and, when they gave their lives to nourish us, we participated in rituals to show our deep respect.
As civilization has expanded, our myths have been replaced by ones that better suited our political and economic leaders. These myths no longer suggest any spiritual significance in the mountains, forests or seas and these once sacred places have become industrial resources, to be subjugated and stripped of their living essence for financial gain. This change in our mythological thinking is why, as you've suggested, the world is dying.
Blessed Be
ZARDULU: My whole life I have been plagued with the inability to genuinely connect and offer empathy to people who complain with no intent to actually face these people they are gossiping about.
I guess my advice seeking from you regards what I might be able to do in addition to confronting the gossiper because I still create anxiety within myself with the belief that I am doing something socially unacceptable and wrong because I'm not listening to gossip.
Rationally I understand that I'm breaking a social taboo especially within female social circles but for some reason I can't get it within my emotional and psychological self to believe I'm not a bad person for doing this.
Seems like you and Carl Jung are really good at teaching a more flowing conscious acceptance. I eagerly await your weird knowledge!
Laura
DEAR LAURA: You're not a bad person but I'm afraid you might end up on the lonely island of Sarpedon with the Gorgons: Medusa, Stheno and Euryale. None of them were bad people either, they just turned everyone they met into stone.
Myth observers tend to focus on the Gorgon’s victims but think of their own isolation: they have effectively walled themselves off from humanity with those rock stares. You risk the same outcome. Gossip is a behavior that humans have evolved over eons. Ancestors who chose confrontation were not as successful as their gossiping counterparts. Meaning, confrontations got them killed more often than the gossip. So, I agree that trying to achieve a flowing, conscious acceptance of it is the most realistic option. What your mentor has suggested, stopping people in the middle of a conversation and insisting they act a certain way, seems very aggressive and contradictory to your goal.
As much as I'd like to hope that my explanation of gossip will help you, there is some other underlying fear or insecurity that also needs to be dealt with. You seem to be open to therapy, so I suggest working to uncover it with the help of a psychologist. Since you mentioned Carl Jung, a quote of his comes to mind: "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
Blessed Be
DEAR ZARDULU: I am the middle-aged offspring-on-duty with my elderly mother. I have two siblings who are uninterested and unwilling to be involved in this endeavor. She lives in a facility where she has rides and meals provided, friends, and a pleasant apartment. For the moment her physical needs are taken care of. However, she seems to need more and more and MORE attention, time, and social support—again, I realize this is normal.
I am becoming more and more bitter and drained. I have explained this to my siblings, in fact begged them to telephone her twice a month. They agreed to and then just did not do it.
I don't want to resent my mother or siblings, but I do. The fact is I never liked my mom, at any age. I have never enjoyed her company. She's always been demanding, critical, judgmental, stern, and self-absorbed. The loss of inhibition as she ages has done nothing to soften these qualities. I try to just show up, make the calls, and go through the motions, but I feel trapped and angry a lot of the time, and occasionally I have snapped at her, which I don't want to do.
Now I am starting to dislike myself for the amount of resentment and anger I'm carrying, and have basically written my siblings off. I'm not even sure what the question is here—is there a way to have relief, or at least peace with myself and still honor my obligations and responsibilities?
Signed,
Crabby and Weary
DEAR CRABBY AND WEARY:
To represent your journey through the past, present and future I have drawn from the tarot the Seven of Wands, the High Priestess, and the Eight of Cups. The Seven of Wands shows a giant man, towering over a landscape and holding a staff in a defensive posture. This tells me that you have always been a supportive person, and like the giant, you have left the comfort of your usual surroundings to perform this role many times.
As we move toward the present we have the High Priestess, showing a religious figure seated before a pair of pillars. Like you, she has a high moral character and does great good in the world. However, something is calling her back to the temple for her own personal growth and it is time for you to do the same. As we look to the future we see the Eight of Cups. It shows a man with his head bowed, retreating into the distance.
It's difficult to find the right amount of time to spend with a parent, but there could be no clearer sign: you're spending too much. As you've said, your mother is doing well, her meals are provided, she has friends and a pleasant apartment. You are not being neglectful by spending less time with her. If you feel some sadness and regret as wean yourself off, just remember, once a better balance is achieved you will see yourself, your mother, and your siblings in a more positive light.
High above Norway, in the cold depths of the Arctic Ocean, lies the Svalbard archipelago. Located some 650 miles from the North Pole, Svalbard is a place of long, dark winters and breathtaking landscapes populated by Arctic foxes, reindeer and polar bears. But it’s also home to unexpected ruins, stark remnants of the places where people have lived on these unforgiving islands.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, Svalbard was used as a base for whaling expeditions; by the early 20th century, its main industry was coal mining. Today, it's still possible to glimpse some of this history in the abandoned mining operations that still exist around the largest settlement, Longyearbyen, which has a population of 2,162 people. Getting around is another matter: roads are limited, which restricts transport mainly to snowmobiles in winter and boats in summer. Air travelers to Svalbard land at the world’s northernmost public airport, which was built during WWII.
Just north of Longyearbyen is the former Russian coal mining settlement known as Pyramiden. Purchased by the Soviet Union from Sweden in 1927, and once home to more than a thousand people, it was abandoned in 1998. Today the signs of its former inhabitants remain only in the guise of a decaying Olympic-sized swimming pool, a movie projector, and a room overflowing with rolls of film.
This isolated, frozen landscape held great appeal for photographer Christopher Michel. This was his second trip to the High Arctic, and, he says, “I am absolutely captivated by remote landscapes devoid of humans. A place where survival requires extraordinary adaptation.” This affinity runs through his photographs, which are a compelling account of this unique region and the remnants of the communities that lived there.
Below, Atlas Obscura has a selection of Michel’s images of Arctic ruins in Svalbard.
The sign at the abandoned Soviet coal mining colony of Pyramiden.
The main square at Pyramiden with Soviet-era insignia — propaganda signs, hammer & sickle, and a bust of Lenin.
Although located some 650 miles from the North Pole, the town's comforts included an Olympic-sized pool.
Pyramiden was abandoned rather quickly in 1998. There are many touching reminders of the families that spent their lives here.
Much of the old equipment still remains, including this vintage movie projector in the town’s recreational hall.
In the projector room, countless reels of Soviet films litter the floor.
The town of Longyearbyen, where the snowmobiles the outnumber residents. It’s very common to see people walking around with rifles, as they are required for polar bear protection for anyone leaving the compound.
Throughout Longyearbyen there are large-scale mining ruins. In this photo, you can see Mine 2B just above the town.
Inside Mine 2B.
The best way to see all of Svalbard, says Michel, is by boat. Charters leave Longyearbyen on a regular basis.
Old abandoned shacks at the Kinnvika Polar Research Station.
A Studebaker M29 Weasel at Kinnvika Polar Research Station.
The immense beauty of the High Arctic is something that you won’t soon forget, says Michel.
The internet is an ocean of digital photos. With the ease of smartphone cameras, people snap endless numbers of pictures of their food, dogs, cats, kids, clothes, travels and everyday experiences. More than 1.8 billion digital images are uploaded online every single day, and some of these image files are embedded with metadata detailing the precise location of where that photo was taken.
The map above, titled “Accidental Geography,” uses the GPS coordinates stored in the metadata of digital images posted to WordPress blogs to create 140,000 location points around the world—the photos unintentionally revealing unique aspects of the surrounding area in which it was taken.
“I find the geography of ordinary people’s lives to be fascinating,” says Ross Otto, a 33-year-old computational psychology researcher at McGill University in Montreal, who spent the last two years building “Accidental Geography.” “You can get this weird idea of what a place is like by looking around at pictures.”
A map of geotagged photos pulled from WordPress blogs. [Photo: Screenshot of "Accidental Geography"]
When you click on a point in the map, a picture pops up with a little caption and a link to the original blog where it appeared. You can view suede stilettos in Madrid, crystal clear beaches in Golds Coast, Australia, children’s classroom art in Zaragoza, Spain, and an attendee enthusiastically posing with Thor’s Hammer at a comic convention in Calgary.
However, people who posted these photos to their WordPress blogs may have been unaware that their smartphones and digital cameras have a built-in GPS with geotagging, the tool that automatically adds the latitude and longitude of where a photo was taken to the file. While geotags can be helpful for photo enthusiasts and travelers who like to refer back to their records to find out where a picture was taken, the feature has also been under scrutiny for its security issues in the past. The information can easily be extracted, spilling the whereabouts of celebrities, soldiers, and fugitives.
Sometimes geotags are useful for travel bloggers and professional photographers. But some people may not realize the feature is on. [Photo: Screenshot of "Accidental Geography"]
In 2012, Otto read about an interview that Vice had conducted with anti-virus program developer and fugitive John McAfee. Vice posted the article “We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers,” which includes a picture of McAfee and then Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro taken with an iPhone 4S. However, the photo was accidentally embedded with data indicating their exact location in Guatemala.
Thanks to a single photo, all parties were suddenly in an uncomfortable, tricky situation. Everyone looking for McAfee knew that he had been chilling with Vice along the Rio Dulce, near the Ranchon Mary restaurant, by a swimming pool. (The coordinates have since been stripped of the image.)
“Many of us don’t realize that when we take a phone, our phones record the precise location of the device at the time,” says Otto. “I really think [the map] highlights issues about how careless people are about using personal technology. So many of the pictures on here are taken by bloggers who don’t even reveal their real names, but their photos often reveal where they live within a few meters.”
Five years ago, when he lived in Austin, Texas, Otto listened to the radio show of a food blogger who held contests on his website. The blogger would take an ambiguous picture of a restaurant or food spot around Austin, post it to his site, and prompt people to guess the location to win a free meal. When Otto saw the photos, he discovered that they had been taken with an iPhone, and the exact location of the restaurants could be found simply by downloading the photos and viewing the coordinates within the file in Preview or any other photo viewing program.
“I kept gaming the system and taking my friends out to dinner, and he never figured it out,” he says.
A meal in Seoul, South Korea. Food pictures are commonly found on the map [Photo: Screenshot of "Accidental Geography"]
This led Otto to believe that perhaps there were all sorts of photos on the internet that might be unwittingly geotagged. He had also previously enjoyed sifting through photos around places on Google’s Panoramia, a map and site for sharing geotagged photos that will soon face its demise, which further prompted Otto to start scraping photos and GPS coordinates as a side project.
Since there was no way to riffle through all the billions of photos to see if they had been geotagged, Otto focused on WordPress, which supports 76.5 million blogs according to a recent count. He spent about two years gathering WordPress sites, systematically feeding thousands of the most common words people use into his program. While 71 percent of WordPress blogs are in English, Otto had to find entries in different languages to populate photos in different countries. He then plotted all the points using the mapping platform Mapbox to get the final product.
“It’s a snapshot of what the internet was like in 2015,” he says.
Otto found some expected and surprising trends among the photos. Many of the pictures he came across were about food and eating around the world, cooking and traveling blogs being a popular fad. He also saw photos of grassroots political movements, and medical diary blogs documenting the progression of a health problem. Otto was fascinated by “the commonality across all these places in the world in terms of experience,” he says.
A screenshot of the warning that popped up on my Android phone camera app. The geotag feature was automatically turned off on my phone.
Otto also hopes that “Accidental Geography” raises awareness about the privacy and security in our digital age. Among the perfectly posed food pictures, pristine landmarks, and private collections, there are pictures of a house in suburban Atlanta and children on playgrounds in Arizona. “The map highlights peoples’ ignorance of what sorts of data mobile phone camera capture, and how to turn those features off.”
By default, the iPhone camera app is set to record the geolocation of where photos and videos are taken, and disabling the function involves going through several steps and menus. On Android phones, the geotagging feature should be automatically set off, but it’s always best to double-check by going to the camera app and clicking on the “Settings” button.
While the map may make us second guess what information we are truly sharing when we post photos online, it also grants us a new look at the world.
“I think there is a whole collective narrative that [the map is] telling when you’re looking at these pictures,” says Otto. “At some level it kind of shows how similar everyone is.”
