In Colorado’s Denver Federal Center, there’s a scientific storage facility where it’s always, always cold.
The National Ice Core Laboratory is the repository for samples of ice sheets collected in Greenland and Antarctica—miles of ice that contains information about the planet’s past and, in particular, the history of its climate.
The lab has more than 10 miles of ice cores. These opaque cylinders are divided into a smaller pieces and stored in aluminum-lined cardboard tubes. They’re kept in what’s essentially a very large, very cold warehouse, where the temperature is maintained at -36°C.
When researchers get permission to use part of a core, they can take their core to the adjoining research room, where they can slice out a portion of the ice and prepare for it to be sent to their own laboratories. This room is relatively warm—it’s kept at -24°C. A bit of advice to anyone visiting (the lab conducts tours, though they need to be scheduled in advance): Be prepared to bundle up.
Under normal circumstances, the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, is not such a tempting landing spot for migrating geese. Its vast surface, half a mile wide and twice as long, is sometimes colored red and green by the toxins collected here when it was an open copper-pit mine. The water is so acidic that it's deadly.
But at the end of November, as the Associated Press reports, thousands upon thousands of birds—25,000 by one estimate—were flying through this area when a snowstorm hit. They needed to land, and the Berkeley Pit Mine was the only option.
Perhaps 10,000 of the snow geese landed in the toxic water, and now thousands of them are dead, reports the Washington Post.
For two decades, the companies responsible for the pit has been trying to prevent incidents like this from happening. In 1995, a flock landed on the water, and 342 of them died from exposure to the water. Initially, the pit's responsible parties denied responsibility for the deaths, but the state's autopsies of the birds showed their digestive systems had been severely damaged by contact with the pit's toxins.
The pit's keepers did have some advance warning that this new flock was on its way, and, according to the AP, employees tried to keep away the geese or scare them off once they'd landing using bright lights and big noises. But so many geese landed on the lake that instead of its usual multi-colored hue, it was white with unfortunate birds who might have died if they stayed aloft in the storm, but were doomed when they landed, too.
In the game Hearthstone, when the dwarven Innkeeper greets players with a hearty, "WELCOME to the Inn!" he sounds like he's channeling some cartoonish ideal of the Scottish accent. And he's not alone. Standard fantasy dwarves speak with a Scottish or generally Northern European brogue, but how can that be true when such a race never really existed? The same can be said for the lofty English tone of the elves, or the working-class Cockney of many orcs and trolls.
While slight variations on these themes exist, fantasy races seem to have as much of a stereotypical sound as any real-world dialect. And they tell us more about the characters than you probably realize.
Long before elves, orcs, and dwarves populated the pages of Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks, Peter Jackson's Middle Earth film adaptations, and video games like World of Warcraft, they developed out of mythology, fan imagination, and more than anywhere else, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And even though his works were purely textual, the ways that common fantasy races sound today have their roots in his vivid fantasy world.
The most commonly occurring pop fantasy races—elves, dwarves, trolls/orcs, even humans—have their roots in European mythology. From the dwarves and elves of Nordic poetry to Scandinavia's trolls, the basic shape and cultural texture of many of these beings can be linked directly to ancient folklore. But it wasn’t until Tolkien’s works, which were heavily inspired by such myths, that the tropes we are familiar with today really fell into place.
“Elves wouldn’t even really be a thing, at least not in the way they currently are, if it weren’t for Tolkien,” says Corey Olsen, noted Tolkien scholar and creator of The Tolkien Professor podcast. “Dwarves are another thing. A lot of the things that we associate with dwarves, we owe a lot of that to Tolkien.”
Throughout The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the reams of related histories Tolkien wrote about Middle Earth, he established whole societies, histories, and languages for a handful of races that still inform how they are depicted today. Elves are ancient, beautiful, and have pointy ears; dwarves are short, tough, and love to use axes; orcs are filthy brutes who live for destruction.
Of course the original readers couldn’t hear what Tolkien’s creatures sounded like, but the intense focus he placed on developing their languages gave people a pretty good idea. “Tolkien was a philologist,” says Olsen.“This is what he did. He studied language and the history of language and the changing of language over time.”
Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures and histories to speak them, often taking inspiration from the sound of an existing language. In the case of the ever-present Elvish languages in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men and hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.
For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like Khazad-dûm and Moria.
“When dwarves actually talk, they don’t sound Scottish at all," says Olsen. "They sound like Arabic or Hebrew.” Tolkien’s choice here was originally based solely on how different Semitic languages sounded, although later he would admit to accidental similarities between dwarves and Jewish people.
However, the dwarves of the Lord of the Rings movies don’t speak with an Israeli accent, and the elves of Warcraft don’t have a Finnish inflection. This comes down to the differences between how Tolkien portrayed his fantasy races and how he imagined they should talk, and the readers' interpretation.
As radio and film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the slow evolution of the dwarven accent from the low British of 1977’s cartoon version of The Hobbit, to the more stylized accents of the pair of dwarves in 1985’s Legend, to the Welsh-by-way-of-Scotland grumblings of John Rhys Davies’ Gimli from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, right into the aggressive rolled R’s of Hearthstone’s dwarven Innkeeper.
“What you get is a sense of Celticness,” says Dominic Watt, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York. Watt explains that many of the virtues associated with the stereotypical fantasy dwarf are also associated with the Scottish accent. “Scottish accents tend to be evaluated pretty positively,” he says. “Shrewdness, honesty, straight-forward speaking. Those are the sorts of ideas that the accent tends to evoke.” Watt also says that there are similar cultural stereotypes surrounding the drinking habits of dwarves and Scots.
Tolkien’s elves similarly took on their own identity, as lofty, immortal progenitors of Middle Earth. They were ethereal, distant, and wise beyond their youthful looks—but above all, above it all. Their voices would come to take on this lofty nature as well.
From the first Lord of the Rings radio plays, elves were depicted speaking in a high-born English accent, owing both to the general Englishness of Tolkien’s texts and to their place in Middle Earth. This vocal portrayal has rarely strayed since.
“The impression I’m always given when I hear elves speak in the English accent you always hear in movies, which again, is very much a Tolkien thing, is that first of all, they are more culturally sophisticated,” says Olsen. Be it the High Elves of Skyrim, Tom Baker’s peaceful elf healer in the Dungeons & Dragons movie, or Cate Blanchett’s ethereal Galadriel, the typical elves of today sound like they were inspired by English royalty.
“If you want people to seem like they are the wisest and they surpass the races of men, and they’re immortal, I can imagine that [...] they are not going to give them West Country accents like they give hobbits,” says Watt.
Maybe the fantasy accent that can be most directly tied to Tolkien’s text is the working-class Cockney accent so often given to orcs and other sentient brutes in modern fantasy. Here we can look directly at the depiction of the trio of trolls in The Hobbit, which are written in a strangely modern dialect—a technique Tolkien rarely used, and later regretted. “In particular, he regretted making their language so recognizably modern. They wouldn’t say words like ‘blimey,’ for instance,” says Olsen.
In the later Lord of the Rings books, Tolkien’s orcs would speak in harsh, but basically correct common parlance, but in the larger view of the fantasy genre, the damage was done. Echoes of that Cockney speech can be found in a number of versions of fantasy bruisers, most notably in the orcs of the Lord of the Rings films and the Warhammer universe.
There isn’t any one instance in which dwarves first sounded like dwarves or orcs first sounded like orcs, and given the breadth and imagination of modern fantasy, it’s not inconceivable that our accepted versions of fantasy dialect will come to change in the near future. For the time being, the accents we take for granted in our fantasy stories are here to stay, still informed, like almost all of the genre, by Tolkien’s influence.
It took five years to drill down to the bedrock beneath the sheet of ice covering Greenland. Down and down and down the exquisitely engineered drill went, through almost two miles of ice, until it came close to the bedrock, where the ice grew rougher with pebbles and rocks.
This was back in 1993, during the most ambitious ice core drilling project that had ever been tried. There were two parallel projects, with sites just a few miles apart, one run by an American team and the other by an European team, collecting cores that could be compared to one another. Only, when they closed in on the bedrock and the rocky ice started to destroy the endlessly designed drill crowns, the Europeans pulled back.
"And the Americans decided to slam that thing into the bedrock," says Joerg Schaefer, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. That’s how they ended up with a five foot sample of Greenland bedrock, which Columbia calls “perhaps earth’s rarest geologic sample: the only bit of bedrock yet retrieved from the ice sheet’s base.”
All those years ago, the American scientists already had an idea of why they might want the bedrock sample. When cosmic rays—radiation from outer space—hit the Earth, they produce neutron showers that fall to the ground and make very specific radionuclides in the first few feet of the ground. Ice, though, stops that from happening. If those particles made by cosmic rays could be measured in the Greenland bedrock, they would reveal how long it had been since that bit of land had been clear of ice—when the massive Greenland ice sheet had last melted away.
When the bedrock was first retrieved, though, the techniques for measuring those particles were not refined enough to reveal the ice sheet’s history. A pilot analysis in the ‘90s showed that the particles scientists were looking for, isotopes of beryllium and aluminium, were present in the bedrock. At some point, this piece of land had been exposed to the sky. “But they couldn’t tell for how long and when it was ice free,” says Schaefer.
When he first came to the United States from Europe, Schaefer started working—“out of geochemical geek-ness"—with Robert Finkel, a pioneer of beryllium analysis and one of the scientists who did the pilot analysis, on refining methods for measuring these isotopes. Finally, after many years of work, they were convinced they could measure the very faint signals they might find in the world’s only bedrock sample from under the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Before they could try, though, they had to convince the sample assignment committee who oversees the ice core to let them have part of it. That took a year. They had to prove that their techniques were good enough that they’d be able to measure the small amounts of isotopes they’d be looking for. “I appreciate it in hindsight,” says Schaefer. “It was a pain in the neck, but you cannot just give these samples out and then they are gone.” Because, in this case, using the samples meant destroying them.
The beryllium and aluminum isotopes that Schaefer and his colleagues were looking for are contained in quartz. To measure the isotopes, first the scientists crush the rock and take the quartz out. After they decontaminate the quartz, to make sure any signal they measure is the signal they’re looking for, they digest it in acid, in order to isolate, using these highly refined chemical methods, the isotopes they are interested in. To actually measure the isotopes, they use mass spectrometers married to particle accelerators, machines so expensive, rare, and specialized that the team used one machine, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to measure the beryllium isotopes and another, at Purdue University, to measure the aluminum.
What they found, when all this was done, more than 20 years after the bedrock was first collected, was that for large parts of the Pleistocene, which stretched from about 11,700 years ago back and back and back to 2.6 million years ago, much of Greenland had no ice sheet covering it. (Their results are published in Nature.) Compared to some models for the ebb and flow of the ice sheet, their data shows that the ice sheet is much less stable than some people thought—and less stable than we all should hope for.
If the Greenland ice sheet melts away, it means the oceans of the world will rise more than 7 meters. That’s more than 22 feet of sea level rise, when even half that would change the shape of the places we live, putting large sections of coastal cities underwater. If the ice sheet is less stable than scientists thought, it’s more possible it will disappear as the climate changes. “You have a hard time sleeping when you think about what it is,” says Schaefer. “The Greenland ice sheet has been much less stable than we wish. It’s not what we like to see. But it was what it was.”
The Providence Library Company was founded in 1753 by a group of Providentians who wanted to read but could not afford to have books shipped from Europe on their own. Before the city had a public lending library, this organization gave members access to the world through shared books for a small fee. The company was eventually housed in the Athenaeum (named for Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom) in 1836. It's been an institution ever since.
Don't be daunted by the neoclassical columns and name. The Athenaeum, or "the Ath" as some of its regulars know it, is for everyone. On any given day, anyone can drop in and browse the stacks, which include gems like the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (containing notes in Walt Whitman's own handwriting, ) an 1830s books of astronomy or a Regency-era book of boys' entertainments.
Artwork dons the walls of the building. A full length portrait of George Washington looks over the reading room, while another wall is graced with a bookplate from The Raven painted by Edouard Manet. The library has its fair share of literary history, even aside from its tomes. Poet Sarah Helen Whitman broke off her courtship with Edgar Allen Poe in the Athenaeum, and H. P. Lovecraft visited many a time and even wrote to friends about the charming little library in Providence.
The Athenaeum still functions as a library but it's also much more than that. There are musical events, parties, old-fashioned salons and speaking events, all hosted in the beautiful Victorian library stacks. The busts of Cicero and Athena even don costumes. It serves as an important cultural space in Providence, and its public programs have earned the institution a reputation as "a 19th-century library with the soul of a 21st-century rave party."
In Spanish director Segundo de Chomón's Les Kiriki, acrobates japonais ("The Kiriki, Japanese Acrobats"), French performers made up to appear Japanese nod their heads and wriggle into balanced contortions. But the orientalist costumes weren't the only trick in this 1907 film.
In fact, just about everything in Les Kiriki is faked. In addition to the actors' costumes, if the acrobatic feats seem impossible (like the little boy holding four grown men balanced on a beam over his shoulder), it's because they are. These stunts were the result of early special effects experimentation.
Chomón had the actors lie against a black background, making it appear as though they were standing up when they were actually horizontal on the ground. As they "climb" and stack themselves atop one another, they are really crawling across the floor while the camera shoots them from above.
This was Chomón's answer to the work of Georges Méliès, best known for his 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune("A Trip to the Moon"). These early filmmakers pioneered low-tech special effects that continue to wow viewers, if only for their ingenuity.
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.
Boasting a towering steeple and an ornate interior with magnificent stained-glass windows, San Thome Basilica is an impressive bright white structure that dates back to 1893. It was constructed by British colonial authorities to replace an older structure from the 16th century, built by Portuguese colonists atop what was claimed to be the tomb of Saint Thomas the Apostle.
Despite consensus among historians to the contrary, Catholic tradition states that Thomas arrived in Kerala from Judea in 52 CE and preached between 52 CE and 72 CE. According to this story, he spent the final years of his life preaching on a beach in what is now Chennai, and was ultimately martyred on nearby St. Thomas Mount.
While modern Church scholars recognize that there is no actual evidence of these events, as accounts of the saint's time in India were written centuries after the fact, the traditional version is still highly significant to South Indian Christians—a.k.a, Saint Thomas Christians. Indeed, Saint Thomas is still regarded as the Patron Saint of India.
The Basilica is built over the place where Thomas was said to be entombed after his martyrdom. Though most of his remains were subsequently transported as far away as Mesopotamia and Italy, a modern chapel in the basement of the Basilica is said to contain a small bone from the saint’s hand, as well as the weapon that killed him. It is one of three churches in the world that was constructed on the tomb of an apostle. The other two churches are St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, and Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Spain.
It can feel like modern Hollywood is too quick to make entertainment out of tragedy, but it turns out that’s always been the case. The first Titanic film was actually made in 1912—only a month after the Titanic sank. Not only that, but it starred a Titanic survivor.
Dorothy Gibson was already a popular actress when she set sail on the ill-fated ship. The 22-year-old had an existing contract with the American branch of the French film company Éclair, so after the disaster she quickly tapped her resources to co-write a film that would be a starring vehicle for her—and, taking advantage of public interest in the tragedy, a marketing sensation for Éclair.
Gibson began her now-forgotten career as a model, known best as the original “Harrison Fisher Girl,” artist Harrison Fisher’s beautiful muse. Her face was in magazines, postcards, and various Edwardian merchandise for years. In 1911 Gibson had her big acting break after being hired by Éclair American Company to work as their leading lady. She starred in the hit silent comedy The Easter Bonnet and the incredibly well-received drama Hands Across The Sea, in which she played Molly Pitcher. Her leading lady looks caught the attention of Éclair producer Jules Brulatour, who began a secret affair with her. Brulatour played a big role in pushing his starlet mistress into the Titanic feature.
In the spring of 1912, Gibson spent several weeks on vacation in Europe with her mother. Brulatour wired her to return to America to begin work on two new films she was contracted to do. So Gibson and her mother went to Paris to book a trip on the Titanic, sailing out of Cherbourg on April 10th.
On the night the Titanic sank, Gibson played a late night game of bridge with a group of bankers from New York. She was making her way back to her room around 11:40, she later told reporters, when she heard a “long drawn, sickening crunch.” She decided to investigate and noticed the deck seemed lopsided, so she ran back to get her mother. Back on deck, she noticed that lifeboat 7 was virtually empty. Gibson invited her bridge partners to join her and her mother in the boat, which wound up being the first lifeboat launched from the ship. They made it safely back to land with quite a story to tell. Gibson gave Moving Picture News a very vivid account of the sinking a few weeks later, describing the event as a nightmare: “I will never forget the terrible cry that rang out from people who were thrown into the sea and others who were afraid for their loved ones.”
It’s likely that Saved From the Titanic was not Gibson’s idea. She reportedly did not immediately want to do this film, having barely recovered from the incident herself. Éclair told Moving Picture World that “the beautiful young cinematic star valiantly conquered her own feeling and forged ahead”—but it sounds like she barely forged ahead, bursting into tears several times during the shooting of the film in Fort Lee, NJ. It’s likely that Gibson felt she was being forced to relive a recent traumatic experience; she even wore the same clothes in the film that she wore on that dreadful night.
Still, her producers—one of whom was her lover, Jules Brulatour—urged her to continue telling her captivating story. Saved From the Titanic was completed in a week; like most films from this era, it was only ten minutes long. It was released a month to the day after the ship sank, making it the fastest film in the history of cinema to tell the story of national tragedy.
The plot is a romantic story in which Gibson plays a young student who is engaged to a sailor named Jack, and who returns to America via the Titanic after studying abroad. She tells her story with horrifying flashbacks that end in her fainting, proving that the sea—an important part of her navy fiance’s profession—is far too traumatic for her. Her character’s parents demand that Jack choose between his bride-to-be and his work. Ultimately Jack decides it is his patriotic duty not to give up his post. Gibson’s father in the film is moved to hear this and says, “Daughter, here is your husband.”
Éclair worked hard to promote the film, but critics weren’t immediately kind to the news of its release. The sinking of the Titanic was a monumental disaster, and critics had a hard time fathoming how any producer thought it would be a fitting subject for a film. For example, The New York Dramatic Mirror wrote:
The bare idea of undertaking to reproduce in a studio, no matter how well equipped, or by re-enacted sea scenes an event of the appalling character of the Titanic disaster, with its 1,600 victims, is revolting, especially at this time when the horrors of the event are so fresh in mind. And that a young woman who came so lately, with her good mother, safely through the distressing scenes can now bring herself to commercialize her good fortune by the grace of God, is past understanding…
The writer of the “Western Correspondent” column in The Moving Picture News was also scathing, hinting that Éclair manipulated Gibson’s story to bamboozle audience members into buying tickets. He writes: “Eclair, I am surprised that you would utilize such a serious thing as that great catastrophe to put out the studio production you did when you didn’t have one single feature that was real or genuine about the Titanic.”
But the trade publications gave the film excellent reviews, almost all of them praising Dorothy’s realistic portrayal. Many said it was the finest acting they’ve seen from her twenty-film career thus far, saying it watching her portrayal felt like she was reliving the experience. (That was likely because she was reliving it, clothes and all.) Moving Picture World praised the film as “a surprising and artistically perfect reel” and marveled at Gibson’s poise so shortly after her trauma.
Dorothy gave up acting shortly after releasing Saved From the Titanic, despite being the second-highest-paid actress in the industry at the time (after Mary Pickford). She dabbled in a career in opera, but ultimately disappeared from the spotlight entirely. Gibson and Brulatour’s affair was exposed by the press in 1913 after Gibson struck and killed a man while driving Brulatour’s car. Gibson later moved to France for a fresh start, where she became a Nazi sympathizer and allegedly worked in espionage. She changed allegiances in 1944, but it was too late for her. She was arrested by the Gestapo in Italy as a resistance agitator and imprisoned in San Vittore in Milan until she escaped in 1944. Dorothy was not compelled to make a film out of her WWII arrest and escape.
Sadly, due to a fire at Eclair Studios in 1914, most of Gibson’s 22 films—including Saved From the Titanic—are lost to history. Titanic film scholar Frank Thompson laments that unless a hidden reel turns up somewhere, it is unlikely we will ever get the chance to see it. Some silent film historians even consider this one of the most tragic losses in the silent film library—the earliest Titanic film, starring a survivor, is a historical relic that sounds almost too good to be true. But for Dorothy Gibson, the loss of a film that capitalized on her fresh trauma might have come as a relief.
Located just outside of the city limits next to the Nikola Tesla Airport, the Belgrade Aviation Museum is notable first for its architectural value alone. A purpose-built museum, its modernist curves and geometric panes of mirrored glass stand in stark contrast to the flat, ploughed fields surrounding it.
Designed in 1989 by noted Bosnian architect Ivan Štraus, the interior of the building contains a history of manned flight in Serbia. Impressively laid out inside the circular dome, the collection runs from the early 1900s to the cusp of the 21st century. Of particular interest are a Messerschmitt Bf 109, a Supermarine Spitfire, and an Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik, which were three of the most iconic planes of World War II. More significantly, this is the only museum where those three planes from Germany, Britain, and Russia can be seen sitting side by side all bearing the livery of Yugoslavia--a quirky result of Belgrade's unique history.
Also notable are displays featuring a selection of NATO aircraft and drones disabled by Serbian air defence forces in the more recent Yugoslav Wars. These include pieces (proudly displayed) of a Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter and a General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, both shot down in 1999.
Some larger aircraft sit outside in the shadow of the museum, their aging hulks combining with the sheen of the odd glass structure to provide a melancholy picture. The sense of decay is exacerbated by an airplane graveyard consisting of exhibits that evidently did not make the cut and thus lie abandoned and rusting in the lee of the space-age structure. The overall combination of architecture, history, and ruin porn create a peculiar and compelling environment.
On November 15th, 1877, a select group of dedicated people filed into the Reading Room of the New York Aquarium for their annual meeting. For the next few hours, they updated each other on the milestones they had achieved that year. One man described how he had loosed skylarks, chaffinches, and pheasants in Central Park, and watched a previous crop of English sparrows "multiply amazingly." A second voiced his hope that the English titmouse and the blackbird could soon join them. Yet another made an impassioned argument for the movement of the California brook trout, which he called "the best of our own fishes," into New York waters.
Today—as we laud native species, fight invasive ones, and secure our borders against trafficked wildlife—this behavior seems intrinsically harmful. But this wasn't a group of proto-eco-terrorists. It was the American Acclimatization Society—one of dozens of perfectly legal groups dedicated to spreading species around the world. For a few decades at the end of the 19th century, "acclimatization," or intercontinental species-swapping, was all the rage throughout Europe and its colonies. Although it was eventually replaced by sounder ecological strategies, its strange legacy remains.
The godfather of acclimatization was a French anatomist named Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Originally a specialist in so-called "structural monstrosities" (what we today would call congenital abnormalities, like cleft lips), Saint-Hilaire eventually found himself in a senior position at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. While there, he developed certain philosophical views about the role of animals in society—namely, that they and humans are locked into a kind of mutually beneficial contract that enabled their true destinies.
Under the terms of this agreement, certain animals provide humans with undying devotion, along with other more tangible goods like fur, feathers, and meat. In return, humans allow these animals a passenger's-seat view of the progress of society and the triumph of reason, something the animals couldn't pull off on their own. Even wild animals, he argued, could choose to become domesticated—opting into what, in Saint-Hilaire's argument, was a good deal for all involved.
Under this philosophy, it only made sense that the French should bring as many of these animals as possible into their country, in order to give them the chance to fall in step. They should also send their own domestic animals abroad, to spread the fruits of this bargain to other countries. In 1854, Saint-Hilaire established La Societé Zoologique d'Acclimatation—the first acclimatization society, headquartered in the National Museum. Within a few years, they had opened a side branch in French Algeria, as well as the "Jardin d'Acclimatation," a zoo in Paris filled with all the animals that might soon roam France—Algerian sheep, Angora goats, yaks, elephants, and hippos. By 1860, the society had over 2,500 members, including diplomats, scientists, foreign heads of state, and military men.
Thanks partially to La Societé's international membership, its founding ideas quickly crossed borders. It helped that these concepts meshed so easily with many of the principals of colonialism. As acclimatization devotee Auguste Hardy once put it, in many ways, "the whole of colonization [was] a vast deed of acclimatization"—dependent on the idea that European powers knew what was best for the entire world, and deserved both to spread their own way of life to all four corners of the globe, and to harvest all of the earth's fruits.
By 1900, there were over fifty Societies, swapping species everywhere from Algiers to Tasmania. Think of a rampant colonial power, and chances are that people there were meeting regularly to scheme about how to spread different creatures to their colonies, and bring others back.
Many of these efforts were, predictably, spectacular failures. An early shipment of camels to Australia, to help travelers cross the arid interior, was met with tragedy when bad weather killed all but one (that camel, named Harry, lived a life of celebrity until he accidentally killed his owner, John Horrocks, by headbutting a gun while Horrocks was cleaning it). Ostriches similarly failed to thrive there. The founders of the British Acclimatization Society, who believed that the country's growing food crisis could be solved by the introduction of exotic fish and big game, threw an enormous banquet every year from 1860 to 1865, featuring tables piled high with German boar, Syrian pig, East African eland, and Australian kangaroo. But they never successfully imported anything more impressive than the North American gray squirrel, which haunts them to this day.
Others were too successful. Australia was a popular places to send European species, largely because the settlers there were suspicious of the native flora and fauna and wanted to see some more familiar animals ("The swans were black, the eagles white… some mammals had pockets, others laid eggs… and even the blackberries were red," complained one, named J. Martin, of his time there).
The American society had its own share of victories and defeats. Chairman Eugene Schieffelin, a New York pharmacist, was both a bird fan and a Shakespeare obsessive, and he built many of the group's priorities around a single pursuit—introducing every bird mentioned by the Bard into Central Park. Some, like nightingales and thrushes, died out quickly. Others flourished to the point of menace. European starlings now compete with native birds for nesting space, damage fruit trees by the millions, and even occasionally ground planes.
Thanks partly to these fiascos, the appeal of acclimatization slowly faded. More rigorous ecological theories replaced the spiritual and colonialist views of the natural world that had driven each society's formation. Some, like Britain's, dissolved altogether. Others rebranded, forgetting their border-crossing dreams and taking up mantles of conservation and game management.
But one society—the original—came to a more brutal, if fitting, end. During the 1870 Siege of Paris, as the German army kept supplies from crossing into the city, most Parisians resorted to desperate measures, eating dogs, cats, horses, and even rats. Responding to the bourgeois's demand for better options, luxury chef Alexandre Étienne Choron cooked most of the animals in the zoo of the Jardin d'Acclimatation for Christmas dinner, serving, among other things, fried camel, kangaroo stew, and elephant soup. (No one, in the end, wanted to dine on the hippo.) It was a far cry from the dream of exotic game roaming France—but the colonizers still had their beasts and ate them, too.
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.
Sure, San Francisco is pretty cool on its own. But don't you sometimes wish that when you landed there, you could be greeted by a pig in a pilot's hat and a tutu?
You're in luck—San Francisco Airport has recently brought in a new volunteer just for you. Her name is LiLou, and she's got a snout, four trotters, and impeccable credentials.
LiLou, who joined up in October, is a relatively new member of the airport's Wag Brigade, a group of specially trained therapy animals whose job is to keep travelers calm and happy. She is a Juliana-breed pig—the smallest kind—and her human companion describes her as a "city pig" who loves people.
All Wag Brigade members are Animal Assisted Therapy-certified, trained by the San Francisco SPCA. LiLou passed her SPCA training this past spring, impressing her trainers with a repertoire of 10+ tricks, including playing the piano. In doing so, she became the city's first-ever therapy pig.
With this new job, she has broken yet another ceiling—LiLou is "believed to be the only airport porker in the country," the Mercury News reports. (Her Brigade co-workers are mostly cats, dogs, and rabbits.) She was hired for her good demeanor, extensive costume collection, and "overall cuteness." And yes, her nails always look like that.
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.
Earlier this year, at a spot north of Liverpool on England's west coast, a piece of land emerged from the water. Made of shale and stone, this little spit of an island became a local object of intrigue, as visitors and locals would jetski out to see it.
Now, though, two jetskiers have made a bid to claim it as their own.
Ross Spence and Micah Jebb have named the island Rosmic, an amalgamation of their first names.
“Micah and myself were talking about the island over dinner and thought we would put a name on it – so everyone knows what it’s called," Spence told The Star.
The island may not be exactly new, though. Spence found in his research that this area was once dredged to improve accessibility for shipping. The new island is the recurrence of the old balance.
In fact, it may already have a name: as the Blackpool Gazette reports, old ocean charts show a piece of land in the same spot, called Kingscar Bank.
Nevada is known for its gorgeous deserts, but there's so much more to the western state. Early explorers of the Spanish Territory were blown away by the magnificent colors of Nevada's scenery, and wrote much about the beauty of their surroundings. Mark Twain spent a piece of the early 1860s writing in Virginia City and in Roughing It, waxed poetic on rugged canyons, silver threads of river, and lakes flaming in the desert. "At rare intervals—but very rare—there are clouds in our skies," he wrote, "and then the setting sun would gild and flush and glorify this mighty expanse of scenery with a bewildering pomp of color that held the eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music."
Luckily, great swathes of that "mighty expanse of scenery" look much as they did back then, and as they have for hundreds, even thousands of years.
This lake earned its name from the conical stone formations that can be seen rising from the still waters. The limestone tufa formations were exposed when a larger ancient lake receded. Today they are not only scenic, but some of them are also home to a rare breed of pelican. The surrounding waters are also teeming with fauna—they are home to the ancient Cui-ui fish and the largest species of cutthroat trout in the world, the Lahontan Cutthroat. The scenic lake is also the setting of numerous local ghost stories, from lore about drowned babies to tales of vengeful mermaids.
The Spring Valley mountain range's elevation is so great that it is referred to as a "sky island," where the ecosystems at different elevations vary wildly based on each climate. Each level of elevation supports a different kind of vegetation and wildlife, some of which is unique to Nevada. At the base of the mountain range, it's mostly desert plants and scrub brush. Move a bit further upwards and it becomes gray blackbush scrub, which eventually gives way to a dense green conifer forest at the peak.
The vistas of Valley of Fire Park are just as dramatic as its name, which comes from the red sandstone formations that glow as if on fire when the sun's setting rays hit them. But people have been admiring the beauty of Valley of Fire for a very, very long time as evidenced by the petroglyphs that dot the rocks all over the park. Some of the art dates to around A.D. 300, but it is believed the Anasazi inhabited the valley as far back as 300 B.C. In addition to these natural and archaeological wonders, the valley boasts an assortment of wildlife, including roadrunners, coyotes, jackrabbits, and desert tortoises, just to name a few.
The natural wonders of Nevada don't only exist above ground, they're underfoot too. Underneath Great Basin National Park you will find miles of magnificent cathedral-like chambers. These caves were discovered in the late 1880s, though there is evidence that they were previously used as a burial site for American Indian tribes. In the following decades, Lehman Caves became the setting for weddings and parties.
You can still see graffiti from these times on some of the cave walls (in the aptly named "Inscription Room"). Some of the signatures are written in charcoal, while others are carved into the stone. The caves are now protected and preserved as part of Great Basin National Park. However, even the damage to the cave represents more than a century of human interaction with the site.
You would never guess it now, but 10,000 years ago, the desert of Nevada was home to the 8,500-square-foot Lake Lahontan. Today, 90 miles east of Carson City, Sand Mountain is a modern remnant of that ancient lake. As wind blew across the empty lakebed, the sand accumulated near a basin that stopped the wind. Stretching across the Nevada desert, the giant dune is two miles long and 600 feet high, but that's not the only unique thing about it. It's also musical. As wind blows across the top, the sand's movement creates an eerie, whispery hum. This rare ringing phenomenon can only happen under precise conditions: a particular sand shape, a particular humidity level, and a particular concentration of minerals.
This refuge is one of the most isolated in the contiguous United States, and as such it is home to animal populations, birds in particular, that aren't found anywhere else. The largest group of canvasback ducks outside of Alaska nests here, and as protected areas become increasingly scarce, deer, antelope, grouse, and other animals find shelter in Ruby Valley. The territory is varied and representative of Nevada's many environments (it's not all desert): there are mountains, plains, lakes, marshes, and even hot springs.
The mirrored waters of a Lake Tahoe are expansive enough that there are secret wonders hidden throughout. One of them is Bonsai Rock, a boulder with four tiny trees growing from the top. Unlike the deliberate fine tuning and precise pruning required for tended bonsai, these trees have been pruned by a the force of scarcity. They've defied the odds of survival by thriving on a diet eked out from their rocky, nutrient-deficient natural container.
The Haukadalur valley in southern Iceland has a regular floor show with just about everything going for it. It performs on time, it’s flashy, it’s ancient, and it won’t cost you anything. There are a couple of real show-stoppers who go by the names of Geysir and Strokkur—one is the old pro, the other, you might say is the understudy.
Geysir and Strokkur are a couple of erupting hot springs, or geysers, in the Haukadalur geothermal field, north of Iceland’s Laugarvatn Lake.
The bigger of the two is Geysir (we get the English word from him, a derivative of an Old Norse word for “gush”), but he’s been a little shy about his star power recently, only spouting off sporadically. Strokkur, on the other hand, can’t contain himself, erupting reliably every 10 or 15 minutes, every day and night. There are other, smaller, geysers scattered around the field, as well as mineral springs and mud pots (a boiling slurry of geothermal water and dissolved minerals, rock and anything that happens to fall in).
Although they’ve probably been active for 10,000 years or more, the hot springs of Haukadalur were first noted by Europeans back in the late 13th century, when the field erupted in geothermal activity after an earthquake. Starting in the 18th century the tourists came, looking for mineral baths, therapeutic mud, and just to watch the geysers blow.
Geysir has been quiet recently, but its eruption in 2,000 of over 400 feet (122 m) holds the record for the highest known geyser blast of all time. His understudy, Strokkur, has more recently taken over the show. A little smaller, a little less experienced, but a whole lot more dependable.
A locked vault in a Baghdad mosque contains a Quran written in lovely, sweeping Arabic calligraphy which, if not for its ink, could be displayed in a museum. But this holy book was written in blood—Saddam Hussein's blood to be precise.
Following an assassination attempt on the life of his son, Uday, the former dictator became a devout Muslim. Ironically though, with infinite resources it's difficult to demonstrate your piety. In an attempted display of devotion, shortly after his 60th birthday Saddam had roughly 27 liters of his blood drawn and given to a calligrapher.
Over the course of two years the artist, Abbas Shakir Joudi al-Baghdadi, wrote some 600 pages of the Quran using the Iraqi president's blood as ink.
Authorities don't know what to do with the document. On the one hand, it is a significant, if gruesome, artifact of a particular era in Iraqi history. On the other hand, displaying it could cause it to be glorified by Saddam's supporters, the Ba'ath Party. Additionally, some Sufi leaders have have called the macabre method of writing such a Quran "haraam," or forbidden.
For now, the Blood Quran resides in a basement under strict lock and key. It was previously on display in Saddam's "Mother of All Battles" Mosque. Now, that room is sealed by three vaulted doors, the keys to which have been distributed between a sheikh, the city police commissioner, and a secret third party. In order to even be considered for a visit to the Blood Quran, one has to submit to deliberation by a government committee. So for now, it sits in the mosque, growing more curious and grisly by the day.
Ten years ago, Lenny Jones was in the throes of getting his Master’s in computer science at the University of Utah. It was the era of PS, I Love You (2006) and The Lake House (2007), movies that glorified sending snail mail into the future. Inspired, he created Letter Me Later, a website that made it possible to schedule email delivery years ahead.
In February 2014, a weird thing happened to Jones: hundreds of messages written in a hodgepodge of Tagalog and English started to flood his inbox. “At first I thought that someone had come up with a bot, because there were so many that I thought there’s just no way this is natural,” he says. “Plus, it’s all in some weird language.”
Unbeknown to Jones, thousands of miles away, the Filipino writers of a hit rom-com, Starting Over Again, had decided to incorporate a time-delayed email service into the plot of their film. They called it Letterlater. After the film came out, heartbroken Filipinos flocked to Jones’ Letter Me Later, a search result Google delivered when people typed “Letterlater.” The results were staggering. In January 2014, only 17,000 unique visitors went to the site, but the next month, the number jumped to 84,000.
The Letter Me Later forum, too, began to be flooded with messages from anguished and anxious Filipino singles. Topic titles, which continue to be posted to this day, tend towards the dramatic. Some have three question marks (i.e. “forbidden love???”). Others are in all caps (i.e. “FALLING OUT OF LOVE”). Then, there are those that seem like they belong in Craigslist’s personals (i.e. “Looking for a temporary bf for 1 month”). Many provide prescriptive advice on how to survive a breakup (i.e. “tips on how to "let go" your BF.”). The forum calls to mind the subreddit “Ex No Contact,” with the one big difference that most of these folks send their proverbial letters and don’t sit on them.
Starting Over Again isn’t exactly an endorsement of time-delayed email. After a painful breakup, the film’s male protagonist, Marco Antonio Villanueva III, desperately sends a message four years into the future to his ex, Ginny Gonzales. In his message, he writes, “I’ll wait for you Ginny. I’ll wait knowing one day, I’ll be back in your life.” Predictably, when we catch up with Marco, he’s moved on—he’s starting his own restaurant and preparing to marry his longtime fiancée.
When Ginny learns of her ex’s engagement, she pulls up the email and shouts, “This email isn’t true. I have to delete you. I have to delete you from my life.” But, she struggles; she can’t do it. She can’t handle the present; she tries to woo him back and ultimately fails.
The film’s plot didn’t surprise Letter Me Later founder Lenny Jones at all. He thought the movie "was good," he says, but "was a little shocked at how slimy [Ginny] was."
Jones does not, however, believe his site can do much for the broken hearted.
“I think in most cases, if you get something from four or five years ago, the person has likely changed, and it’s not at all relevant,” he adds. “Usually, someone doesn’t keep feelings like that for someone for so long.”
Lyks Mamauag, a Filipino student, had a different take. After watching Starting Over Again, she turned to Letter Me Later to send her ex-boyfriend a message. Even though he never responded, Mamauag reflected, “When I sent the email, I felt a certain relief in my heart. It felt great to be able to release all of my emotions in one email.” She has some advice for the future users of Letter Me Later: “I would tell them to simply write (or in this case, type) with their whole heart.”
Despite its success, Letter Me Later isn’t for everyone. Take Lenny Jones. Apart from testing the site, he hasn’t ever actually used it. “I don’t do well thinking into the future, which is my problem, I know,” he says.” I can’t even think of what would be interesting to write to myself or to anyone else in the future.”
But don’t worry, brokenhearted, Lenny Jones isn’t going anywhere, and he’s committed to the cause. “I haven’t had reason to think that I’d ever shut it down. It could go forever."
Update (12/9): We initially used the word "Filipino" to refer to the language used in the Philippines. We meant Tagalog.
Every year, in the heart of Central Oregon's Cascade Mountains, there is a lake that mysteriously drains down a hole. It fills up to capacity each winter, quickly starts to drain every spring, and transforms itself into a quiet meadow by summer.
Lost Lake, near the small town of Sisters and the Hoodoo Ski Resort, is a 79-acre watery haven during the rainy months. Streams and creeks are running high and fast, and this mountain basin fills up like a bathtub. When the rains slow down, so do the streams, but the cycle of the lake doesn’t stop there. The water recedes, pours into a 7-foot wide hole, and simply disappears.
Geologists speculate the culprit is a collapsed lava tube created during a period of intense volcanic activity over 12,000 years ago. The tube has formed a slow drain that feeds into the rock-hard honeycomb of old lava underfoot (or under-lake), the water running into a tributary of the McKenzie River and surrounding aquafer, eventually ending up 6 miles away in Clear Lake.
When Lost Lake is gulping water in winter it can keep up with the constant draining. But by spring, when flow is low and the drain is wide open, the lake lives up to its name. One request: please don’t try and plug the hole. It won’t work, and it only makes more work for the Forest Service. They work hard enough already.
Many would say that Richard Helms was a stand-up sort of guy; his mom, his neighbors, his friends, even his ex-wife, all attested to his loyalty, his intelligence, and his strict, wholesome commitment to his country, a patriot and a leader. But the man who would climb the ranks of United States Intelligence, from his World War Two stint in the Office of Strategic Services to his post as Director of Central Intelligence for CIA to his appointment as ambassador to Iran, is remembered by the public for his secrecy, his lies, and his commitment to the cloak-and-dagger code of his agency - none of which, of course, appear (at least in the negative) in Helms’s FBI file.
The agency investigated Mr. Helms three times. The first came shortly after the war, as part of the CIA’s creation and enveloping of OSS.
The search turned up many shining reviews, including those heaped upon him while an undergraduate at Williams College.
It also resurfaced allegations made by one of his former OSS employees who was upset that his reports were repeatedly labelled as unusable, though they revealed nothing confirming Communist motivations.
The next time he was scrutinized came in the fifties, when he was vetted for security clearance …
and the subject of more communist suspicions.
Helms was finally reviewed again at the turn of ‘72-’73 in preparation for the ambassadorship to Iran, and, unsurprisingly, the rundown of statements provided by his associates was glowing. Ray Cline, a CIA analyst described in the file itself as a Helms rival, said of the CIA leader’s loyalty: “If there is any question here, we all have a problem in the United States.”
Unsurprisingly, others vouched for the man’s ability to keep a secret for his government.
And though his ex-wife explained that Helms had had “several girl friends,” his age would likely curb that appetite …
and his pre-existing friendship with many ruling Iranians would likely help his cause.
Curiously, the papers reported that Helms’s friends and associates had made up absurd claims when they were told of the background check.
Thinking themselves the subjects of a prank given the CIA’s head obvious possession of security clearance and top-level trust, they claimed to make things up.
If there were any outlandish claims, they were conveniently omitted from his final FBI files, which you can check out the first section of below, and the rest here.
Blood. The mere mention of the word is enough to make some people feel faint. Most of us associate it with terrible cuts resulting from bad kitchen accidents, or with Halloween and slasher films. In some cultures, it is thought to contain the power and substance of a being, in others it is unclean and undesirable. But whatever be your personal perception of blood, have you ever seen it up-close and personal?
Using a Samsung Galaxy S II and a home-made adapter, Aurel Manea captured the movements of blood under a microscope. At 400X, there still appears to be a flow to these movements, but once he zooms in at 1000X, everything slows down. Besides images of living blood, Manea also captures images of dried blood, which evoke an old wall that is cracking under the weight of time.
Sit back, press play, and become acquainted with the substance of life.
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.
