Rothera on Adelaide Island is the UK's largest Antarctic research station. Until recently, station support assistant Kirsten Shaw ran its mail service out of a handmade box. But only this month, the station received an actual Royal Mail postbox. The upgrade is primarily aesthetic, but highlights the logistical difficulty and surprising importance of snail mail in Antarctica.

Figuring that it was best to go straight to the top with these things, Shaw wrote to the British King last August. In the isolation of a research station, whose population varies seasonally from around 100 to 22, a simple letter is a physical connection to loved ones in the outside world.

"An actual tangible piece of paper with handwriting from friends and family is such a lift," Shaw explained.

Her argument must have made an impact, because when polar research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough arrived in Antarctica this month with a load of supplies, it also had a shiny new, official Royal Mail post box.

For a letter to reach the new Rothera Royal Mail postbox, it must pass over many hundreds of kilometers. Likewise, outgoing mail has an arduous journey ahead of it. Outgoing mail is stamped and bagged by Shaw, then loaded onto a British Antarctic Survey plane or ship.

The bags are unloaded at a BAS office in the Falkland Islands and then flown to a Royal Air Force station in Oxfordshire. From there, they're fed into the normal Royal Mail system for delivery.

There's nothing quite like posting a letter as a penguin waddles past.

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The Kaamos Road follows French cyclist and filmmaker Joffrey Maluski on a winter journey along the Arctic Circle. On his 1,500km, 25-day expedition through Lapland, he carries everything he needs on his bicycle, barely seeing the sun.

The journey begins not on a bike but on a series of nine trains, which takes Maluski from the south of France to Bodo, Norway. There, he assembles his bike, on which he will carry his fuel, gear, and tent.

While he waits for the ferry to the Lofoten islands, he explains the plan. Starting from this archipelago, he'll cycle across Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The "kaamos" of The Kaamos Road is the Finnish word for the polar night. His entire journey takes place during a time when the sun barely breaches the horizon.

Through the frozen dark

He does enjoy a few hours of muted light every day, but the rest of the time, Maluski bikes through the dark. After six days of riding through lashing rain and icy wind, he reaches the Swedish border.

With every kilometer, he reminds us, he pushes deeper into the Arctic. Sunlight becomes even rarer, even as the camera lingers on the rosy, perpetually dawning skies. The scenery comes with fairly brutal conditions for a bike ride. After one 110km day, where temperatures never rose above -16˚C, Maluski shows us the icicles hanging from his face.

His journey quickly settles into a daily routine. At eight, he gets up, eats, and waits for the dawn. Around 10 am, he starts biking. He captures as much film and photographs as he can before it sets again at 1:30 pm. He keeps biking in the darkness, covering between 60 and 100 kilometers. His toes, he reports, are painfully cold, all day, every day.

The temperatures only drop as he nears the final stretch, crossing back into Norway. When he shows us his morning routine, he admits how hard it is to will himself out of his sleeping bag into the -23˚C morning and onto his waiting bike.

After the 25th consecutive morning of such hardship, Maluski arrives in Vardo, Norway.

Reintroducing keystone predator species can have a near-miraculous restorative effect on ecosystems. This is what I would remind a Patagonian penguin who is feeling a bit down about his whole family being eaten by newly arrived pumas.

Trophic cascade

This new behavior is the latest change in an ongoing evolution of predator-prey dynamics on Argentina's Patagonian coast. Before European colonization, pumas (also known as cougars, catamounts, mountain lions, and panthers) ruled the windswept and rocky tip of South America. Their prey were the abundant guanaco, a llama relative, and the lesser rhea, a large flightless bird.

But introducing or reducing even a single species can cause broad changes across an entire ecosystem, a phenomenon referred to as a trophic cascade.

European colonization transformed the landscape. Sheep and cattle replaced the native herbivores, and predators were culled to protect the livestock. With the loss of the foxes and pumas, however, came a new inhabitant: the Magellanic penguin.

Like their namesake, Ferdinand Magellan, these handsome waterbirds were interested in the colonial potential of the South American mainland. Prior to the 18th century, their colonies bred mainly on offshore islands. After the mainland predators disappeared, they established a large breeding colony on the coast of Patagonia, in the Monte León sheep ranch.

Puma on penguin violence

In 2004, the Monte León ranch became Monte León National Park, after conservation organizations purchased it and donated the 25 oceanfront acres to the Argentine National Parks Administration. Wild prey species trickled back in, including the puma. Soon after, local authorities monitoring conditions in the new park began hearing about puma attacks on the penguin colonies.

Now, a study using camera traps has confirmed extensive predation. A team led by ecologist Mitchell Serota placed 22 cameras in the colony from January to April, the middle of the penguin's breeding season. Pumas visited nearly every night, more than 12 times as often as any other predator.

Pumas are incredibly adaptive animals, able to thrive in arid deserts, rocky mountains, open grasslands, and lush rainforests. We're still learning about their behavior, with a recent study finding that they're far more social than we previously believed. Penguin predation is a great example of their behavioral elasticity. Right now, it appears to be paying off, as the area around the penguin colony has the world's densest concentration of pumas.

Despite this new danger, the population of Magellanic penguins is actually growing. However, this puma hunting behavior only emerged recently. It's too soon to tell what its effect will be on the penguins, which only live in the area seasonally.

Four climbers went missing on New Zealand mountains this weekend. Authorities located one deceased pair and removed their bodies from Sabre Peak in Fiordland National Park on Sunday. But another two climbers on Aoraki-Mt. Cook are overdue, with weather conditions hindering searchers.

Worsening weather

Rescue teams entered the Fiordland National Park early on Saturday night, after two climbers failed to return. They located one body that night, and the other on Sunday. However, as weather conditions worsened, the location of their remains high on Sabre Peak became inaccessible.

The north buttress of Sabre Peak features 500m of exposed rock and ice and is popular with serious, experienced climbers. Though authorities were eventually able to extract the climbers' bodies, police described it as "a difficult and technical rescue."

An official cause of death has not been released, but it should come out with the coroner's report. Given the circumstances, a fall is likely.

The next day, another two climbers were also overdue, this time on Aoraki-Mt. Cook. Again, the weather has hindered search and rescue efforts. Much of New Zealand lies within the infamous "Roaring Forties," characterized by strong winds and heavy rainfall. The latest weather reports indicate that the wind and rain are expected to stop for a time on Wednesday, allowing search teams to enter the area.

New Zealand's deadly mountains

The New Zealand Mountain Safety Council released a statement in response to the two latest incidents, calling them "a sobering reminder of the seriousness of Aotearoa’s [New Zealand's] complex and challenging alpine environments."

They noted that good weather has led to more climbing on the high peaks of the South Island, but good weather doesn't prevent them from turning deadly.

The 2,162m Sabre Peak was first summited in 1954. Since then, many climbers have been injured and killed there. Two climbers perished in 2017, and another two men in 2020. Aoraki has an even more tragic history.

Only three weeks ago, guide Thomas Vialletet and his client, Kellam Conover, fell to their deaths on Aoraki. At 3,724m, Aoraki is the highest peak in New Zealand, and guides consider it a challenging climb, as changing weather and poor visibility frequently lead to accidents. During 2019-2020, for example, there were 24 search-and-rescue operations.

A New Zealand Geographic article found the Aoraki visitor's center record books listed 78 fatalities on the mountain since the death of George Napier in 1907. That article was from 2016. That list is now at least a dozen names longer.

When tragedies do occur, authorities often struggle to locate and recover bodies. David Moen, a 19-year-old climber, went missing on Aoraki in 1973, and his remains were only found in 2015. The bodies of three climbers who went missing there in 2024 have still not been located.

Brown bear attacks on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido continue to grow more frequent every year. Depleting food sources and expanding human populations have led to hungry and emboldened bears coming into contact with people. This year alone, there have been 13 recorded fatalities from bear attacks and over 200 injuries.

One such incident occurred on August 14 on Mount Rausu. A young man, hiking with a friend, was attacked and killed by a well-known local bear. Officials located the man's remains the next day and recovered his body as well as a number of personal effects. The bear and her two cubs were killed for the safety of hikers and area residents.

Hokkaido police surrendered his remains and effects to his parents. His watch was among those items, and now his parents have shared with the media the chilling data it captured.

A chronological record of the attack

At around 11 am on August 14, GPS data shows that the watch and its owner suddenly veered off the hiking trail on Mount Rausu. The 26-year-old Tokyo resident was about 200 meters ahead of his hiking partner as they descended from the 1,661m summit. The sudden change in direction that his watch logged was the bear dragging the young man off the trail and down the slope, into a patch of bushes.

The watch circled around this spot in the bushes, seemingly tugged and whirled back and forth. Soon, between 100m and 130m from the trail, the watch stopped detecting a heartbeat. It did not register movement again until around 9 am the next morning. Location data shows the watch moved a few hundred meters further into the bush, as the bear dragged the man's body.

Later that day, hunters found the three bears, with the mother bear feasting on part of the victim's body. A hundred meters away, more of his remains were buried in a mound of earth. Brown bears will often bury uneaten food in this way.

The victim's father, Shinobu Sota, spoke to Japanese media, questioning why nothing was done before the attack. This particular bear was known to be active in the area. She had repeatedly displayed a lack of fear of humans and had even chased another hiker.

In the aftermath of the young man's death, the bear attacks have continued. As winter arrives, the bears should enter hibernation, but it seems that some remain active. Warmer weather and changing behavior may delay their hibernation, as new incidents have been confirmed even into December.

On March 30, 1956, Kamchatka's Bezymianny volcano erupted. The massive explosion blew the lid off the mountain and generated massive clouds of ash. A peak, which once reached 3,113m in altitude, lost 700,000 square meters of material.

Until Bezymianny awoke in 1955, it was considered dormant. Since then, it's been continually active with smaller eruptions.

Then, a 2020 study found it had almost completely regrown.

How volcanoes are reborn

After a massive eruption, volcanoes may continue to be active. Over time, that activity can build up a new cone to replace the old, exploded one. However, Bezymianny is the first such volcano that scientists have been able to observe reforming in real time.

Photographs from the past seven decades show the evolution of Bezymianny's edifice. Slow by human standards, in geologic terms, it's all happened very quickly. Not long after the initial eruption, two lava domes formed about 400m apart. Over the next 20 years, they shifted and expanded, becoming 200m closer. Fifty years after the 1956 eruption, the two vents merged into one central cone.

Based on current projections, Bezymianny will completely regain its old size within the next decade. In the past few years, Bezmianny has seemed particularly eager to reclaim its old height. October 2023 was notable, with lava flows, avalanches, and ash plumes, which prompted authorities to issue aviation warnings.

Not the first time

Like the mythical phoenix, which repeatedly dies only to be reborn from its own fiery remains, Bezmianny has regenerated before. The 2020 study analyzed images of the volcano from before 1956 and observed older collapse scars. They noted a much older, now grown-over crater around the mountain near its summit.

The eruption that formed the pre-1956 Bezmianny occurred around 4,700 years ago.

As Bezymianny demonstrates, volcanic regrowth is not consistent. Domes grow in two different ways, from the inside and from the outside. Endogenous growth occurs when an inflow of magma beneath the surface causes it to swell outwards. Exogenous growth occurs when expelled lava hardens into rock, building up the volcano from outside.

The lava can also be expelled quickly and violently, resulting in extrusive growth, or in a gradual outflowing, called effusive eruption. Between 1956 and 1977, Bezymianny transitioned from endogenous to extrusive growth. After a 1977 spike in activity, it became dominated by extrusive and effusive activity.

Part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, Kamchatka has over 300 volcanoes, of which 29 of them, including Bezymianny, are active.

A documentary short set in Daphne, Alabama, Jubilee describes a rare natural event that only occurs on Alabama's Mobile Bay, on the Gulf of Mexico. We're introduced to some of the people who live along the bay. For them, a Jubilee is part of their vanishing culture.

Watching for the Jubilee

In the bay, a complex combination of weather and tides can cause the water's oxygen levels to drop suddenly. When this happens, sea life congregates on shore and in the shallows. Shrimp, crab, eels, and flounders practically throw themselves on waiting nets and spears.

For many long-time residents, predicting, preparing, and watching for a Jubilee is an important part of their lives. We soon meet Miss Stephanie, a mentor to many of the younger residents who've discovered a love of Jubilee-watching.

When she was young, she says, the Jubilees were more frequent and more intense. We see faded photographs of dozens of flounders hung up, and of masses of crabs emerging from the water.

Mildred, her elderly mother, recalls how the entire community was mobilized at the call of "Jubilee." It was the neighborhood children who patrolled the beach most diligently, eagerly watching for signs.

Some of them still do. We meet Christopher, a young local, and some of his friends. Their summers are spent fishing, swimming, and rising before dawn to check the beach. This is when the Jubilee happens: in summer, just before dawn. But as Christopher explains, they're hard to predict. The wind, the tide, the temperature, the moon phase, and salinity all have to come together just right.

Beautiful unused piers

Miss Stephanie no longer gets up to check for Jubilees, now that Christopher has taken over. She still takes on the cooking when they bring in their hauls and keeps the door open, waiting for the kids to holler for her. (We even learn that in the old regional debate between Zatarain's and Old Bay for spicing seafood, she prefers Zatarain's.)

Christopher says she helped teach him to appreciate just spending time by the bay. A talented musician, he enjoys spending time at the beach, playing the accordion and violin. He doesn't understand, he tells us, why there are all these beautiful piers going unused. The camera runs along a line of large, pristine beachfront houses and their large, pristine piers, all vacant and lifeless.

"They don't really enjoy the bay," Christopher explains. They also build seawalls, which leads to the beaches eroding. "I don't know why."

Private beaches and rock walls prevent Christopher and his friends from walking long stretches of the beach to check for Jubilees. The people in those big homes look down, he says, on those who actually use the bay; it's low class to swim. He swims anyway.

Many of these same people, Christopher tells us, don't even believe the Jubilees are real, or at least that they still happen. We don't see one ourselves, only black-and-white pictures of massive hauls. But Christopher and his friends still get up in the middle of the night to check the beaches.

Colin O’Brady is 28 days into his second first solo crossing of Antarctica. He continues to report whiteout or near-whiteout conditions with only brief interruptions. O'Brady says he's only making 8-10km a day.

He hasn't been reporting his overall distances, but based on his current position, he's covered around 250km out of his planned 2,865km route. He'll have to average more than 30km a day moving forward in order to finish the crossing.

Every day, his heavy sled becomes lighter, but his map indicates that he has been forced to return to arduous double-hauling for at least a few days due to the soft snow. Double-hauling forces him to do three kilometers for every kilometer of actual progress.

The whole "secret" of polar travel, and how someone can drag 100kg or 150kg, is that the cold and wind transform the snow into a hard, styrofoam-like surface over which the sled glides fairly well. You can't haul that weight through the soft snow that most of us are familiar with. Even a skiff of new snow makes hauling much harder. Very cold temperatures increase friction on the snow and make hauling harder, too.

Frozen in the doldrums

Matthieu Tordeur and Heidi Sevestre are approaching the South Pole of Inaccessibility. Winds were cooperating on Tordeur's 34th birthday on December 4, but then their luck had changed. Only 216km from their first goal, the pair was practically becalmed by light winds, just four to six knots.

They've spent two days stuck in place, but used the time to study weather charts, repair equipment, and prepare for the final push. Sevestre also used the time to prepare a software update to their radar system, which would allow it to penetrate from 40m to 100m below the surface. Currently, the team has sent back 1,300km of data from their progress so far.

Progress from Hercules Inlet

On December 9, Monet Izabeth crossed the 81st parallel, marking her first major milestone on her solo ski journey from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole. She reports that choppy sastrugi still impede progress, but the painful friction rash she developed early on is now under control.

Andrea Dorantes is 17 days into her own expedition and is making steady progress.

Sebastian Orskaug successfully reached Thiels Corner on December 7 and was able to resupply, picking up enough food for an additional five days. Thiels Corner was his halfway point. He now has just slightly over 450km to go. In the days leading up to the resupply, he'd struggled with poor sleep and bad surfaces. The "resupply party," as he calls it, seems to have brightened his spirits, however.

Tom Hunt is still neck and neck with the ghost of Vincent Colliard, who set the speed record on this route in 2024. However, the surface conditions he's encountered so far are much better than those that Colliard had.

If Hunt hopes to beat the record, he'll have to match Colliard's second-half speed increase. That means averaging just over 60km per day from now on -- a tall order. Hunt's updates continue to be chipper with no report of major issues.

Other expeditions

Hoddi Tryggvason successfully reached the South Pole on December 10, after a kiting journey of 2,300km. He is now headed for the Bay of Whales, toward the Kanses and Reedy Glaciers.

Ian Hughes has just crossed the 87th parallel on his Messner Route ski expedition. At 583km out of a total 911, he is now solidly over halfway. However, his progress has been hard-won.

Despite his attempts to avoid them by veering west, he's now hit an area thick with bumpy sastrugi. Poor sleep and bad surfaces have also slowed down his push. Hoping for a better surface, he's decided to head further west rather than stick closer to his planned route. So far, this seems to be working out, as he was making good progress at his last check-in.

The multigenerational Norwegian duo of Kathinka and Emma Gyllenhammar continues in high spirits. They try to set a consistent daily pace, skiing for an hour and then taking a 10-minute break. This sequence is repeated eight times, then they make camp. In the tent, they take turns on kitchen duty. Every day, they listen to a Christmas song and play cards.

Moment of excitement still interrupt their routine. A few days ago, they crossed paths with Tom Hunt around 83 degrees south. The sastrugi have returned, and when temperatures hit +5˚C on December 11, they were uncomfortably warm and contemplated the human impact on Antarctica.

Last weekend, around 1,800 other registrants and I attended a three-day virtual event celebrating the history and science of the polar regions. Called Terror Camp, it uniquely blends academia and internet fan culture.

In 2023, polar humanities professor Hester Blum agreed to speak at the event. She was shocked to find that the audience of old men she had expected was actually much younger and more diverse. Amazed by the passion of the attendees and the unusual format, she later told Atlas Obscura that this “could save the humanities.”

Since 2023, Terror Camp has only grown, with more attending in 2025 than in any other year. But what is, I'm sure you're asking, an "online polar fan conference"? Could an extremely online mid-20s history aficionado explain it to me succinctly? Yes, I can.

A short introduction to Terror Camp

In 2018, AMC released The Terror, a television show based on a (opinion: much worse) Dan Simmons book by the same name. The show is a retelling of the Franklin expedition with supernatural elements. It was not a massive mainstream success. But it did make a splash with 20-somethings on Tumblr, a semi-defunct blogging website.

There only being so much to discuss about a 10-episode miniseries, fans soon expanded to the historical Franklin expedition, and then into polar history in general. Soon, a whole community of socially conscious young people with English degrees was blogging rapturously about Roald Amundsen.

The first Terror Camp took place in 2021, spearheaded by organizer Allegra Rosenberg. What started as a Zoom meetup for a TV show quickly grew. By 2022, TC was two days long and included talks on Douglas Mawson, climate change, and Franklin search narratives in Victorian periodicals. Half a decade on, Terror Camp has ballooned in scope, length, and attendance.

Terror Camp 2025

The core of Terror Camp is a series of themed panels streamed live, with each day finishing on a keynote. At an Artists' Alley, independent artists sold polar-centric art prints, stickers, quilts, books, and playing cards.

Colorful slideshows by passionate fan-academics explained the 16th-century Barentsz expedition, the importance of Antarctic benthic organisms, how much the British government spent looking for Sir John Franklin, and more.

I won't list every talk. They were all interesting and presented by a range of experts with clear passion, and you can see the full program yourself on the website. But reading the program will not convey the experience of being in a live chat with hundreds of excited peers, delivering the text chat version of a standing ovation (spamming the clapping hands emoji) in reaction to a biomedical researcher explaining the symptoms of scurvy.

If you will forgive me a moment of earnestness, seeing the unabashed enthusiasm and unpretentious intellectual curiosity of the crowd was really incredible.

There's nothing out there like Terror Camp

I can think of few other events where the curator of Roald Amundsen’s house would be received like a rock star by a Royal Opera of Versailles' worth of passionate fans. His name is Anders Bache, by the way, and his talk was fantastic. He showed us Amundsen's teeth, hair, and umbilical cord.

Another personal highlight of the program was a talk on queerness in historical naval adventure fiction. Seth Stein LeJacq, a history professor specializing in gender and sexuality in the age of sail, explained that the research he was presenting was intended for the Maryland Naval Academy's history symposium. His invitation was rescinded due to the U.S. Government's pushback against the general concept of diversity.

The Defense Department may not have liked LeJacq's research, but the attendees of Terror Camp certainly did. Terror Camp also provided an enthusiastic welcome to research on the repatriation of indigenous artifacts, studying climate change through polar ice cores, and the rampant abuse of Inuit women by 19th-century Arctic explorers.

I've never been in a space that so seamlessly blended academic scrutiny with fun and the open enthusiasm of fan culture. Watching guest actors from the original Terror show fail to answer Arctic trivia was as much part of the conference as the Senior Curator at the National Maritime Museum outlining careers in polar humanities, or a translator discussing an Inuktitut novel.

There is nothing out there quite like Terror Camp.

Like many children, I was devoted to dinosaurs. Their grand scale, their strangeness, the sudden tragedy of their violent end, captures the imagination like little else. It's strange for us, today, to remember than for much of our history, these ancient beasts were unknown.

Of course, we've been finding their bones around the world for probably as long as we've had eyes. They may have inspired mythological creatures like giants, dragons, and griffins. But it was only in the mid-19th century that we began to think of them as a specific group of long-extinct animals, and only in 1842 that they were given a name.

Less than a decade after the word dinosaur was coined, a sculptor with a keen interest in natural history was commissioned to create life-size models of prehistoric beasts. His creations fascinated and frightened, entering the public imagination with a grand dinner hosting the celebrity scientists of the day. On the last night of 1853, twenty-one prominent paleontologists ate an eight-course meal inside a massive model of an iguanodon.

We should get some beasts in this park

In 1851, the Great Exhibition brought over six million visitors to Hyde Park in London, where a specially built Crystal Palace held all the wonders of the Victorian era. But after that first World's Fair ended, Britain was left with a big glass building just sort of sitting there. In 1852, the Crystal Palace was disassembled and rebuilt on Sydenham Hill, southeast of London.

There, artists and experts gathered to design and build exhibitions on a massive scale. Different courts showcased the history of art, society, and the natural world. All aspects of the park were designed around what Victorian elites considered the proper order of things. Science and history were enlisted to support the modern British imperial project.

A scion of that project, Prince Albert, first suggested an area dedicated to all those strange prehistoric beasts that people had been digging up over the past few years. What were they calling them again...? Ah, yes. Antediluvian Monsters.

The man they found for the job was Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a sculptor and artist who had illustrated scientific works, including The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle. Renowned gardener Joseph Paxton designed a "primordial" landscape with a series of islands, which would be populated by full-sized statuary recreations of extinct animals.

Designing dinosaurs

While Hawkins himself was educated and interested in natural history, the primary scientific mind behind the project was paleontologist Richard Owen: the man who first called them dinosaurs.

In the early 19th century, a few very important fossils were unearthed and described scientifically for the first time. Geologist William Buckland presented Megalosaurus in 1824, and amateur paleontologist husband-wife duo Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell discovered the Hylaeosaurus and Iguanodon in the same decade.

In 1842, Owen compared these three extinct animals and theorized, based on shared anatomy, that they were all part of the same Mesozoic family. He called this family Dinosauria, a Greek construct meaning "fearfully great lizard".

A decade later, Owen brought all his expertise to bear on the Crystal Park dinosaurs project. (A brief note on terms: Technically, only four of the statues are what we now define as dinosaurs, but I'm going to keep referring to them all that way for the sake of brevity.)

Hawkins and Owen were the first to create 3D, full-size speculative replicas of extinct animals. Hawkins created endless sketches and miniature models, studying the fossils and the literature, trying to get it right. Their reconstructions also drew inspiration from modern animals. This is where things got a bit contentious.

A tale of two iguanodons

The biggest debate revolved around the iguanodon. You can tell a lot from bones, but there's also a lot you can't tell. The biggest contention revolved around how they stood and moved.

The first camp was headed by Gideon Mantell, who, as the name he gave it suggests, believed the iguanodon had a lizard-like build. His model had longer hind limbs than forelimbs (this later proved correct) and a long, whip-like tail (not correct, but cool).

Owen was on the other side, vocally championing his view that the iguanodon and the other dinosaurs were built more like large mammals. His iguanodon has the broad-shouldered stance of a rhinoceros and a horn to match.

Owen, a seemingly rather difficult and pugilistic personality, attacked Mantell, publicly accusing him of plagiarizing Owen's own work and calling him "nothing more than a collector of fossils," who could only provide materials for real scientists like himself.

Mantell, unfortunately, was dealing with chronic pain and an attendant opiate addiction following a carriage accident, and his decline prevented a vigorous defence. He died of an overdose in 1852. A postmortem examination found the twisted spine behind his years of pain. Owen added Mantell's spine to his collection in the Hunterian Museum.

A fearfully great dinner

Hawkins, perhaps wanting to balance the two conflicting interpretations, ended up creating two iguanodons. One was reptilian, the other was mammalian in build. But the compromise only went so far. When it came time for the big dinner, it was Owen's iguanodon that would be the star.

That big dinner was an event that Hawkins hoped would legitimize the scientific accuracy of his designs and get people excited for their upcoming unveiling. To that end, he sent out dozens of invitations to prominent zoologists, geologists, paleontologists, and anatomists. While he was at it, he also invited the press and the wealthy magnates who had sponsored the building of the park.

These luminaries received a card, illustrated by Hawkins with prehistoric creatures, inviting them to dinner "in the Iguanodon" on New Year's Eve. Twenty-one of them turned up, probably not knowing what to expect.

What they found was the massive iguanodon, hollowed out with an open back, on a stage hung with banners bearing the names of famous deceased zoologists, and Owens. Owens himself sat at the head, as the symbolically powerful brain of the whole affair.

He opened the event as the main speaker, praising the models in progress and their accuracy. He finished by offering a toast to the deceased Mantell. Though he'd refused to admit it when Mantell lived, Owen was now willing to drink to him as the "discoverer of the iguanodon."

Generously, one could interpret this as a burying of the hatchet. But considering the time and exact place, it may have been more like a victory lap.

The jolly old beast

After a moment of silence for Mantell, the mood picked up. Attendants, including naturalist Edward Forbes, geologist Joseph Prestwich, ornithologist John Gould, and the managing director of the Crystal Palace, grew merry.

Forbes had written a song for the occasion and hired a singer to perform it. The original music is lost, but we still have the lyrics. The chorus goes: "The jolly old beast/Is not deceased/There’s life in him again!/ROAR!"

From surviving menu cards, we know diners enjoyed an eight-course meal that included dishes like mock turtle soup, turbot à l’hollandaise, pigeon pie, and salmi de perdrix. Their desserts were macedoine or orange jellies, Bavarian cream, Charlotte Russe cake, and nougat à la Chantilly. All of it was washed down liberally with sherry, madeira, port, moselle, and claret.

Things kicked off at 4 pm, but it was well into 1854 before the distinguished guests wrapped up, stumbling to the train line.

In all the papers

The dinner was widely publicized. Lengthy reports appeared in the most popular papers and magazines like Punch and the Illustrated London News (ILN). The reports have more than a touch of humor, with Punch joking that "if it had been an earlier geological period, they might perhaps have occupied the Iguanodon's inside without having any dinner there."

Alongside a massive illustration, ILN produced a long and effusive column of text. On the same page, ILN included a long article about Owen's work with other extinct animals. The story appeared in over a hundred newspapers across the British Isles. For many, it was the first introduction to dinosaurs and the science of paleontology.

When the statues their newspapers had praised so highly were finally unveiled, crowds flocked to the new Crystal Palace park to see the massive ancient beasts which had once prowled their island. They proved so popular that Hawkins made a bustling side income selling miniature models and was commissioned to make many more extinct animal models for the park.

The impact of these massive, life-size models on the public imagination was electric. This was a public that hadn't even been introduced to the concept of evolution yet, and it was now coming face to face with massive, draconic beasts existing on a timescale hard even to comprehend. Dinosaur parks proliferated in the following decades.

Soon they began appearing in popular works by Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Dickens. The second age of the dinosaurs had begun. God willing and the creek don't rise, it'll never end.

The Crystal Park dinosaurs reign eternal

The Crystal Palace burned down in 1936. But the park remains, including the 30-odd statues. Over the many years out in the elements, by 2014 the old beasts had taken quite a beating. Several were missing outright.

A charitable organization, formed to protect and maintain the statues and the surrounding geological landscape and art, stepped in. Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs successfully campaigned for funding, and the statues were subject to a year's long conservation program. The dinosaurs were repaired, repainted and in the case of a stolen Palaeotherium, replaced. Historic England ensured the statues' digital preservation in 2023 with the creation of digital scans.

Conservation work is ongoing, and the iguanodons will continue to stand as they grow more and more out of date. Modern paleontological work has shown that real iguanodons looked absolutely nothing like the statues. Oh well.

The High Life: The Final Season of Chamonix's Oldest Refuge catalogues the last days of a 119-year-old alpine hut. Called Charpoua, the refuge is the oldest and smallest in the Chamonix Valley, just north of Mont Blanc.

Sitting above 3,000m of elevation, the hut's keeper, Sarah Cartier, has spent the last eight summers living there in isolation. We join her and her two young children as they care for Charpoua, which was set to be demolished and rebuilt after that season.

Life at Charpoua

With the season set to open in a few days, the documentary meets Cartier and her children as they arrive at the hut and receive a load of supplies via helicopter. Cartier bustles about the hut, cleaning, unpacking, and airing out, while talking to the camera.

She discusses the work ("housekeeping at 10,000 feet,") and her decision to bring her two children, including one seven-month-old. But, like her decision to serve only organic and vegetarian food, Cartier stands by her own way of doing things.

The hut is a shelter for passing climbers, but most of the time it's just the three of them. She describes a sense of freedom in being alone on the mountain, in the tiny refuge. Her life in the hut, "a cocoon," from the outside world, is minimalist.

The end of an era?

Noe, Cartier's husband, visits several times a month, as do friends. When they do, she gets the chance to ditch the kids for a short climbing break. Like her, these climbers are drawn by the relative isolation of Charpoua. This relic from an older era of alpinism is situated in one of the more difficult-to-access and less-traveled areas around Mont Blanc.

On August 29, the season ends. Cartier and her family are joined by dozens of Charpoua well-wishers from the community. Cartier admits that, unlike previous years, this time she doesn't want to head down. "We're so happy living here," she explains.

Nearly a dozen expeditions started out on the 2025-26 Antarctic season. Some are attempting a speed record, a redemption, or scientific progress. All are battling the weather and the surface conditions as they push deeper into the vast and unforgiving Antarctic.

O'Brady picks up speed

Colin O’Brady is now well past the 80th parallel, heading toward the South Pole as part of his solo continental crossing attempt. His speed has picked up since he was able to ditch the arduous double-carrying. On November 29, he awoke to whiteout conditions and, for the first time, a surface on which he could single-carry.

The next day, he saw what he assumed to be an alien spacecraft. Upon further inspection, he found it to be a University of Wisconsin weather station. His extraterrestrial encounter, where he was able to see the weather station from several kilometers away, turned out to be only a brief break from the whiteout. By December 1, it had descended again.

O'Brady had to return briefly to double carrying after a layer of fresh snow made the surface too difficult for a heavy sled. So far, it appears that O'Brady is adhering to his plan to avoid using the South Pole Overland Traverse (SPOT) road, which features navigational flags and filled-in crevasses.

In a recent interview with ExplorersWeb, polar guide Eric Philips noted that the Polar Expeditions Classification Scheme (PECS) that he spearheaded came about as a result of O'Brady's controversial first expedition, with its unfounded claims of a full crossing. PECS attempts to standardize many aspects of polar travel, such as "crossing" and "circumnavigation," which until recently were loosely and sometimes deceptively used.

Among its other achievements, PECS seems to have eliminated the superfluous term "unassisted," which meant nothing, but which adventurers would tack onto "unsupported" because it sounded impressive. We thankfully haven't heard anyone use "unassisted" in the last several years.

Sastrugi and slow going

French kiting/glaciology duo Matthieu Tordeur and Dr Heidi Sevestre are forging on at an elevation of 3,283m across what they describe as a "chaotic maze of sastrugi." They're currently making for the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility, as part of a planned 4,000km kite-skiing expedition.

This less-celebrated pole -- the point on the continent furthest from the edge of the Southern Ocean -- is of scientific interest to them because it's located in one of the coldest parts of Antarctica, and has been the focus of less research than other areas. But it's still nearly 500km away from Tordeur and Sevestre, who are making slow progress through faint winds. Sevestre is reminding herself that things could be worse by reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard's Antarctic classic The Worst Journey in the World.

Four from Hercules Inlet

Monet Izabeth is now one week into her attempt to ski to the South Pole alone and unsupported. The first section of her journey is slow going, with the sled at its heaviest. She's averaging around nine kilometers per day. Colder temperatures over the last few days have hardened the sastrugi, making the skiing more awkward. The first week also brought her friction burns and a broken satellite phone.

Andrea Dorantes, who is attempting the same route, is now approaching the first week mark and has not reported any issues.

The third polar traveler taking the route from Hercules Inlet to the Pole is Tom Hunt, who started his speed record attempt on November 30. He's chasing Vincent Colliard's 2024 record of 22 days, 6 hours, and 8 minutes. So far, Hunt is matching Colliard's pace. But Colliard started off behind the former record. He only made up for his initial slow progress with a dramatic speed increase late in his attempt.

One of Colliard's advantages was that he lives in northern Norway and is a good cross-country skier. Many Antarctic travelers are fit but lack experience on skis and tend to be shufflers and clompers.

Like Izabeth on the same route, Hunt has been battling sastrugi on and off. Other than a mild issue with hot spots on his feet, however, Hunt hasn't had any notable issues, and his messages back are chipper.

Sebastian Orskaug has covered 493km from Hercules Inlet toward the South Pole so far, with 632 to go. He successfully crossed the 84th parallel on December 3 but has been making slow and difficult progress. The same day, he noted an elevated heart rate and continual soreness. His Starlink is also down. Nevertheless, his motivation meter is still reading as a smiley face.

Other expeditions

Hoddi Tryggvasen of Iceland started out for the South Pole early last month and was making good progress at his last check-in. He is kiting from Novolazarevskaya Station in Queen Maud Land to the South Pole, then on to the Bay of Whales.

Kathinka and Emma Gyllenhammar are on day 19 from their starting point on Union Glacier. Earlier this week, fierce winds forced them to retreat into their tent, starting late and stopping early. The sun came out on December 1, and they celebrated the start of the Christmas season by singing and lighting an Advent candle. Since then, they've crossed the 82nd parallel, and the weather is continuing to cooperate.

British adventurer Ian Hughes is the only one tackling the Messner route this year. After nineteen days out, he's covered 400km out of the 911km route. Last week, he battled difficult wind conditions for days. This week, the weather has been kinder.

With humans largely out of the picture, wildlife has returned to the once-settled Chernobyl area. Last year, researchers found that the region's grey wolves have become largely immune to the cancer-causing effect of radiation. But resisting radiation is a far cry from actively feeding off it. But a type of black fungus seems to be doing just that.

Since the 1990s, researchers have found fungus growing and apparently thriving even in the most dangerously radioactive areas of the former power plant. Recent studies have shown that the black fungus growing in Chernobyl has developed an incredible ability to convert radiation into energy.

Meet the mold in Reactor Four

In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's fourth reactor exploded in a catastrophic meltdown. Four years later, a Ukrainian research team led by Nelli N. Zhdanova discovered black mold growing in and around the former plant, including within the ruins of the fourth reactor. There were 37 species of fungus in all, growing in different ranges of radioactivity.

A 2000 study found that particular molds containing melanin, the same pigment-producing molecule that exists in human skin, grew densely in highly irradiated areas. The star of this particular show was Cladosporium sphaerospermum.

Zhdanova's team took samples of this mold and exposed it to radiation, measuring its growth  against various controls. Weirdly, the Chernobyl samples actually grew better when exposed to dangerous ionizing radiation. Researchers now theorize that fungi like C. sphaerospermum are performing "radiosynthesis," capturing and living off of ionizing radiation, like how photosynthetic organisms use electromagnetic radiation from sunlight.

Radiotrophic fungus (in space?)

The secret weapon of C. Sphaerospernum likely lies in melanin. Melanin is a type of biomolecule, which serves a number of functions across the animal and fungal kingdoms.

When our skin is exposed to UV radiation in sunlight, our melanin-producing cells start, well, doing that. The dark melanin gives you a tan and, more importantly, absorbs that UV radiation and prevents it from damaging the cell nucleus.

Since we, however, would not thrive inside Reactor Four, it must be assumed that the melanized fungi have more going on. The current theory is that melanin acts like chlorophyll. Like melanin, chlorophyll is a pigment -- it's what makes plants green -- and it is a key part of photosynthesis.

The exact mechanism of C. Sphaerospernum's radioactive success may not be confirmed yet, but that didn't stop scientists from sending it to space in 2022. As the resulting study explains, mold that was grown on the outside of the International Space Station actually did better than the control.

This is good news for mold and even better for human astronauts. One of the many health risks of space travel is exposure to radiation. While we are still in the early stages of research, scientists are already looking at radiotrophic fungi as a potential way to shield us from radiation in space.

The National Outdoor Book Awards have announced their 2025 winners. Previous winners of these awards over the 29 years included TV host David Attenborough and climber Joe Simpson. This year, 17 books spanned 10 categories, ranging from memoirs to hiking guides.

Outdoor Literature

The Outdoor Literature winner was A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst. Her first book tells the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, who spent months at sea in a tiny inflatable raft. Like the heroes of older works, fictional and nonfictional, their ship was sunk by a whale, leaving them adrift on the open ocean.

The NOBA judges called the work "storytelling perfection."

Journeys

The Journeys category recognizes books that cover a (non-motorized) outdoor journey. The first of two winners this year is John Turner's Killing the Buddha on the Appalachian Trail. Judges praised his thoughtful take in a crowded field. While he does write about the details of life on the trail, Turner's writing uses the trail as a vehicle for philosophical musings on aging, failure, and life.

The second winner is North to the Future by Ben Weissenbach. Subtitled An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska, his book is an autobiographical account of his experience as a backwoods novice who finds himself part of a small research team hiking through the Brooks Range. This account of his 42-day journey explores his work studying Alaska's changing climate.

History and Natural History

The History/Biography award was also divided into two winners. Diane K. Boyd's A Woman Among Wolves is a memoir of her four decades studying wolves in remote regions. Publishers Weekly called it a "swashbuckling" account, where her many close encounters with dangerous wildlife are transformed into "tales of adventure and derring-do."

The other History winner was Daniel Light's treatment of early mountaineering up through the 1920s. Lengthy subtitles being a staple of the genre, his book's full title is The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering.

The Natural History winner was Born of Fire and Rain: Journey into a Pacific Coastal Forest, by M. L. Herring. A scientist and artist, Herring's book combines memoir, illustration, and guide in an exploration of Oregon's Coast Range.

Nature and Environment

Apparently, the competition for this category was tight this year, because NOBA awarded one winner and two silver medalists. The winner, Saving the Big Sky is a collaborative work between photographer Kevin League and authors Bruce A. Bugbee, Robert J. Kiesling, and John B. Wright. The result is a 50-year history of conservation efforts in Montana. Photographs, maps, interviews, and prose record how six million acres of private land were voluntarily protected.

Into Whooperland, one of the silver medalists, likewise combines writing and photos. Michael Forsberg, the author and photographer behind Whooperland, spent five years immersed in the world of that symbol of endangered wildlife, the whooping crane.

People the Planet Needs Now: Voices for Justice, Science, and a Future of Promise, by Dudley Edmondson, features 25 activists, researchers, and educators tackling pressing environmental issues. It focuses on indigenous voices and the work of people of color.

Classics, Children's, and Others

NOBA singles out works in categories that other awards might not consider, like design and artistic merit. The winner for design this year was Smithsonian Trees of North America. W. John Cress's arboreal epic runs over 800 pages and rendered one judge "awestruck."

Another unusual category is that of the classic. Rather than a book published in 2024, this award goes to a work that has stood the test of time. In this case, NOBA chose Reinhold Messner's The Crystal Horizon, the 1982 account of his first solo Everest summit.

NOBA chose two books in the children's category, one fiction and one nonfiction. A further three awards went to nature and hiking guides. The "tenacious" Michael Haynes won silver for Hiking Trails of Mainland Nova Scotia. Matt Ritter and Michael Kauffmann's California Trees outlines all 95 native species, while Nicole Coenen's Axe in Hand outlines the proper technique for chopping them all down. I was unaware that there was enough to learn about chopping wood to fill an entire book; goes to show what I know.

Finally, NOBA granted the title Work of Significance to Thatcher Hogan for Mapping the Adirondacks. Hogan blended history, guide, and illustration in a way that did not fit neatly into any category, but impressed the judges.

If that wasn't a long enough list of outdoor and adventure reading, you can also check out the winners of this year's Banff Mountain Book Awards.

The so-called "longest ridgeline" in Europe runs along the spine of the Mont Blanc massif. This short documentary follows Erik Heldmann as he and climbing partner David Deichmann attempt the ambitious route, called the Peuterey Integral.

Summitting Aiguille Noire de Peuterey from the south ridge, the route proceeds down the north face to a traverse of the Breches des Dames Anglais. From there, it flows along the Peuterey Ridge, up and over Aiguille Blanche, and ends at the summit of Mont Blanc.

After outlining the route that he and his climbing partner, David Deichmann, will take, we briefly descend into daily life. Heldmann is a professional route setter, working at a climbing gym in Darmstadt, Germany. In the gym, we see the deep professional satisfaction that Heldmann takes in his work. But it's important, he tells us, for him to change his mindset when he moves from the "very safe sport" of gym climbing to outdoor climbing.

As Heldmann and Deichman start their approach, the weather finally clears after days of storms. It takes eight hours to reach the Eccles Bivouac, a tiny shelter at over 3,800m in elevation.

On the Peuterey Integral

The next morning at 4:30 am, the pair takes their first steps along the Peuterey Integral. On the first day, Heldmann reaches the top of 4,460m Picco Luigi Amadeo and finishes a project that has taken him six years -- summiting all 4,000m peaks in the Alps, 82 in all.

From Picco Luigi Amadeo, the ridgeline and distant Mont Blanc are clearly visible; there is still a long way to go. Handheld and drone footage follow the pair as they make their way along the snaking ridgeline.

Finally, they celebrate success at the summit of Mont Blanc. As the two figures head home, text on the screen tells us that even after becoming one of the elite few to complete all the alpine 4,000'ers, Heldmann continues to work at his comparatively humble job at the climbing gym.

Things are heating up in the icy south, and not just because of climate change. We check in with this season's polar expeditions as they ski and kite across the Antarctic.

Colin O'Brady is now well into his potentially redemptive second attempt to cross Antarctica. He's now approaching the 80th parallel, making slow but fairly steady progress. He continues to report soft snow, which forces him to haul half his heavy load, then return for the other half. In the past five days, he admits he's skied 160km but advanced only about 30km.

On Tuesday, an unexpected heat wave drove temperatures up to -5˚C. The heat softens whatever hard, windbound snow lies beneath the powder, making hauling even more difficult. Nevertheless, he's already traveled a full degree from where he began, amid the crevassed and changeable ice near the Ross Sea.

On his tracker, O'Brady appears to have started somewhat inland. But complicated ground conditions mean most will accept his journey as a full crossing if he does complete his route. The Polar Expeditions Classification Scheme (PECS) stipulates that outer coast journeys must start "as close as practically possible" to the sea. If O'Brady's starting position really was as close as he could safely get to the ice's edge, then this crossing may escape without the asterisks of his previous one.

Polar guide Eric Philips, one of the founders of PECS, told ExplorersWeb that O'Brady contacted them before he left to ensure that, if he succeeds, his crossing will be considered a full one. Philips explained that the satellite images from that part of Antarctica are old -- even the high-resolution Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica hasn't been updated in a decade.

As you can see from the lower map above, he started about as close as you can get to the Ross Sea without venturing into that crevassed area, which might have changed significantly in recent years.

You might argue that climbers on Everest have to go through the Khumbu Icefall; why shouldn't someone have to begin right at the ocean's edge, crevasses or not, if they want to claim a full Antarctic crossing?

"These are sporting rules rather than literal rules," admits Philips. "True polar exploration doesn't exist anymore." Due to the age of the satellite images and the uncertainty of what exactly is in that area, an expeditioner needs a certain flexibility with start and finish points.

"It's not our job to make a determination post-expedition," says Philips.

Unlike the first time, O'Brady told Philips that he would not be using the South Pole Overland Traverse (SPOT) road, which has navigation flags at regular intervals along its nearly 1,000km. The crevasses are also filled in.

"He says he will be going up another glacier," said Philips. The SPOT road uses the Leverett Glacier; the Leverett Glacier would be considered support, Philips adds, whether or not you're right on the packed-down, flattened ice path.

Philips is not sure O'Brady will succeed, but "if he does, it will be extraordinary."

Radar and sastrugi

The French team of explorer Matthieu Tordeur and glaciologist Dr. Heidi Sevestre is 24 days into their kite-ski expedition. After battling contrary winds for days, on day 18, they finally caught a fair breeze from the north. Equipment troubles and the punishing elevation (they're now well over 3,000m) haven't prevented them from sending back their first surface radar readings.

A few days ago, they were even able to deploy their custom-made deep radar device, which stretches out over 100 meters. As they deployed it, the surface became a mess of sastrugi, which caught on and flipped the deep radar assemblage.

Sastrugi are hard snow waves carved by wind; they look like frozen whitecaps and can make for bumpy and awkward sled hauling. The sastrugi are only increasing as they approach the Pole of Inaccessibility.

Two pairs in good spirits

Mother-daughter duo Kathinka and Emma Gyllenhammar also battled a heavy patch of sastrugi, along with poor visibility. On November 24, they left the Heritage Range Mountains behind them. They now have a flat, white landscape between them and the South Pole.

In the last few days, conditions have improved, and their speed is picking up. Despite the much-mourned loss of a beloved pee funnel, their spirits remain high.

The veteran team of Lars Ebbesen and Roland Krueger completed their short ski expedition on November 26. The final week was eventful, with a total whiteout on November 21. After pushing 15km despite the storm, they took the next day off.

By November 23, conditions had improved, and they made 19km, despite spending an extra hour freeing their buried tent. They spent the last few days navigating rarely explored mountains like Gygra, Risen, and Hoggestabben in sunny weather.

Hercules Inlet route

Monet Izabeth and Andrea Dorantes have both begun their solo unsupported ski expeditions to the Pole, along the classic Hercules Inlet route. Izabeth left the base on Union Glacier on November 25. Other than a broken satellite phone antenna, now swapped for a backup, and persistent headwinds, all is going well. Dorantes left not long after and reports good progress.

Tom Hunt is due to start his Hercules Inlet to South Pole speed record attempt in the next few days. He is currently on Union Glacier making his final preparations. Weather permitting, a small aircraft will drop him off at Hercules Inlet this weekend.

Other solo expeditions

Two weeks into his ski expedition to the Pole, Sebastian Orskaug's website still reports his motivation as a smiley face. He's covered over 260km of his 1,100km journey, crossing the 82nd parallel on November 25. Despite continuing difficulties getting Starlink to work, he continues to collect samples according to his Polar Rideshare concept.

Ian Hughes is 240km into his own ski expedition, despite days of wind conditions he described as "relentless" and "punishing." All the essentials are working, but little comforts have failed: His headphones have completely given up the ghost. He is now making good progress in silence.

Another solo skier is also headed for the Pole. Icelander Hoddi Tryggvason completed a 4,200km snowkiting expedition in Greenland last July. Now, Tryggvason is kiting from Novolazarevskaya Station in Queen Maud Land to the South Pole, then on to the Bay of Whales. Tryggvason started out from Novolazarevskaya in early November. An initial dearth of wind forced him to manhaul for the first week, but he's now making good progress toward the South Pole.

Researchers have just discovered a giant crater 900m in diameter in southern China. Named the Jinlin crater, a new study confirms that the huge bowl-shaped formation in Guangdong Province came from an asteroid impact. The impact crater is also less than 10,000 years old, shockingly recent.

To confirm that it is an impact crater, researchers from China's Center for High Pressure Science sampled rock fragments. A huge object hitting the Earth at high speed brings immense forces to bear. This creates a crater, but it also leaves damage at a microscopic level. The shock waves create what are called "planar deformation features" in materials like quartz and feldspar.

These structures form only under the immense pressure of 10 to 35 gigapascals, which can only come from celestial body impacts.

Researchers collected quartz from Jinlin and looked for these visible pairs of shock-damage structures. They found them.

Hiding in plain sight

But not only is Jinlin an impact crater, but it's also a very young one. The rainy conditions in Guangdong and the loose soil that make up the rim mean the crater should erode fairly quickly. The fact that it hasn't means it must be fairly young.

To get a more exact idea, researchers looked at very small pieces of granite. The chemical weathering rate of granite under known local conditions is a fixed rate. Based on that, any fragment of granite under 30 centimeters created by the impact will take around 10,000 years to completely turn into soil. The fact that there are still some of these tiny granite fragments around means the impact occurred less than 10,000 years ago.

Ancient asteroid

Today, we have very little reason to fear sudden destruction by an asteroid. But significant impact events were something to fear in our recent past. In a press statement, lead author Ming Chen said that Jinlin crater "shows that the scale of impacts of small extraterrestrial objects on the Earth in the Holocene is far greater than previously recorded."

Based on the size of the crater, Chen's team estimates that the meteor itself was about 30 meters across. This makes it much, much smaller than the asteroid which killed off the dinosaurs, but thirty times the size of the object which burnt up over the Philippines last year. We don't know exactly what it was made of yet.

It's three times the size of Russia's Macha crater, which previously held the distinction of being the largest Holocene impact site.

While they did not leave any evidence of writing, people were living in the Guangdong region 10,000 years ago. They must have experienced quite a sight.

Two climbers have died on New Zealand's highest mountain, Aoraki. Late on Monday night, a party of four climbers in trouble contacted the authorities. Early the following morning, a helicopter successfully evacuated two climbers, who were uninjured. Another helicopter arrived, and both helicopters began searching for the other two climbers.

At around 7 am local time, searchers from the Department of Conservation Aoraki SAR team found the bodies of the two missing people. During an attempted summit of Aoraki, the pair, connected by the rope, had fallen to their deaths from the west ridge of the mountain.

Conditions on the mountain were calm and clear, but the helicopters initially struggled to retrieve the bodies, which, still connected, were not easily accessible. The climbers' remains have since been recovered.

No margin for error

The New Zealand Mountain Guides Association (NZMGA) has shared that one of the deceased was Thomas Vialletet, an internationally recognized guide who had been guiding in New Zealand for over a decade. He was leading a U.S. client at the time.

NZMGA president Anna Keeling described Vialletet as "careful and diligent," with plenty of experience on Aoraki. But as Keeling told Radio New Zealand, Aoraki is considered the most difficult climb in the country, with "no margin for error."

For Keeling, the news was shocking; Vialletet had just summited Aoraki two weeks earlier. He "knew the route well, and knew the conditions well this year."

Also known as Mount Cook, Aoraki is a 3,724m peak in the South Island's Southern Alps. It has a long mountaineering history, including a 1948 ascent by Sir Edmund Hillary. But it's considered a challenging climb, especially with its frequently changing weather.

In addition, parties often climb in the dark on the snow and ice. This ensures firm snow but reduces visibility. This was the case with the four climbers, who were attempting to summit on Monday night.

With at least one fatality nearly every season, Aoraki is New Zealand's deadliest mountain, as well as its highest.

Though searchers were able to find and recover the bodies in this case, conditions on Aoraki don't always make this possible. In 2024, three climbers who went missing on Aoraki were eventually declared dead after an extensive search. As in this most recent incident, a fatal fall was the suspected cause.

In early July of 1908, Luigi Pernier was heading an archaeological mission to Crete. One evening, the Italian was writing a letter to his superiors when he was interrupted by the arrival of Zacharias Eliakis, who supervised the dig that afternoon. Eliakis had a strange object with him.

It was a clay disk, the size of a dinner plate, and still covered in dirt. Pernier examined the object. There appeared to be writing in an unknown language, carved into the disk. Thrilled with the discovery, Pernier added a postscript to his letter, describing the disk. He signed off saying that this object might be "one of the most important monuments of early Cretan writing."

Over a hundred years later, the object which came to be called the Phaistos Disk remains unique and completely untranslated.

A singular object

The disk was uncovered in the Phaistos acropolis, an ancient Minoan site near the southern coast of Crete. A massive palace surrounded the city of Phaistos. The Minoan people had been living there since 3,600 BCE. Excavation had been ongoing for nearly a decade before Eliakis uncovered the disk.

He found it in a basement on the north end of the palace, in an area dating to around 1800 BCE, the Middle Minoan period. With it was a tablet with writing in Linear A, a still undeciphered ancient Aegean script, and pottery from that Middle Minoan period.

The disk itself was made of very fine clay, about 2 centimeters thick and 16 centimeters across. It's not perfectly circular, as it was made by hand rather than with a mold. Its creator stamped 242 individual figures into the wet clay, laying down the sigils in concentric circles, separated by lines, on both sides of the disk. Then it was fired at high heat, preserving it. The use of stamps makes this disk the first known use of movable type.

The writing was unlike anything else archaeologists had found in Crete. The Middle Minoan people had both the Linear A script and a slightly earlier one called the Cretan Hieroglyphic. The Phaistos Disk's carefully stamped people, plants, animals, and objects represent a third, seemingly unrelated writing system, in use at the same time as the other two. That is, quite frankly, too many writing systems for one island.

Early excitement, first attempts

Classicists rushed to be the first to interpret the new discovery. Dr. Arthur Evans was the first notable figure to step forward. Evans had led excavations at the Minoan palace of Knossos, even coining the name "Minoan," after the legendary Cretan king Minos. He'd also worked with Linear A and B, discovering that they were two different systems and assigning them the names we still use.

Evans argued that the disk wasn't even Cretan, but had come from somewhere in Asia Minor. He numbered the unique symbols 1-45 and categorized them.

He disagreed with Pernier on number seven, arguing that it was not a hat but a breast, and therefore indicated a female divinity. Evans was a prominent figure in the "Great Goddess" theory, which posited that a single matriarchal deity had been worshiped across Eurasia since prehistory. This is now largely debunked, and I really can't get into it, so let's move on.

He also linked number 29, the cat, to this goddess. The two symbols appeared together several times, and both appeared with 24, which he believed was a temple. The fact that it did not resemble Minoan temples was, he argued, an indication of the symbols' non-Cretan origin.

Evans argued that the Linear A tablet found with the disk proved that in Crete, hieroglyphic systems were out of date by the time of the Phaistos disk. But in Anatolia, with whom the Minoans were in contact, hieroglyphs were still in use. That was as far as he got in terms of deciphering it, though.

Continuing attempts, continuing failure

How do you read something written in an unknown language, with unknown letters, when you don't even know what direction or order the symbols are read in or what many of them represent? The seeming impossibility of the task only attracted more challengers.

Stanford doctor of philology George Hempl examined the disk and made early progress, noting with Sherlock Holmesian panache that the way pressure was applied to the stamps showed they had been made from the outward side in, and right to left, not the reverse as Evans suggested. The number of unique sigils, furthermore, meant that each one represented a syllable, not a word or a single sound.

Hempl's proposed solution hinged on the text being written in Greek. His technique was a more sophisticated application of something called Frequency Analysis. This matches the frequency of a symbol appearing against how often it appears in the language on average. Hempl generated a religious text, from which he spun an involved story of pillaging Cretan privateers, an Ionian priestess, and a cattle-based cult. This theory is not accepted by modern scholars.

As the decades wore on, classicists, philologists, cryptographers, and people with no qualifications whatever attempted to solve the mystery of the disk. It was interpreted as a receipt, calendar, game board, hymn, land title, work of fiction, mathematical treatise, and whatever Hempl thought was happening. The language was variously assumed to be Ionic Greek, Attic Greek, Luwian, Hittite, Egyptian, Basque, Dravidian, Semitic, Sumerian, and more.

As the years went on, and the gibberish translations piled up, some scholars began to question if the Phaistos Disk was real at all. Wasn't it suspicious that these symbols hadn't turned up anywhere else in Crete?

Rings, combs, and bowls

Then, the symbols started turning up elsewhere in Crete.

In 1934, Greek archaeologist Spiridon Marinatos found the Arkalochori Axe in a cave in central-eastern Crete. This axe has 15 pictographic signs, several of which appear to match those of the Phaistos disk. In particular, symbol 2, the head with a plumed helmet or hair, appears several times on both artifacts.

In 1965, a team led by Doro Levi, another Italian archaeologist, was excavating the ruins of a building in Phaistos. Among the ruins was a collection of pottery and scraps. On an otherwise unassuming bowl was stamped number 21, the comb. The same comb symbol turns up again, stamped on a broken tablet in Phaistos, also found long after the disk.

Later artifacts also provide parallels to the spiral writing arrangement. Near the Minoan site at Knossos is a necropolis centered around the Mavro Spelio cave. During the 1920s, Arthur Evans found a gold signet ring there while excavating the tombs. The writing was arranged in a spiral pattern, just like on the disk. All of the artifacts seem to date from the Middle Minoan period.

Phaistos fraud?

In 2008, the speculation that had been simmering for a century was reignited. Jerome Eisenberg was an antiquities dealer who dedicated himself to sniffing out fakes and standing up against illegal and unethical antique importation. He also edited his own archaeology magazine, Minerva. For the centennial of Luigi Pernier's discovery, Eisenberg published an article in Minerva arguing that the disk was a hoax, perpetrated by a jealous Pernier.

Eisenberg's theory went as follows: Pernier, seeing Evans' success in nearby Knossos, and the relative lack of finds, especially writing, from Phaistos, decided to craft an untranslatable text which would boost his reputation and impress Evans and his own mentor, Federico Halbherr. Familiar with Italian artifacts, Pernier based his creation on the Etruscan Magliano Disk. Found in 1882, the Magliano Disk was a lead plate with a spiral of writing on both sides.

Defenders of the disk pointed to nearby, contemporary parallels as evidence that it was genuine. But Eisenberg interpreted these as sources of inspiration for Pernier's forgery. He pointed to several signs that were similar to symbols in Linear A and B, as well as other "stamped" symbols in Minoan artifacts.

At the same time, Eisenberg argued that the uniqueness of the disk was evidence of forgery. There were no other flat clay disks in the Bronze Age, nor "other hieroglyphic script of this type."

His article is detailed and lengthy, breaking down the suspicious circumstances of the find (which occurred during a late inspection) and the linguistic issues with the script. For instance, he argued that there were too many unique signs and too few repetitions to be real writing.

Why no thermoluminescence?

Eisenberg's claims inspired new appraisals of the disk. Many called for thermoluminescence analysis, a precise dating technique that involves heating a small sample and measuring the amount of radiation it absorbs. This test would give its proper age and settle the authenticity question pretty definitively.

The Archaeological Museum in Heraklion has declined to do so. Partly, they are resistant to anything that would damage the disk, even slightly. But also, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose from a test. But even without the definitive proof, many scholars are willing to argue for the disk's authenticity.

Pavol Hnila, a researcher at the University of Berlin, responded to Eisenberg in 2009. Analyzing Pernier's personal letters, Hnila argued that Pernier had not behaved like a jealous forger. He was open and sincere about the potentially suspicious way the disk was found. If he had wanted to, his position would have allowed him to arrange a much less questionable discovery. Pernier himself raised the similarity of his finding to the Magliano disk.

As for the writing, Hnila and others pointed out that the parallels to other languages could be due to cultural interaction in Minoan times. It's normal for writing systems developed in the same region and era to borrow symbols from one another. Some of the best proof, however, comes from a recent investigation into what else has turned up at the Phaistos site.

Similar artifacts to the Phaistos Disk

Along with the disk and the Linear A tablet, the basement ruin was filled with pottery. During the Middle Minoan period, when the disk was made, Minoans were making a particular type of fine ware decorated with stamps. These stamp marks were largely ornamental, with geometric or floral designs, but some are clearly representational.

In fact, a number of those vessels' designs have symbols that match those on the Phaistos Disk.

So the Phaistos disk is not the only stamped, fired clay item from this era. It's true that so far, it remains unique. But if it were a special or ceremonial object, it would certainly be more cleanly made than the ordinary bric-a-brac of Minoan life. Today, most scholars think that the disk is likely genuine.

But even if the disk is real, translating it, without other examples of this script, is nearly impossible. That doesn't stop people from trying. John Chadwick, the scholar who translated Linear B, was so bombarded with attempts he had to put out a request that people stop sending him their Phaistos disk solutions. Decades on, the field is even more crowded.

Multiple papers have come out in recent years, bringing the weight of computing power to bear on the problem. So far, they have not triumphed.

Released in 1988, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History is an offbeat documentary about Australia's invasive cane toad problem. Informative and thorough, it's edited like a horror movie in some places and a comedy in others. And in some ways, it's as much a people story as a toad story.

As text on screen informs us, the cane toad was introduced to Australia in the mid-1930s to control cane grubs, which were eating up the sugar crop. One hundred and two toads were snatched up from Hawaii and introduced to North Queensland.

It was a classic "little old lady who swallowed the fly" gambit. In introducing the toads to tackle the grub problem, they created a whole new problem. The documentary explains this issue via a surprisingly detailed breakdown of toad mating practices and techniques.

Fifty years after their introduction, the waters are thick with cane toads. Bill Freeland, a wildlife officer, pulls out writhing handfuls of slick black tadpoles. Hearty little beasts, they are quick to develop legs and can thrive in slow, fast, clear, or brackish water.

The second plague

The rapid colonization of the toads was not without consequences. Perhaps worst of all, they didn't even solve the original grub problem. The grubs and the toads were in the cane fields at different times, meaning they never intersected. The toads did, one farmer explains, kill a great deal of stray dogs. See, cane toads have a poisonous sack, which makes them a potentially deadly foodstuff.

In 1945, cane farmers brought new pesticides to bear against the grubs, resolving the initial problem. The toads continued to proliferate, covering most of Queensland and into New South Wales. And yet, by their ubiquity, they seem to have earned themselves widespread affection. One interviewee -- a self-serious intellectual trying to interpret the cultural moment -- calls it a "perverted reverence."

The documentary introduces us to charming old people who call the toads their "mates" and put out food for them. Later, we'll meet a young girl who keeps a very large cane toad as a pet, treating it like a doll. One man says he gives them cigarettes, which they apparently enjoy. There was even an attempt to erect a cane toad statue in Gordonvale.

Bufotoxin and bad habits

The cane toads aren't "mates" to anything that tries to eat them. As the stray dogs discovered, cane toads possess a powerful bufotoxin. When the glands in their backs are pressed, they expel this toxin, sometimes with impressive force and distance.

We are introduced to Dr. Michael Archer, a zoologist whose pet and study subject, a cat-like marsupial called a quoll, died after biting a cane toad. Archer, Captain Ahab-like, vows revenge against the cane toad. This led him to hit one with a pick, whereupon poison squirted right in his eye, temporarily blinding him.

The toads are also voracious and indiscriminate eaters. As Archer explains with obvious detestation in his voice, they've been found with small native marsupials in their stomachs. Larger native animals die from trying to eat the toads or being out-competed.

Another biologist, perhaps getting caught up in the moment and going a tad far, claims the cane toad invasion is just as dangerous as "the German army in World War II."

Several decades on, the cane toads have continued to spread. But the documentary isn't just a charming relic; its exploration of the complex relationship between human populations and invasive species remains relevant. It's also great if you want to see a human scientist imitate a toad's mating call with frightening accuracy.

As we approach the tail end of November, the 2025-26 Antarctic season is well underway. Though a few are still waiting to begin, most of this year's challengers are now scattered across Antarctica.

Colin O'Brady heads Poleward

Colin O'Brady, 40, is a week into his solo crossing of Antarctica. In 2018, the American sparked debate and faced criticism when he claimed to have completed a solo crossing of the continent. Rather than cross the breadth of Antarctica, he went from inner coast to inner coast, skipping the ice shelves that have been part of the continent for millennia.

This time, his planned route included the ice shelves. The going has been slow on the Ross Ice Shelf. On his social media updates, O'Brady reported "the loosest, deepest snow" he's ever seen in Antarctica. With the soft, powdery surface preventing his 225kg sled from moving, he's spent the last four days double-hauling -- dragging half the load forward, then returning for the second half, thereby covering three kilometers for every kilometer of progress.

Three pairs progress

French explorer Matthieu Tordeur and glaciologist Dr. Heidi Sevestre are on a 4,000km kite-ski expedition, which primarily aims to collect scientific data. Facing contrary winds and hoping to start their work sooner, they took a vehicle from the Russian research station Novolazarevskaya to the Thorshammer ice slope.

From Thorshammer, the still-difficult headwinds forced them to zigzag and backtrack. Finally, they left the mountains, pushing westward in search of more favorable winds. They're now 466km into the journey, averaging around 70km per day.

Meanwhile, Kathinka Gyllenhammar and her daughter Emma continue skiing to the South Pole. They left Union Glacier a week ago, reporting good weather. They're now moving through the Ellsworth Mountains with 100kg sleds.

On the night of November 19, a sudden change of wind shook them awake and began to move even their heavy sleds. Nevertheless, they continue to make good progress.

Polar veterans Lars Ebbesen and Roland Krueger are well into their short expedition from Wolf's Fang runway in Queen Maud Land to the Norwegian Troll Research Station, 250km away.

They started slowly, on extremely dry snow, but they're now making swifter progress. Roland needed a day off to recover from stomach problems, but has bounced back. They are both in high spirits, despite a small storm on November 18 with "completely hopeless conditions" that nearly blew away their tent. Their updates are filled with praise for the beauty of the mountain scenery, rarely visited by anyone but climbers.

Hercules Inlet

Meanwhile, four different expeditions this year are tackling the standard route from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole. (Some will head back again). Only one expedition is already underway.

Tom Hunt's speed record try won't start until December. Monet Izabeth is about to begin her attempt to become the first American woman to complete the route unsupported. Both Izabeth and Andrea Dorantes of Mexico, who's attempting the same, are now at Union Glacier performing final checks on equipment.

Norwegian Sebastian Orskaug is skiing to the Pole and returning by ski-sail, while debuting his "Polar Rideshare" concept. Through his site, sponsors contract him to collect samples, take measurements, and so forth. Interested parties can also enjoy live updates on his progress, as well as biometric data. (He apparently has a resting heart rate of 62; hardly exceptional.) You can even check out his motivation level, currently displayed as a smiley face.

A week and 112km in, he's left behind the worst of the sastrugi fields and is hoping to pick up speed. His current daily average will not be enough to reach the South Pole within his planned 45 days.

British adventurer Ian Hughes is the only one attempting the Messner route this year. After a week, he's covered 124km. Although he reports intermittent poor visibility, things are overall proceeding apace.

Starting in October, online sites of varying levels of legitimacy started posting stories about human remains found in Antarctica. Very old human remains. What is the body of an early 19th-century young Chilean woman doing in the Great White South?

Eye-catching AI images of perfectly preserved women suggested lost histories and forgotten worlds. But is there anything to it?

Bones on the beach

In 1985, a real Chilean biologist named Daniel Torres Navarro was collecting marine debris on a beach at Cape Shirreff, on Livingston Island in the South Shetlands. There, half-buried in the pebbles of the rocky beach, he found an algae-covered chunk of human skull.

Navarro conducted a thorough search of the area but couldn't find any other remains. He carefully collected the skull in several fragments and brought it to Santiago, where University of Chile anthropologist Claudio Paredes reconstructed the skull and performed an initial examination, dating it to about 175 years old.

Navarro took Paredes back to the find site during the 1987-88 field season, when Navarro found the diaphysis -- the long, middle shaft -- of a human femur. They were due to leave the very next day, so it wasn't until 1993, when Navarro returned to the area again, this time to study fur seals, that he could search the site where he'd uncovered the leg bone. There he found what is, for now, the last of the remains --another long bone.

So there you have it: three pieces of bone and a whole lot of questions.

Hello? Whose bones are these?

Paredes examined the cranium in a report to the Antarctic Institute of Chile. Based on the teeth and the ossification of sutures in the skull, which is considered the most reliable method for estimating age from remains, the person in question was between 18 and 25 years old.

It's when we get to the sex and race determinations that things get a little tricky. Paredes determined that the owner of the skull had been female, based on eight physical characteristics. Of these, six fell in the range considered more common in females, one fell in the male range, and another was undetermined.

Skeletal remains can be used to determine sex with fairly high, though not perfect, accuracy. However, that rate falls without the pelvis, the most important marker. A 2023 review paper found experts only had a 76.6% accuracy rate in determining sex from the cranium alone. So while the skull indicates female traits, it could very well have belonged to a man.

The problem with skull measuring

The race determination is, well, a whole can of worms. Forensic anthropology is a field that has evolved significantly over the past 30 years since Paredes examined the skull. Scientific consensus increasingly rejects skull measurements as reliable indicators of racial background.

There are physical traits, even skeletal, that can hint at a person's racial background. But using skull measurements to determine if a subject is "mongoloid," as they did then (hint: we don't use that word anymore) is closer to pseudoscientific Victorian-era eugenics than it is to modern, evidence-based forensic anthropology.

Even accepting skull measurements as legitimate, there is significant ambiguity in the ID of the skull. Of the 14 measurements that were standard at the time, Paredes was only able to take nine. Navarro himself admitted that post-mortem deformations "could have affected some cranial measurements" and that the high number of missing teeth "would hinder racial determination."

With all of those caveats established, the researchers concluded that the cranium showed both "mongoloid" and "caucasoid" traits, which they believed indicated mixed descent. This, Navarro theorized, would match an early 19th-century Southern Chilean person who was, as many are in that region, descended from Indigenous people and white sailors.

In a later 1999 article on his find, Navarro says that there are plans to conduct DNA analysis on all three of the skeletal remains. If this analysis was ever performed, I have not been able to find it.

Rewriting Antarctic history?

So, the find is real. The age is reliably a young person. The sex is likely, but not certainly, female. Of race, the less said, the better.

However, this find does not, as some recent articles claimed, "rewrite human history." Even if we accept the racial and sexual identification of the remains, there are several ways they could have ended up on a beach in the South Shetlands.

First, it is possible that the remains were of someone who died at sea, and their body washed up on the island. One specific incident is relevant: On September 4, 1819, San Telmo, a 74-gun Spanish navy ship, sank in the Drake Passage. All hands -- some 644 people -- were presumed lost.

Not long after, Captain William Smith discovered the South Shetland Islands. But when he actually landed on a later visit, he found man-made wreckage already there -- the battered remains of the San Telmo. If wooden boards from the ship could wash up on the beach, why not a body?

Then, of course, there were sealers. Not long after Smith named the South Shetlands, sealers arrived to exterminate the local pinnipeds. From 1820 to 1824, some 60-75 British sealers were living and hunting on Cape Shirreff. They left behind ruined huts, glass bottles, harpoons, carved figures, and broken stoves. But, several of the new articles are quick to point out, there weren't female sealers! How could a woman's remains have ended up there?

A woman in a sealer camp

In fact, it is neither impossible nor even unlikely that a young Chilean woman might find herself aboard a sealer on the wrong side of the Drake Passage.

While uncommon, it was not unheard of for a married woman to join her husband at sea in the 19th century. Whaling ships, for example, might carry the captain's wife, and some, like Mary Brewster and Mary Chipman Lawrence, even left detailed diaries of their lives at sea on these vessels.

Indigenous women, in particular, might find themselves at sea for less savory reasons. In the South Pacific whaling trade off Southern Australia, European sailors would bring, voluntarily or no, Aboriginal women with them as both "wives" and workers. In 1819, a passing ship reported seeing European sealers go ashore on the mainland and seize aboriginal women, bringing them back to their sealing camp on Kangaroo Island.

A missionary in Tierra del Fuego reported a similar practice in 1889: "The sealers think nothing of kidnapping a Fuegian woman, [and] imprisoning her on board for the whole sealing season."

It's a grim fate to contemplate, but not an unlikely one. It's also possible that she went sealing disguised as a man. This practice isn't just a fictional trope, but a reality born out in historical records. A study on women in 19th-century whaling found four cases of women masquerading as men, and those were only the ones who were found out.

Dangerous territory

Navarro found the skull in 1985. Most of the papers on it came out in the 1990s. Why is it showing up on a rash of online sites now? I don't know for certain, but I know that the current interest spike started in July, on the Spanish-speaking internet.

The skull might be a curiosity or conspiracy-starter here, but for Chile, it may be more significant. Chile is one of the nations that signed the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The treaty formally froze all territorial claims and theoretically prevents any future ones. But proof of early exploration or even indigenous settlement would be a significant bulwark to Chile's existing claim. Countries like Russia, the United States, and Brazil have asserted their right to make future claims. Those with existing slices of the pie are anxious to shore up their perceived legitimacy.

About two months after Spanish sites revived the Antarctic skull story, it crossed over, slightly garbled, onto the English web. The English articles dialed up cultural depictions of Antarctica as a place of myth. Since its discovery, it has featured in the works of early science fiction authors like Jules Verne, and the horrors of Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft. That haunting mystique continues today as alien/Nazi/flat earth conspiracies in the scarier corners of our culture.

So it's with all of this in mind that I urge skeptical caution when approaching stories like this. Don't get me wrong, the remains are a cool find. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

European Green Crabs have inundated part of the coast of British Columbia. To combat this invasive species, the Haíɫzaqv Nation, which manages the land, set up crab traps along all the beaches, baited with fish. In the last few years, though, the traps in the Bella Bella area have turned up with significant damage. So they set up cameras to catch the perpetrators.

Almost immediately, the cameras caught remarkable footage of wild wolves feeding from the traps. A lone female wolf waded out at high tide and emerged carrying the trap's buoy in her jaws. Then she pulled on the line to reel in the crab trap. Once the trap was on the beach, she tore open the netting and removed the bait cup, eating the tasty bait inside.

A new study explores the meaning of this behavior. Does this count as wolves using tools? How did they figure this out, the study asks, and just how much more common is tool use than we previously believed?

How did they learn this?

This is impressive behavior. It requires the wolf to connect and understand the relationship between a yummy fish treat, a rope, a buoy, and a (completely submerged) trap.

It was an efficient process, too. The whole affair took just three minutes. The wolf moved with purpose, clearly understanding the sequence in which she had to perform certain actions.

Researchers who studied the clips are still wondering how well the wolves really understand the mechanics involved in their trick. It's possible, the paper suggests, that wolves learned to retrieve and open the traps through trial and error, then memorized the steps without fully understanding them.

It's also possible they learned from watching people. When resource management officials stopped to check the traps and switch out bait, they could have inadvertently shown observing wolves how to retrieve traps. But officials raise the traps from a boat; they don't drag them to shore.

We also don't know how widespread this behavior is. Cameras did catch another individual retrieving a partially submerged trap, but so far, only the first female wolf has shown the ability to reel in a trap that's completely hidden underwater.

The 'tool use' debate

Only rarely do researchers get a chance to observe wolf behavior in the wild. Is this level of sophistication common across wolves, and is this just the first time we've seen it? Thanks partially to the work of the Haíɫzaqv Wolf and Biodiversity Project, wolves in this area have minimal conflict with humans. Has their comparatively comfortable situation made them more confident and curious than other wolf populations?

The biggest question is more one of definitions, though. Namely: Does this count as tool use? Since tool use is considered a key marker of intelligence, categorizing wolves as a tool-using species would be significant.

The study cites "using an external object to achieve a specific goal with intent" as the common understanding. By this metric, the clip is definitely evidence of wolves using tools. But the most current comprehensive work on animal tool behavior (titled, creatively, Animal Tool Behavior) sets a higher standard.

"The animal must produce, not simply recognize," this definition runs, "[the relationship] between the tool and the incentive." So, if the wolves were tying ropes to the cages themselves, then it'd be tool use. Just using an existing rope doesn't count.

Is it still tool use when animals appropriate human tools, rather than creating their own? The paper answers with an interesting analogy: The authors are writing their paper on a computer, "whose inner workings [they] do not fully understand." Nevertheless, their use of this tool is certainly evidence of higher thinking.

Only weeks after the titular expedition returned, ITN broadcast Death on Annapurna: Chris Bonington's Lethal Himalayan Expedition. Using footage from the expedition, it chronicled the British Annapurna South Face expedition of 1970.

Led by Chris Bonington, the expedition successfully summited Annapurna's South Face for the first time. But on the descent, their luck turned.

Snow bad this year

The documentary begins with the porters, however. The expedition employed 320 local porters, who each made £3 total for their work. Days into their heavily laden march, Chris Bonington is introduced. He's received bad news. The snow was quite bad this year and lays thick and low over the mountain. This means a much lower base camp and a harder push ferrying their goods back and forth.

At 3,600m, the porters can finally abandon their loads. As accompanying presenter John Edwards notes, the South Face isn't clearly visible from the camp. The camp's distance from the face causes continuing supply line issues. Then a sudden blizzard forces the porters to abandon a load of supplies, which are promptly raided by local ravens.

"Big mountains are unpredictable," Edwards notes simply. At any moment, the weather, the altitude, and the ice can end the expedition. Under Bonington, the expeditionaries slowly work their way up the face, getting ropes in place and negotiating a mountainside that's never been climbed before.

To the summit

The team steals upward, throwing themselves against an intimidating icefall, which is increasingly unstable as melting ice and snow cause avalanches and falling seracs. The monsoon season, which will end all climbing, swiftly approaches.

It takes 21 days to climb the ice ridge. Now, with three weeks remaining, they face the rock band. Frustrated with the slow progress, Bonington tries to keep climbers on the mountain. But rest is impossible above 6,000m.

As Bonington explains, the work is unlike the "traditional Himalayan plod," with exhausting, very steep climbing and soft snow which must be shoveled through. The sheer face means Sherpas do not accompany them above 6,400m; in that era, few Sherpas had technical climbing skills. Forced to do their own carrying, the climbers are increasingly exhausted and sick. Bonington himself, pleurisy-stricken, has to fall back to Base Camp.

Short of time and fearing changeable weather, Bonington decides to continue the push. Don Whillans and Dougal Haston, especially, are game for the challenge. It is these two who ultimately reach the summit, as those waiting below cheer for them over the radio. They were actually only supposed to set up Camp 7, but as they explain over the radio, "It was easier to go for the summit than it was to pitch the tent."

A tragic descent

With that sudden and almost anticlimactic victory, it's time to descend. They've summited just in time, as the weather begins to turn while they celebrate. Then, another sudden shift.

Most of the men and supplies were already at Base Camp when Ian Clough, a climbing instructor and friend of Bonington, was bringing down a last load of equipment. Only three hours from Base Camp, Clough lost his life in the icefall to a falling serac.

Due to the logistical difficulties of retrieving his body, Clough is buried at Base Camp. We see the expedition gathered around his grave, as Bonington says a few words. Perhaps, Edwards reflects, this grave halfway up a frozen mountain is "the most suitable burial place for a mountaineer."

Rather than leave us with this quiet combination of grief and triumph, the documentary ends on a strange coda: Edwards interviewing Don Whillans about his alleged Yeti sighting. As Edwards repeats throughout the documentary, you never can tell in the Himalaya.

Charvet Drucker was watching a pod of orcas, also known as killer whales, off Camano Island in Washington, when she found herself unwittingly involved in their hunt.

In an act of desperate genius, a harbor seal threw itself onto the boat like movie bank robbers throwing themselves into the backseat of the getaway car and yelling, "Drive!"

Drucker was photographing the hunt in advance of its seemingly inevitable conclusion. As the orcas got closer, she cut the engines, as per regulations. The seal headed right for the vessel, quickly pulling itself aboard.

A shocked Drucker began to film on her phone as the frustrated orcas circled the boat while the seal hunkered down. The orca pod swam back and forth for some time, attempting to rock the boat through their coordinated movements and shake the seal loose. It did slip off in a tense moment, but managed to get back aboard before the pod caught it.

After about 20 minutes, the orcas gave up. When the coast was clear, the victorious pinniped slipped back into the sea, and Drucker uploaded the footage to her Instagram:

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Stowaway seals

This is hardly the first time that a wily seal has saved itself in this fashion. In 2016, Nick Templeman's boating excursion off Vancouver Island was watching a pod of orcas. The whales appeared to be hunting something. Suddenly that something, a seal, appeared and made a beeline for the boat and clambered aboard. The orcas circled the boat for some time before eventually giving up, leaving the seal free to slip back into the water.

Two years later, another boating excursion in the same area was waiting for an orca pod to kill a seal it had been chasing. They had no plans to interfere with the hunt, but the seal made them unwitting accomplices when it likewise hopped aboard their vessel.

In a strange twist, Nick Templeman was in a neighboring boat at the time. He watched events repeat themselves, as the orcas circled and waited, then eventually gave up. This time, the seal did not disembark immediately but stayed aboard until they reached the dock.

Given our historical propensity for collecting their fur and blubber, seals have fairly good reason to avoid humans. But as they say, any port in a storm.

Unicorns have a deeply rooted association with purity, young women, and nobility. Their association with Vikings, poison, and white powder of unknown origin is, in the modern day, perhaps less recognized. Nevertheless for the people of medieval and early modern Europe, the mythical horned horse was connected to all of the above. The unicorn was real, and so was unicorn medicine.

Good for what ails you

The first Western accounts of an equine, single-horned animal come from ancient Greek explorers in India. The unicorn appears in the works of Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and more. The Hebrew word re'em, describing an unknown horned animal, was translated as "unicorn" in the 4th century Latin Vulgate, which became the official Bible of Roman Catholicism. Medieval people then cited the Bible as proof of the unicorn's existence, in a neat bit of circular logic.

The unicorn was not merely a supposedly real creature but a potent symbol and substance. In popular Christian allegory, it came to symbolize Christ's purity, humility, and oneness with God. The spiritual purity of the unicorn became a physical purity, and then the ability to purify.

The unicorn could heal wounds, cure disease, counteract poison, and purify water. Hildegard von Bingen, 12th-century abbess and mystic, wrote that "there is no leprosy, of any kind that will not be cured if you often anoint it with [an ointment made with unicorn liver]." If you wear a belt and shoes of unicorn skin, she went on, "you will always have healthy feet, legs, and loins."

But the horn was where the unicorn's power most resided, something attested in the earliest Western accounts of the creature. Drinking glasses made with its horn could counteract poison. The ground-up horn was the active ingredient in ointments, salves, and tinctures.

Ten times its weight in gold

Henry VIII's royal pharmacopoeia contained a recipe for an ointment containing ground unicorn horn, alongside red coral, white lead, oyster shell, and rose oil. It does not say what this ointment was used for. I can't imagine it being effective against much of anything. But it was expensive.

Unicorn was medicine for only the wealthy. At the height of its popularity, powdered horn cost over ten times its weight in gold, while whole horns were even more valuable. Lorenzo de Medici's horn, for instance, was worth 6,000 gold florins.

Ivan IV, aka The Terrible, paid 70,000 marks for a jewel-encrusted unicorn horn staff to a Welshman who claimed to be a wizard. He prized this object so much and believed in its healing abilities that he had it brought to him on his deathbed.

Unicorn was the perfect gift for the sovereign who had everything. In 807, Harun al-Rashid, Caliph of Baghdad, gave a nearly three-meter-long horn to Charlemagne. Pope Clement VII gifted a horn in a silver stand to the French King Francis I, and Venice gave one to Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent. Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I divided his vast treasure among his sons, except for the two most valuable objects: a unicorn horn and the (alleged) Holy Grail.

Horns were both displays of wealth and protection against the assassination all powerful people fear. The Spanish Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, for instance, refused to dine without his unicorn horn on the table. Mary Queen of Scots used unicorn horn powder to test her food for poison while she was imprisoned. Sadly for her, unicorn horn had no power to prevent beheading.

The many horns of Elizabeth I

Appropriately for the "Virgin Queen," Queen Elizabeth I owned several unicorn horns. Walter Raleigh's half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, gave the queen a jewel-encrusted horn worth £10,000, something like £10 million today. In 1577, Martin Frobisher gave her another unicorn horn, of a more marine origin.

Frobisher had just returned from an Arctic expedition. One day on Baffin Island, he had discovered the corpse of a massive, nearly four-meter-long fish similar to a porpoise. Emerging from the snout was a spiraling horn nearly two meters long. In his diary, Frobisher wrote that it "may truly be thought to be the sea-unicorn."

Some of his sailors had apparently tested the magical powers of the horn by dropping spiders into it. Frobisher did not witness this strange experiment, but was told by his men that the spiders had died, somehow proving that the horn was magical.

Robert Dudley, one of Elizabeth's favorites, is rumored to have stolen the tip of the unicorn horn belonging to Oxford College. Herman Melville's claim in Moby Dick (Chapter 32) that he gave this to the Queen is, however, merely an off-color pun.

Elizabeth also had a goblet made of gold and unicorn horn, which she drank from, believing it would purify the contents. This cup was passed down to James I as part of the crown jewels. Frobisher's horn was bejeweled and became known as the Horn of Windsor, while Gilbert's likely became the silver-coated Tower Horn kept in the Tower of London.

Both of these items were lost or stolen during the English Civil War. During the reformation period, King Charles II received a replacement horn, but what happened to it is, likewise, unclear.

The sea-unicorn

By this point, you're probably wondering, given the fact that unicorns are not real, where all these goddamn horns are coming from. Well, as suggested by Frobisher's sea-unicorn, they were coming from narwhals.

The narwhal is a small toothed whale that lives in Arctic waters. They grow up to three meters long, not counting their horn, which is another three meters or so. Actually, it isn't a horn at all but a tooth, specifically the upper left canine. Most males grow tusks, occasionally even two tusks, while only a little over one in seven females do.

The tusk may allow the whale to sense salinity and water temperature, but this is probably not its main purpose. If it was, we'd expect all of them to grow tusks, not just most males and a few females. It may be a result of sexual selection, with females preferring males with large tusks, or an adaptation for male narwhals to battle with in the fight for territory and mates.

Narwhals don't usually leave the Arctic, but occasionally confusion, predation, or food scarcity push them out of their native range. In 1588, for example, a very lucky Welsh woman found a horn washed up on the beach and became fabulously wealthy. In 1949, a living pair of narwhals swam into British rivers to the surprise of all, and the consternation of the narwhals, who quickly found themselves in a museum collection.

But these incidents are so rare that they cannot account for the majority of the "unicorn horns" of medieval and early modern Europe.

Vikings and corpse whales

While most of the world was ignorant of the narwhal, the people who lived around and traveled regularly in the Arctic were familiar with them.

It is the Old Norse language, through the Dutch, which gives us the word "narwhal." Their word was náhvalr, from nár, meaning "corpse," and hvalr, or "whale." It was called the corpse whale, linguists theorize, because its round, mottled form bobbing on the waves resembled the pale and bloated corpse of a drowned sailor.

At the end of the 10th century, Norse sailors reached Greenland and set up a settlement there. The Norse Vikings (Viking is more a job, something like sailor/marauder/merchant, than a people group) had vast trade networks across Eurasia and North Africa.

Walrus ivory was a valuable trade good for the Greenland Norse, who did a brisk trade in the stuff. By the 10th century, walrus ivory from Greenland and Iceland was turning up in Islamic and Chinese markets. Along with the walrus came the much rarer and more valuable narwhal tooth ivory. The unicorn horns sold to the kings and popes of Europe were the same narwhal tooth that the Vikings sold as fine whalebone in the east.

The problem is that we have no record of the Greenland Norse hunting narwhal. In fact, they wrote that this animal's flesh was inedible. (Clearly, it is an acquired taste, since Inuit love the stuff, particularly the skin and blubber, called muktuk.)

Secret trade route?

In Old Norse, narwhals were inedible corpse whales. But people who lived with and hunted live narwhals gave them different names, with different regional dialects of Inuktitut referring to their black-and-white spots (Allanguaq), or tusks (tuugaalik). In fact, it was likely various Inuit groups, trading with Norse voyagers, who actually provided the priceless unicorn horns for royal treasuries.

A 2024 study used genetic analysis to source walrus ivory artifacts to specific hunting grounds. This study found that as time went on, the Norse had to go further and further into the Arctic and toward Canada, as they killed off all the closer walruses. As they pushed deeper into the Canadian High Arctic, they met the Thule -- the few dozen people who lived in Northwest Greenland -- more and more often and started increasingly exchanging goods and cultural knowledge.

By the High Middle Ages, Norse traders were making regular trips from Iceland to Greenland, where they traded with both the Greenland Norse and the Thule. And some of what they traded, scholars believe, were narwhal horns.

Unicorn trade dies, skepticism is born

The Greenland Norse abandoned their Western settlements around 1350. The Eastern Settlements were empty by the 1540s. As narwhal horn and walrus ivory imports slowed, however, elephant ivory imports increased. The colonial age was kicking off in earnest, which was bad news for most of the people and animals on Earth but cool for walruses. The elite of Europe began to get their ivory from Asia and Africa instead of from the north.

Besides, unicorn horns were beginning to seem a little last century, a little gauche. While Elizabeth I's horn was worth £10,000, Charles I's was only valued at £500. Maybe it was a smaller or perhaps uglier horn, but still the value of such objects had plummeted. In fact, some intellectual types were suggesting that unicorns weren't real at all.

Emerging -- not for the first time -- to challenge a strange medical practice, Ambrose Pare published a discourse on unicorns in 1582. The royal doctor to four French kings, Pare was not afraid to challenge old medical wisdoms in favor of new evidence. He was skeptical of medicinal cannibalism and debunked the myth that gunpowder was poisonous in wounds.

Regarding unicorns, he argued that 1) they didn't exist and that therefore 2) their horns did not have healing properties. No one, he argued, had presented reliable evidence of unicorns, and the descriptions of them varied wildly. In his many decades of practice, he had never seen unicorn horn or powder demonstrate healing or purifying properties.

Pare faced considerable criticism, with one anonymous troll calling him "Lucifer" and arguing that the unicorn cure was well established. Pare countered that long use was not evidence for efficacy, but many were not convinced.

The end of unicorn medicine

Apothecaries still used the unicorn as their logo, but Pare's side was starting to get louder and more numerous. During the 17th century, European intellectuals had more information than ever before about the world beyond their backyard. At the same time, there was an emerging interest in scientifically cataloguing the natural world.

With these two trends, it was inevitable that the mythical unicorn would transform into two real, but very different, animals. The unicorn or monoceros of the land was the rhinoceros. When Marco Polo saw a "unicorn," which he described as disappointingly ugly, that was probably a rhino.

As for the narwhal, it was delineated by a Danish physician who had the fantastic name of "Ole Worm." Ole Worm got his hands on a narwhal skull and used it to demonstrate that unicorn horn was actually the tooth of an Arctic marine animal. Other treatises, like Paul Ludwig Sachs' 1676 Monocerologia, further argued the narwhal/unicorn identification.

People are conservative and were slow to accept this blow to whimsy in medical annals. One 1694 compendium of medicine insisted that unicorn was still used "to resist all manner of poisons, and cure the plague, with all sorts of malignant fevers, the biting of serpents, mad dogs, et cetera."

Into the late 18th century, some apothecaries still sold fossilized unicorn to treat the plague. Honestly, in the days before penicillin, it wasn't the worst thing you could try.

Mountains with year-round ice caps gain height from a permanent layer of snow and ice. Traditionally, there were five of these ice-capped peaks in the contiguous United States, and the most famous of them is Mt. Rainier.

But climate change is coming for these peaks. A new study in the journal Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research shows that all five have lost height due to ice melting.

High-altitude science

People who visit the mountains every year notice melting ice, newly exposed rock, more rain, and less snow. But collecting precise data at the summit of a mountain requires one to actually reach the summit with delicate instruments intact, and that is a specialized skill set.

In late August 2024, a team funded by the American Alpine Club surveyed the Lower 48's five ice-capped peaks, led by experienced mountaineer and researcher Eric Gilbertson.

At the summit, they conducted ground surveys using GNSS equipment (Global Navigation Satellite System) on loan from Seattle University. Here, researchers use several GNSS devices, including one with a known position, to get a more accurate reading. For this, the team had to spend several hours on each summit.

Once they had the 2024 measurements, researchers compared them with past data gathered by LiDAR, photographic analysis, and earlier theodolite surveys.

A changing landscape

The results were troubling, to put it mildly. In 1956, Mt. Rainier measured 4,392.2m (14,410') at its highest point, Columbia Crest. As of 2007, however, Columbia Crest is no longer the summit of Rainier. That honor now goes to a 4,389m (14,399.6') rocky outcrop about a football field away. Columbia Crest, meanwhile, continues to melt, measuring only 4,385.8m (14,390') at the time of the study.

"All told," the study announced, "Mount Rainier is no longer an ice-capped summit." Average temperatures at Rainier's summit have risen over 3˚C since the 1950s, causing this drastic change.

As for the four other peaks, only two of them remain ice-capped. Liberty Cap, a sub-peak of Mt Rainier, and Colfax Peak, a sub-peak on Mt Baker, have a few remaining meters of ice. El Dorado Peak and East Fury have both lost their caps, and with them, several meters of elevation.

The majority of this ice loss has occurred since 1999. Not only are Washington's frozen peaks losing ground, they are doing so at an increasing rate. East Fury, on Mt. Fury, is both the lowest peak and the one losing ice most rapidly, which seems unfair. The study notes that the data on trends over time is preliminary.

However, it does show the ongoing danger that climate change presents for alpinists. There will be increasing confusion and debates about records, as summit locations and elevations change from year to year.

But it's also a reminder of the importance of mountaineering in climate research. Even with advanced satellite and remote sensing, on-the-ground survey work is key to understanding and measuring how our mountains are changing.

Kayak the Mangoky follows two men from source to sea along Madagascar's longest river. Friends Oscar Scafidi and Ben Ziehm Stephen set out in the spring of 2022 with a collapsible kayak to complete the first recorded source-to-sea expedition of the Mangoky River.

The film begins with their training in Tunisia, where they lived at the time. Rather than practicing with their kayak, they focused on hiking, running, and backpacking. As Oscar's voiceover foreshadows, this turned out to be a good idea.

Finally, it's time to start the expedition. They fly into Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and load up their gear. Things go wrong before they even begin the trek to the source of the Mangoky, when the 4x4 breaks down in the middle of the night. Flat tires and more complications follow. It's vehicle number four, a massive truck, which finally brings them close to their destination. The next morning dawns, the official day one of kayaking the Mangoky.

Carrying their gear (kayak included) on their backs, Oscar and Ben begin hiking along a path that fades in and out. But finding the exact source turns out to be trickier than anticipated. Dense foliage prevents satellite navigation, and the locals give conflicting directions and are generally unenthused by the prospect of guiding them.

Finally, they manage to stumble on a muddy little stream, the source of the Mangoky. Now, the expedition can officially start.

Source to sea

The next day, they trek back to the village where the river is enough like an actual river to support a kayak and assemble their vessel for the first time. For several days, the pair make a good pace, but outside the city of Fianaransota, they have to pack the kayak back up.

From here to Ikalamavony, it's nothing but punishing portaging for 135km. The scenery is beautiful, but the unwieldy, heavy packs and rumors of dangerous local rattle rustlers weigh down every step. Friendly passersby tempt Oscar and Ben with offers of rides, but they push through.

The pair is rewarded with more portaging. In Ikalamavony, they learn that crocodiles and rapids make the next section impassible. Instead, they'll have to trek an untested path through the mountains. Along with four guides, they set out west. But on the second day, they reach the fun-to-try-to-pronounce Mananantanana, a tributary of the Mangoky, running swift and clear.

There ends up being a lot of portaging anyway, as they dodge rapids that locals upriver had assured them did not exist. Got 'em with the old "navigable river" trick. In between portaging and kayaking, they manage to get completely lost.

The four guides eventually arrive to rescue them, and between the six men and helpful, curious locals everywhere they stop, they manage to get Oscar, Ben, and the kayak into the Mangoky proper. From there, it's smooth going, other than the non-functional camp stove, broken steering mechanism, and constant threat of crocodiles.

Even these can't prevent Oscar, Ben, and a whole cadre of guides from slipping into the Mozambique channel, completing the journey from the source of the Mangoky to the sea.

Damavand lies in the Alborz range, near the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. A dormant volcano, Damavand rises 5,609m into the skies of Iran. It's the highest peak in the country and holds ancient cultural significance for the region. It also lays claim to the title of Asia's tallest volcano -- but it's not without challengers.

In 2008, a volcano news and travel website run by "volcano adventurer" John Seach ignited a debate by listing Kunlun in Tibet, not Damavand, as the highest volcano in Asia. His claim inspired defenders and detractors, hinging on the definition of a volcano.

The man behind Damavand versus Kunlun

In the early 2000s, Seach continuously updated his website, volcanolive.com, with news on recent volcanic activity, research, and travel. In his "About" page from the time, Seach described himself as a volcano educator, whose professional volcanology services had been used by the BBC, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and more.

Sporadic web archive snapshots give us a rough timeline. In early 2008, he listed Damavand only as the second-highest volcano in the Northern Hemisphere. The first was, presumably, Mount Elbrus in Russia. As for Kunlun, he did list it as a volcano, but made no height claims. However, sometime between October of 2008 and February of 2009, Seach updated his website.

Now, the page for Kunlun firmly stated that it was "the highest volcano in the northern hemisphere, and the highest volcano in Asia. Kunlun volcano is 130m higher than Mt. Damavand in Iran." The page for Damavand repeated this claim.

Soon, several other mountaineering sites listed Kunlun as the tallest Asian volcano. But there were many more firing back.

What is a volcano?

On the surface, it seems pretty straightforward. The tallest volcano is the one that reaches the highest elevation. Kunlun is higher, ipso facto, it takes the crown. But the question isn't if it's taller; it's whether it's a volcano.

See, Kunlun volcano is more commonly called the Kunlun Fault Volcano Group, or Ashikule Volcanic Field. It's a cluster of 70-odd pyroclastic cones in the western end of the Kunlun range. The highest of these cones may be as high as 5,808m (exact measurements are difficult due to the remote, understudied location), bringing them above Damavand. Its peak comes in at somewhere between 5,609m and 5,671m, depending on your measuring data.

But Kunlun is not a single volcano, and none of the cones has a significant prominence. The volcanic field has an average altitude of around 5,000m, with the individual "peaks" rising only a few hundred meters above the surrounding elevation. The tallest peak, Ka-er-daxi or Vulkan, has only 120 meters of prominence. For these reasons, many argue, including the Mount Damavand guide company, that Kunlun isn't a volcano.

Damavand is one of the Volcanic Seven Summits, a complication of the highest volcano on each continent. Like other adventure lists, this one draws a significant number of climbers and hikers. Damavand isn't the only controversial member. Mount Elbrus is listed as Europe's tallest mountain, but depending on where you define the geographical border between Europe and Asia, it arguably isn't even in Europe. Australia's tallest volcano isn't in Australia at all, but rather in New Guinea, so that seventh continent is now often referred to as Australasia or Oceania instead of Australia.

Seach's site is still up, and still lists Kunlun as the tallest volcano in Asia, but the debate seems to have cooled. Everywhere else I looked listed Damavand, and the alpinists who've completed the Seven Volcanic Summits in the last few years all climbed Damavand for their Asian volcano.

Everyone loves spiders. The only thing everyone loves more than spiders is a lot of spiders all in the same place. The only way this scene could be improved, popular opinion holds, is if the many spiders are in a pitch-black flooded cavern deep underground, which smelled like brimstone.

Well, fantastic news. A recent study unveiled a massive subterranean spider colony, with a gigantic communal web, living in a sulfuric cave on the border between Greece and Albania.

Many individuals, several species

The world's largest spiderweb (that we know of) occupies over one hundred square meters of surface area. Starting about 50 meters from the cave's entrance, this region is permanently dark. The passage is narrow and low, and the bottom is covered by a sulfur-rich stream. Some sections of web have grown so heavy with silk and spiders that they've detached from the wall.

While the scene could have emerged from JRR Tolkien's worst nightmares, the spiders themselves are not giant. In fact, the Arachnes who wove this tapestry come from several different species, working together over generations to build a veritable spider citadel.

The most populous are the Tegenaria domestica, or Domestic House Spider, some 69,100 strong. As suggested by their name, T. domestica often lives near humans. While they are considered endemic to Balkan caves, this is the first time they've been observed building large, colonial webs.

Their primary collaborators are approximately 42,400 Prinerigone vagans. Smaller than T. domestica, the research suggests that the lack of light prevents T. domestica's predatory instincts from triggering at the sight of their diminutive cohabitants. P. Vagans has also never been known to form colonies before.

Every square meter of the colony is crawling with somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand spiders, 110,000 spiders in all. They are outnumbered, however, by their prey.

Why so many spiders?

These spiders are predators, and so they congregate wherever there is the most prey. The study, led by Istvan Urak of the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, estimated there were more than 200 small chironomid flies for every spider. A type of non-biting midge, around 2,414,440 individual Tanytarsus albisutus flies feed the attercop metropolis in Sulfur Cave.

This massive, dense swarm hovers above the sulfuric stream, which runs along the cave floor. This section of the cave represents a rare type of ecosystem, where life thrives without any sunlight.

In 2024, a team from the Emil Racovitza Institute of Speleology visited Sulfur Cave, following up on earlier reports of unusual animal abundance, including a massive spider colony. The team identified 30 invertebrate species living in a self-sustaining chemoautotrophic ecosystem.

Chemoautotrophic means the bottom of the food chain turns inorganic materials into energy, instead of using energy from the sun as plants do in most ecosystems. Microorganisms in the stream convert sulfur into energy-rich biofilm (slime) which is eaten by larvae. The larvae turn into insects (like the non-biting midge) which are eaten by the predators (spiders).

This unique lifestyle seems to be changing the traditionally surface-dwelling populations within it. In the 2025 study, Urak's team genetically sequenced the P. Vagans and T. domestica in the cave. Both species were genetically distinct from nearby, above-ground populations.

Arctic Alchemy, a short film from directors Colin Arisman and Zeppelin Zeerip, follows adventurer and climate scientist Roman Dial on an expedition into the Arctic.

Dial, now in his 60s, has been going into the Alaskan wilderness since he was a teenager. He has decades of experience climbing, mountain biking, packrafting, and hiking. In interview and voiceover, Dial explains how a love for the outdoors became a need to chase more grueling and dangerous challenges.

After a brush with death on an Alaskan peak, however, Dial changed. He realized, he explains, that he wanted to grow old and raise a family. He settled down with his wife Peggy, and when they had a son, named Cody, Dial went back to school. Dial got his PhD and became a science professor.

It is his research that brings him into the mountains now. We're following him on a rafting trip into the Brooks Range, where he and his team are sampling the pH levels of streams. The Arctic rivers, which should be pristine, are rusting from metal contaminants. By sampling them right at their source and following the water down, Dial and his team hope to shed light on this strange and worrying phenomenon.

Paddling a poisoned river

Most field science in Alaska, Dial's colleague and friend Brad Meiklejohn explains, is done by helicopter. The work is so remote, the land is so vast and sparsely populated -- but helicopters are expensive. By using his adventuring skills, Dial can get good results on a slim budget.

The scientific results are good, but the news isn't. As they delve deeper into the water's headlands, they find bilious, yellow water that leaves dark red stains on the rocks.

As anthropogenic climate change warms the Arctic, permafrost melts, exposing rock that hasn't touched water in millennia. When it does come into contact with water, the resulting chemical reaction produces acid and releases metals previously contained in the rock. Then the rivers bring the acid and metal downstream into the water table.

There are Alaskan native communities downstream whose survival relies on these waterways. The damage is not slow and long-term. The Brooks Range is changing quickly, and the effects are already being felt. For himself and Dial, Meiklejohn says, there is a real grief that comes with this.

Moving through wild country

As the expedition moves forward, Dial reflects on his experience with fatherhood. He raised Cody to love nature, taking him hiking, rafting, and camping from a young age.

In July of 2014, Cody was in Costa Rica, traveling on his own during some time off from school. He emailed his father that he was entering the park -- and then no one heard anything else. Roman Dial rushed to Costa Rica to search for himself, despite authorities telling him to stay out.

The search lasted for weeks, then months, and ultimately extended over a year. It was only two years after he'd entered the jungle that Cody's remains were found and retrieved. For his father, the grief was intense. Through fostering and encouraging his son's love of nature, Roman wondered, had he inadvertently contributed to his death?

And yet, Dial still finds comfort and escape in nature. He's transformed his loss, Meiklejohn believes, into his work preserving "their favorite place."

As for the Brooks Range, Roman Dial's work has advanced scientific understanding of how climate change is affecting it. His protegés, like Russel Wong, who was also on the expedition, will continue his research and advocacy against threats like the proposed Ambler Industrial Road.

Mark May was an intelligent young Australian with a scholarship to study law. Instead, he fled society and lived alone in a remote gorge for 35 years. He passed away in 2017, taking his own thoughts on his choice with him.

Since then, his family, the press and the world at large has been left trying to understand how, and why, the "hermit of Wild Rivers" rejected society.

A promising start

Mark Francis May was born in 1954 on a 50-acre farm near Armidale, in New South Wales. He was the second-eldest of seven brothers whose father, Phil, put them to work from a young age. They spent their boyhoods learning to hunt and fish, clearing land and building the farmhouse.

Though a good student when he put his mind to it, Mark was somewhat of a loner, with a private, intellectual bent. When he was abused by a friend's father, he told no one about it. As a child and young man, his brothers recall that Mark was very artistic and creative, fond of painting and playwriting, often forcing his siblings to stage his plays in elaborate, handmade costumes.

By his mid-teens, he'd decided to seriously dedicate himself to schoolwork. Mark excelled and won a scholarship to study law at the Australian National University. He made a go of it, but even in his first semester, he had a hard time with the university lifestyle. Mark struggled to do any of his schoolwork, instead falling into drug addiction.

"Bourgeois society," he wrote to a friend at the time, sickened him. "I should live according to my human nature."

A troubled decade

But the next decade was a series of troubled behavior and run-ins with the law. On June 16, 1977, May appeared before Canberra Petty Sessions for trespassing. Contemporary newspaper reports allege that May and several other young men had refused to leave their boarding house. May was remanded on a $50 bail, but failed to appear in court and refused a good behavior bond.

Eventually, the incident came to a close, but by the next summer, he was in trouble again. In July 1978, he faced charges for cannabis possession and attempting to use an altered prescription to buy methadone. He pleaded guilty and was released with a $100 fine. The same year, he was arrested with methadone actually in his possession, as well as a stolen typewriter.

In late 1982, May pleaded not guilty to a charge of breaking into a pharmacy to steal drugs, 800 cigarettes and $12. May was found guilty, but the judge told reporters that due to time served and the fact that May was operating with diminished capacity due to being on a benzodiazepine at the time of the crime, he'd been sentenced leniently. May's nine-month sentence was suspended in favor of a fine and a good-behavior bond.

During his two months in jail, Mark read Henry David Thoreau's famous book, Walden. Not long after he was released, he went into the bush.

Life in Wild Rivers

The rocky gorges of the falling tablelands were hard country, isolated. It got terribly cold in the winter and burning hot in the summer. Cattle and their keepers occasionally wandered through in the early years, before it became a national park. Once in a long while, a hiker, but that was all.

Mark May set up at the bottom of one of these gorges, making multiple camps which he moved between throughout the year. He hunted, fished and fixed up his camps, even constructing a staircase to get in and out of the gorge. Using mostly trash and found objects, Mark also built two more permanent structures, water collection systems, and gear storage.

Still a voracious reader, Mark brought his books down into the gorge. He had a radio and enjoyed listening to it, and befriended the local possum population, which soon, to his irritation, overran his camps.

He farmed, but not for food. Mark grew a small crop of marijuana in tiny, hidden enclosures. The money he made from this crop helped him pay for what he needed to survive. The local police later admitted they were aware of Mark's drug activities, but he was so isolated, and his growing was so small-scale, that it wasn't worth bothering about.

Isolated but not completely disconnected

The nearest civilization was the small town of Hillgrove. It was a day's hard trek from Mark's home base, and a second day of walking to get from Hillgrove into Armidale. Mark made his way out once every few months, sometimes calling a friend from Hillgrove to get a lift. He attended holidays and family reunions sporadically and often without warning.

While he refused to get a postbox, he had dead-drop locations, like a hollow tree trunk, where he'd leave notes. Local farmers and friends would check on him, forming an informal support network which offered supplies or a few days rest out of the cold. But Mark always went back. The gorges were his home, and he felt unsafe anywhere else. The city, he said, made him sick.

His last visit was in Christmas of 2015. Mark was thin and quiet, with a persistent cough. He kept himself apart from the family at large but spoke extensively about his home, and his life, in the bush, urging his brother Pete to come visit.

By early July of 2017, no one had heard from Mark in months. Pete checked the hollow tree dead-drop near Hillgrove and found a worrying letter. Mark wrote that he was "OK, but starving," and would be visiting for food the next Sunday. It was dated from late May.

Searching for Mark May

Pete called his brother Steve, and they decided it was time to organize an expedition into the gorge. Weeks after his note, Mark had either starved, they calculated, or he had found food. It wasn't a rescue mission.

The brothers, both country doctors and themselves experienced backwoodsmen, came prepared and well supplied. Along with Pete's adult children Liz and Dave, they set out on the morning of July 15. A local farmer who'd looked in on Mark when he could helped point out the trail down the gorge, and the party descended.

Failing to find Mark's hidden staircase, they were forced to scrambled down the gorge in the rain, trying not to think about how they'd ever get back out. Luckily, they made it down without incident and followed old cattle trails down to a large pool surrounded by rocky terraces. This was where Mark made his most permanent, main camp, and the state of it was reassuring.

They found everything neatly stored and packed away, as if he'd planned to leave it for some time. The family search party, knowing it was too late to turn back that evening, camped in Mark's home with a sense of relief.

But the next morning, Pete walked down the river and found a backpack of Mark's, caught in a shrub and laying open. The group decided to search for Mark's other camps, so Liz and Steve waded across the river while Pete and Dave checked to the west.

It was Liz, reaching the eastern bank first, who found Mark's body.

Remembering the story of Mark May

Mark was lying in the entrance to his tent, his body decayed enough that later, when the coroner examined it, no cause of death could be determined. Unwilling to leave his body behind, the family buried him and hiked out of the gorge. Police later came and retrieved his remains, according to legal requirements. Eventually, however, Pete was allowed to bury one of Mark's finger bones at his camp by the river.

After Mark's story came to light, news reports were garbled and no one quite knew what to make of what had happened. Steve shared his recent loss with a childhood friend named Tom Patterson. Patterson had gone to school with several of the younger May brothers, and even lived with the family for several months. He had never met Mark, though, and the story deeply effected and fascinated him.

Hearing about Patterson's interest, Pete handed over a box of typewritten and hand-scrawled documents which made up Mark's unfinished memoir. Patterson launched himself into the material, supplementing it with interviews with the family.

In 2019, Pete took him down to the gorge where they visited Mark's grave and toured his now abandoned home. His water collection system was so well made that years later, the water was still clean and fresh-tasting.

Patterson's book about Mark May, Missing, was released in 2022.

There are only five species of rhinoceros alive today, and most are very endangered. The prehistoric past, however, held over fifty species over many different environments. A new study from The Canadian Museum of Nature describes a new species of ancient rhinoceros. Unlike its more familiar living relatives, Epiaceratherium itjilik had no horn, and lived in the High Arctic 23 million years ago.

This discovery introduces a unique new species and a deeper insight into the ancient rhino lineage. But it also has a broader significance, altering our understanding of neglected land bridges in the North Atlantic.

Meet Epiaceratherium itjilik

On Devon Island, the world's largest uninhabited island, a team from the Canadian Museum of Nature discovered a well-preserved and nearly complete fossilized rhino. This is the furthest north that any rhino has ever been found. The remains were in remarkable condition. Over 80% of the skeleton was intact, and the bones themselves were still three-dimensional.

The well-preserved remains allowed researchers, led by Dr. Danielle Fraser, to compare the High Arctic rhino with its Eurasian relatives. The teeth, jaw, finger bones and femur showed distinct differences, marking this as a new species.

Since the discovery occurred in Inuit territory, the researchers consulted elders from Canada's northernmost community of Grise Fiord. After learning a bit about the animal, Jarloo Kiguktak, the former mayor, suggested the name itjilik. The name comes from an Inuktitut word meaning "frosty."

Epiaceratherium itjilik was relatively small and stocky, without a horn, and related most closely to four other hornless Epiaceratherium species. The reconstructed genetic tree showed that our Epiaceratherium diverged from the rest in the late Eocene, 34 and 40 million years ago. So how did it get to the Arctic?

Ice-hopping megafauna?

Like the more famous Bering Land Bridge, a series of land bridges in the North Atlantic once connected the Canadian Arctic with Iceland, Greenland, and continental Europe. Animals used these bridges to move back and forth, but according to conventional wisdom, they were not used much after the late Eocene, about 54 million years ago.

Our new friend, Epiaceratherium itjilik, overturns that supposition. They likely crossed the North Atlantic Land Bridge as many as 20 million years after the bridge's previous "end date" estimate.

It's difficult to study long-drowned land bridges. They are, after all, deep below the waters of the North Atlantic. But the current geological science suggests that this causeway was a low stretch of land interrupted by thin bands of water. Seasonally, ice could cover those waterways, allowing animals, like the ancestors of Epiaceratherium itjilik, to cross in the same way that contemporary Arctic animals like caribou and muskoxen now cross from island to island over frozen ocean.

Australia was, for many decades, the open-air prison of Britain's criminals. Most were convicted of petty offenses. A quick perusal through the records finds convicts transported for stealing a coat, lying in court, impersonating a Royal Navy sailor, and poaching.

Once arrived, the convicts, mostly young men, were put to work. Their purpose was to provide the raw labor that British interests required to transform Australia into a machine for resource extraction. Building infrastructure, establishing large-scale agriculture, and killing, pushing out, or enslaving the native inhabitants.

Through this system, the convicts, themselves the victims of British imperial violence, often ended up being some of the most vicious perpetrators of that violence against the Aboriginal Australians. Some convicts, however, escaped and found shelter, solidarity, and even family among the Indigenous groups they'd been pitted against.

From Moreton Bay to K'gari

During the first half of the 19th century, an unexpected relationship emerged between the Moreton Bay convict settlement and the people of K'gari Island and the surrounding coastal region.

Moreton Bay, in what is now Queensland, was the "maximum security" facility of the eastern Australian penal system. Convicts who had committed another crime while in another penal colony, including attempting escape, were shipped to Moreton Bay. There, conditions were brutal and punishment severe. One in ten convicts died in 1828-1829 alone.

K'gari Island, just a few days' walk up the coast, is the world's largest sand island. In the early 19th century, it was one of Australia's largest Indigenous population centers. Several thousand inhabitants lived on the island and in the surrounding coastal areas. The primary group was the Butchulla, with the Kabi Kabi people occupying the coast between Moreton Bay and the K'Gari area.

Brutal conditions in Moreton Bay led many to escape, becoming "absconders." Some absconders were quickly caught, while others failed to survive in the wild. But some, with local help, stayed free for years, and even avoided recapture forever.

The absconders' gamble

Running was a desperate act. There were no white settlements for many hundreds of kilometers, and surviving alone in the bush took incredible skill, physical endurance, and luck. Recaptured absconders faced severe punishment.

Nevertheless, many did run. John Sterry Baker and George Mitchell achieved one of the first successful abscondings. They fled Moreton Bay on Jan. 8, 1826.

They soon split up. Mitchell went north, where he met another convict -- more on him later -- and lived with the support of a Kabi Kabi headman, Ngumundi. After several years, word reached him that he'd actually been pardoned, and he returned.

John Baker was a 27-year-old who was sent to Moreton Bay for stealing a sheep. Baker fled inland, following a tributary of the Brisbane River. There, he almost died of exposure and starvation. Luckily, a group of Aboriginal people found Baker.

They recognized him, in fact -- to his surprise, they claimed he was a deceased friend of theirs named Boraltchou. He said he didn't think that he was, but between his dire state and the language barrier, he eventually found it prudent to go along with them. In fact, he went along with the story for the next 14 years.

He learned their languages and customs, explored the region, and lived as Boraltchou until August of 1840. He reappeared at Moreton Bay, which by then was in the process of decommissioning. Instead of punishment, he got a job offer -- interpreter -- and worked in Sydney until his death in 1860.

Ghosts and kinsmen

John Baker was not the only misplaced white man who was adopted as a deceased Aboriginal person. Some groups in the Queensland region practiced mortuary flaying, carefully removing the skin of their deceased loved ones as a way to care for their body. This process would leave the white fascia visible, resulting in white corpses.

This may be why, when they saw a pale stranger near death, the people Baker met assumed he was a spirit returned. But the belief in loved ones returning as white-skinned corporeal spirits extended beyond Queensland.

The Kaurareg people of the Torres Strait called returned, white-skinned spirits markai. When a shipwrecked Scottish teenager named Barbara Thompson washed up on Prince of Wales Island, a local community leader recognized her as his deceased daughter, Giom. She lived as the markai Giom for five years before leaving on a passing British survey ship.

As the years went on, the understanding of white strangers as literal ghosts may have given way to the white-ghost designation as a shorthand for a certain type of person, and a way of understanding how they could fit into a community. Literal or figurative, the belief in white-faced returning spirits was a boon for many shipwrecked or absconded Europeans in the early 19th century.

A mutinous, very bad fellow

David Bracewell was a 23-year-old sailor of somewhat rough character. When he was arrested in 1826 for "assault with intent to rob," his records note that he'd been in jail before. His recidivism landed him a sentence of 14 years. The transport ship records state that he was mutinous and a "very bad fellow." He didn't impress the authorities once in Australia, either. Bracewell arrived in Hobart Town in June and was in Moreton Bay by December.

He absconded that spring, and after they caught him, authorities gave him 150 lashes. In 1828, 1829, and 1831 he absconded again, finally managing the final time to avoid recapture. For six years, he was free, traveling and falling in with various Indigenous groups.

In 1837, a Naval party entered Kabi Kabi land by the Noosa River mouth, looking for a rumored shipwreck. Instead, they heard a rumor of an escaped convict. One of the men in the party was a convict named Samuel Derrington. Derrington went into the bush and emerged with Bracewell in tow, earning £5 and a year off his sentence. Bracewell was shipped back to Moreton Bay.

In 1839, he absconded again. You have to admire his persistence. He ended up in the Wide Bay area, where he joined a Kabi Kabi tribe. Their prominent headman was Ngumundi, who had been George Mitchell's savior 13 years earlier. Ngumundi adopted him and named him Wandi, meaning "big talker" or "great talker."

If you want to catch an absconder

Samuel Derrington, who apprehended Bracewell in 1837, was himself a former runaway. Convicted of burglary in 1826, Derrington had fled a life sentence in Moreton Bay in late 1827. He returned in 1836 with an incredible -- I may even say unbelievable -- account of his years away.

According to Derrington, he was held captive by a tribe living on the coast of Queensland. His obituary claims that Derrington "was especially the object of female vigilance." Despite not being allowed to leave, he somehow became chief and led his people to glorious victory against nearby enemies.

Chief/prisoner or no, he did learn several local languages of the Kabi Kabi family as well as the customs of the region. When he returned in 1836, he offered his skills as bushman and interpreter in the hopes of reducing his remaining sentence. His jailers first tested him as part of the party that located Bracewell.

The leader, a Lieutenant Otter, gave Derrington a good review. So a few months later, when news of another wreck reached the settlement, they sent Derrington along. The party heard that the four survivors had been killed in a conflict with the locals, somewhere out in the bush. Derrington again set out.

According to a letter from the Moreton Bay commander to the Colonial Secretary, Derrington "quitted the party alone, and entirely naked, and having traveled in this manner about thirty miles through the forest, making enquiries, rejoined the party with intelligence, which partly led to the discovery of the murdered bodies."

This was enough to get him his ticket of leave. Derrington moved to East Maitland, married, and became a successful tinsmith.

Elisa Fraser on K'Gari

The fraud of Elisa Fraser is too tangled to properly cover here. But to strip the story to the essentials: In May of 1836, the brig Stirling Castle sank off K'Gari. The 11 survivors, including Captain Fraser and his wife, Elisa, were taken in by the resident Butchulla. At least, that's the story that other survivors and Butchulla oral records tell.

According to Elisa, she was cruelly held captive and forced into brutal labor and mistreatment after the death of her husband. In fact, the work she was asked to do was normal domestic labor for Butchulla women. The Butchulla had no reason to hold someone captive who wasn't particularly helpful and was, according to their oral telling, considered mad.

Whatever the truth, Fraser was certainly looking to leave K'Gari. Her chances seemed low, but rumors of the Stirling Castle wreck had reached Moreton Bay. Lieutenant Otter organized another search party, which sallied forth into the bush, guided by a convict volunteer named John Graham.

The convict scouts of the Elisa Fraser 'rescue'

A young Irishman convicted of stealing six-and-a-quarter pounds of hemp, John Graham was sent to work for a mill owner in Parramatta. There, he met and befriended some of the local Dharug people, who taught him their language and their fishing and foraging techniques. After only a few years, though, he was caught for petty theft and sent to Moreton Bay.

John Graham ran from Moreton Bay in July 1827 and stayed out until 1833. During this six-and-a-half-year span, he met up with George Mitchell (remember, Ngumundi's protegé from earlier). Graham abandoned his initial plan (find a boat and sail to China, somehow) when an Aboriginal woman recognized him as her late husband. She eventually died, but Graham stayed with the tribe, learning their language and way of life.

By 1836, though, he was back in Moreton Bay, serving his original sentence plus the time he'd been away. He volunteered for Otter's expedition, hoping to win a reduced sentence. Graham went unarmed into the bush and made contact with the Butchulla, negotiating for the handover of the three surviving crewmen and Elisa Fraser. According to Otter, Graham "shunned neither danger nor fatigue," and without his help, Elisa might never have returned.

When Fraser returned to England, she wrote a salacious narrative that painted the Butchulla as savage, murderous cannibals. Her lies fueled a series of massacres against the Butchulla over the following decades. While the island has now returned to K'Gari, for over a century, it bore the name Fraser.

Andrew Petrie, return or recapture

In 1824, 16-year-old Scotsman James Davis was convicted of stealing half a crown (12.5 cents) from a church and sentenced to transportation for life, which seems a bit extreme. In 1828, he was moved to Moreton Bay for a robbery conviction. Six weeks after arriving, he absconded with another prisoner.

The pair soon met the Ginginbarrah tribe, led by chief Pamby-Pamby, who adopted Davis as his deceased son, calling him Duramboi. The other convict was eventually killed for destroying a sacred burial site, but Davis remained. As Duramboi, he traveled widely, learning several Aboriginal languages, engaging in scarification and, allegedly, cannibalism.

In 1842, Andrew Petrie, a convict administrator and explorer, was journeying through the Wide Bay area. He was astonished to see a "wild" white man living with the Ginginbarrah. With Petrie was none other than Wandi, also known as David Bracewell. Petrie had run into Bracewell on the same journey and explained that the Moreton Bay settlement was decommissioned, and promised Bracewell would not be punished if he returned.

Bracewell and another man "stole in upon" the Ginginbarrah and dragged Davis out. Davis was furious, but Bracewell and Petrie eventually convinced him that he was free. Davis had to relearn English and get used to stifling, European-style clothes again. He worked as a guide and translator when called upon, but mostly he lived in Brisbane and sold crockery.

David Bracewell later claimed to have also been involved in the Stirling Castle affair. This may have just been big talk, though. At any rate, he was crushed to death by a falling tree in 1844.

The names we don't know

John Graham got his ticket of leave for the Stirling Castle affair, and promptly disappeared forever from the historical record. It's possible that he returned to the community he'd been part of for six years.

Out of the 145 Moreton Bay prisoners who ran, 98 of them never returned and were never found. Most, certainly, died. But there must have been a lucky, clever, and perhaps personable few who lived out their days with the Aboriginal communities who found them. According to Andrew Petrie, "Had I or someone else not brought [James Davis] from among those savages, he would never have left them."

George Mitchell said there were at least a dozen escaped convicts living in the territory, under the protection of Ngumundi and his kin. Most of them remain a mystery.

Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching follows two brothers on a year-long quest to see as many bird species as they possibly can. Owen Reiser and his older brother Quentin, however, are the exact sort of people you do not expect to birdwatch at all, let alone competitively. Quentin got the birdwatching bug first, and his younger brother copied him, which is classic younger sibling behavior.

They decided to plunge headfirst into the world of extreme birdwatching by going for a so-called "Big Year." This is the challenge to identify as many birds as possible within a 365-day period. The range is limited to the contiguous, or lower 48, U.S. states. Furthermore, the bird must be alive, wild, and unrestrained.

At the time they set out, the record to beat was 751 birds.

The average extreme birder

The brothers are definite underdogs in the race. As Owen lays out in voiceover, the average Big Year competitor has been birdwatching for 24 years and can identify over a thousand birds by sight. The brothers, meanwhile, are armed with only very limited bird knowledge and a 2010 Kia Sedona with which to roam the country on a directionless avian quest.

There's also eBird, of course, the citizen science app, to help them. During the day, the brothers take endless photographs of any bird they think might be new. Then at night they pore over the images, using online and printed guides to identify the species before recording it on eBird. The pair starts off from Tucson, Arizona, which is, by wild coincidence, my hometown.

There's a brief period when the app and a related app called Merlin, which identifies birdsong, are down. Forced to do things the old-fashioned way, the boys try dozens of decades-old "rare bird hotline" listings. The only one still active is run by an Amish community in Ohio.

As for van life, "it really sucks, actually," Quentin claims. They're taping up the van to keep out mosquitoes, incidentally eliminating all airflow. A surprising number of nights are spent in the Cracker Barrel parking lot. Showering is a rare luxury.

Bird controversy?

Amid the van life struggle and birding hunt, the pair investigates birding culture, interviewing both local and record-holding birders. They meet blackballed bird fakers, alligator attack survivors, extremely Christian birdwatching prodigies, and all manner of rabid avian enthusiasts. Along the way, at least one of them becomes a rabid avian enthusiast himself.

But as the year runs on and they pass 300, 400, 500 birds, the lifestyle begins to wear on them both. Quentin admits that while he's come to earnestly love birdwatching, which is "fun as fuck," the competitive aspect reduces his enjoyment.

Birding, their most positive interviewees say, should inspire an appreciation for the natural world and a desire to save it. Instead, competitive birders release mountains of emissions flying across the country to add something to their list.

"How many times does this happen every day?" Quentin asks mournfully, as they gaze at the remains of a killdeer nest destroyed by heartlessly applied lawn mowing.

"This is right up there with 9/11," Owen agrees.

By the end of the year, cumulative exhaustion and ethical quandaries have left them feeling cold regarding chasing rare birds. Instead, they decided to focus on actually watching the birds instead of ticking them off a list. They go see flamingos in Florida.

In the end, the brothers finish in 23rd place with 579 birds. They award themselves first place in the Kia Sedona-based Big Year category.

A single asteroid descended without warning to end the reign of dinosaurs, at the peak of their size and strength. It's too cinematic an image, too archetypal a story, to possibly be true, isn't it? For decades, scientists have questioned this simplistic narrative of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, or K-Pg event.

For much of the 2000s, researchers investigated the additional role of volcanic activity, as well as sea level and climate change, which preceded the famous impact. Maybe it's too frightening to imagine that a single chunk of rock in the wrong place could wipe out between 75% and 80% of species on Earth.

But emerging research in the last few years suggests the old theory was right, after all. A new study funded by the National Science Foundation found that dinosaurs in New Mexico had healthy, diverse populations in the final days before a 10km-wide asteroid struck the Yucatán Peninsula.

Searching for boundary-dwellers

The boundary between dinosaur times and post-dinosaur times is actually a physical line imprinted on the Earth. The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary (like me, you may have learned as a child that it was the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) boundary, but this term is no longer in use), is a thin band of iridium-rich rock which formed approximately 66 million years ago.

The idea that an impact event caused this layer of iridium, and that this event also killed off the dinosaurs, was first proposed by father-son physicist-geologist team Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980. To study the final Cretaceous ecosystems, paleontologists look at geological formations formed right below this boundary line. But as with all things, simple rules like this get complicated in practice.

In the Ojo Alamo rock formation in New Mexico, several chunks, called members, from different eras divide the rock. The Naashoibito Member is from the Maastrichtian age. This age included the final days of the Cretaceous from 72 to 66 million years ago. However, confirming the date of the fossils within these formations has been a sticky subject, as the layers fold in on each other and overlap.

To prove that the fossils they were looking at were really from the late Maastrichtian, the National Science Foundation researchers had to develop a new model for how the layers were deposited. Once they had a better picture of what they were sampling, they could model a snapshot of the late Maastrichtian.

The titans of the latter days

What they found was a total upending of previous models. Popular understanding went that species diversity had peaked in the earlier Campanian era and declined as the Maastrichtian went on. When the asteroid hit, so the story went, dinosaurs were less diverse and less healthy than they had been.

But the researchers, led by Andrew G. Flynn of New Mexico State University, found this wasn't the case at all. The fossil specimens in this late Maastrichtian group were not abnormal or smaller than the Campanians. The models showed healthy species diversity across different sizes, diets, and lifestyles.

Rather than a slow population collapse, the late Maastrichtian was a time of flourishing speciation and high regional diversity. And then the asteroid hit.

Waterwalker is a 1984 feature-length documentary from Canada's National Film Board. In this beloved classic, filmmaker and naturalist Bill Mason paddles through Ontario's wilderness, reflecting on art, nature, and the exploration of the natural world.

On the screen, we see Mason's art, film, and painting as he begins to discuss his ongoing attempts to share his experiences with nature. Originally a commercial artist, nature exerted an inescapable pull on him. He spent months at a time in the wilderness, taking commercial work to support his next trip. Then he turned to film as a way to transmit the beauty he saw.

"The problem with film," Mason reflects, as he adds the final refinements to a landscape painting, "you show it the way it is, everybody goes off to sleep."

Once, Mason remembers, he showed his footage to producers. They immediately began trying to add drama -- plane crashes, broken legs, wolf attacks -- to Mason's disgust. The producer's ethos is fundamentally opposed to Mason's work, which, he says, has no villains.

"Just you and me," Mason promises, paddling Lake Superior and the waterways of Ontario.

Following the water

The canoe is a literal vehicle for Mason but also a vehicle to explore his thoughts on spirituality, the natural world, artistic inspiration, and the timeless appeal of water. Starting on Lake Superior, he begins making his way upriver, reaching toward an unknown headwaters.

While Mason broadly works his way north, the film does not follow a particularly linear narrative. Instead, it winds along, stopping to examine a striking image or explore a line of thought.

Amidst wildlife encounters, tipped canoes, and painting sessions, he continually returns to his canoe. It's a traditional wood-and-canvas affair. While he admits it isn't as practical to lug around as the modern alternatives, his aesthetic sensibility is compelled by its lines. In a similar vein, he dismisses modern tents as "doghouses," in favor of an old-fashioned open-front A-frame tent -- variously known as a Baker tent, Labrador tent, etc.

Environmentalism drives Mason's desire to show nature's beauty to an audience. Both his paintings and his filmmaking entreat the viewer to understand and care about the land. On his journey, he sees birch trees struggling and hears about acid rain.

"You see for yourself what we're doing to the land." Even a seemingly pristine waterfall, far from civilization, is bittersweet, because one day he knows ravaging progress will find it.

Bill Mason passed away in 1988, at only 59 years old. Over thirty years later, his work, especially his documentary films like Waterwalker, remain iconic staples of the genre. His message -- the need to learn how to love and live with the natural world -- has never been more relevant.

Every year, the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival celebrates the best mountain and adventure writing, film, and photography. The literary highlight of this alpine-themed bacchanal is the Banff Mountain Book Competition, which is divided into eight categories and one grand prize. The grand prize will be awarded at the festival, but the category winners have been announced.

First, a moment for the two Special Jury Mentions. Vineeta Muni's Across the Himalaya is a memoir of Muni's experience on the 1997 all-female 4,500km trans-Himalayan traverse attempt. Meanwhile, Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? follows the author through the world's waterways as he considers the nature and importance of rivers.

Now, the category winners:

The Climbing Literature award went to Moving the Needle by Dave MacLeod. Now, climbers know MacLeod as a master of the sport, but his book positions him, instead, as an average-ability climber from a working-class background who finds himself taking on the world's hardest trad climbing route.

While most winners paid some homage to the environment, the winner of the Environmental Literature category was The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light, by Craig Childs. Through a stargazing Nevada bicycle journey, Childs made the jurists feel it was "impossible not to look up at the stars."

The Mountain Article prize, awarded to a magazine piece rather than a book, went to Caroline Van Hemert for Fleet-Winged Ghosts of Greenland. Van Hemert biographied the peregrine falcon, from the hunting birds of princes to the unhappy stars of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. 

Focusing on one small Greenland population, Van Hemert blended fieldwork writing, family narrative, history, and ecological plea in one article. It also featured cool pictures of birds.

Fiction, nonfiction, and what lies between

The Mountain Fiction & Poetry prize went to Feryal Ali-Gauhar for her novel, An Abundance of Wild Roses. Jurists called the novel, set in a small village in Pakistan's Black Mountains, "harsh, haunting, and mythic." It, too, is an environmental story, made even more literal by a conflict with supernatural nature spirits.

The nonfiction equivalent category, the Jon Whyte Award, went to the lengthily titled Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women's Ascent of Denali by Cassidy Randall. The second account of an all-female expedition on the winner's list, Randall's work won praise as an act of historical reclamation. Alex Honnold liked it too, if that sweetens the deal.

Even that seemingly most practical, sometimes dull effort, the guidebook, can be literary and award-worthy. In evidence of this, the jury awarded Northern Horizons by Will Herman in the guidebook category. Both the jurists and external reviewers mentioned the stunning photography: Nice pictures always help.

Finally, the winner of the Adventure Travel prize is Jon Waterman for Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis. Waterman is a long-time writer and adventurer who brought both skills to bear in this work. He harnessed his Arctic adventurer skills to bring the reader intimately close to anthropogenic damage in the Arctic. The effect is, as jurist David Chambre wrote, "more meaningful than any political speech."

As well as eternal kleos and a shiny new sticker for the paperback edition, the winning authors get cash prizes and a chance to win the grand prize, and more cash, in November.

South African photographer Wim van den Heever says it took him ten years to finally photograph the rare and elusive brown hyena in Namibia's abandoned mining town of Kolmanskop.

Brown hyenas are the rarest of all hyena species, with conservationists estimating there are between 5,000 and 8,000 left. Hyenas aren't well-liked, but they play a vital role in their ecosystem.

The image also won in the Urban Wildlife category, playing with the boundaries between urban and natural environments. Kolmanskop was abandoned 70 years ago when the diamond mine ran dry. During the day, tourists visit to explore the crumbling town. At night, the tourists leave, and the hyenas emerge.

Ghost town stakeout

At least, South African photographer Van den Heever was convinced that they did. Over a decade, he returned again and again to the Namib Desert ghost towns. He found hyena tracks and scat, and caught glimpses of their dark shapes darting behind sand-blasted walls, but cryptid-like, they eluded his camera. After a decade of setting camera traps, a single hyena decided to cooperate, allowing Van den Heever to get the winning shot in the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

Run by the London Natural History Museum, the contest gathers the most striking wildlife images of the year. Last year's winner featured a cadre of tadpoles from British Columbia. This year, the winners cover a diverse array of species, themes, and settings. All of them capture a unique moment from the animal kingdom.

The competition has been running since 1965, when David Attenborough presented the very first award. Today, tens of thousands of entries are narrowed down to around 100 winners across more than a dozen categories.

Besides the elusive hyena, another Namibian mammal, one of the Skeleton Coast's uniquely maritime lions, was highly commended in the competition. Like the brown hyena, Namibian lions hunt seals on the Skeleton Coast.

Category awards and standouts

The Photojournalist Story Award goes to a series of pictures that explore a central theme. This year, the winner was Javier Aznar Gonzalez de Rueda of Spain, who examined the turbulent relationship between humans and rattlesnakes in the United States. His photographs show the beauty of these feared reptiles and reflect on the annual tradition of culling them.

Other photojournalist entries showed the effects of anthropogenic climate change, plastic-choked ecosystems, and the exotic pet trade. The competition aims, in part, to increase the visibility of such important work.

While many of the images feature animals, the competition also includes plants, fungi, and even protozoa. Imre Potyo's shot of a rare bearded hedgehog fungus was highly commended, with other winners showcasing phosphorescent pitcher plants, coral structures, springtime meadows, and the tiny alien world of slime mold.

In addition to the winners showcased, the competition runs a People's Choice award, which the public can vote for. This vote will happen in the winter, with the winner being announced sometime in the new year.

You can view all the images in England's Natural History Museum in London, beginning on October 17, or visit their website.

For centuries, strange booming sounds have occasionally broken Seneca Lake's natural serenity. Legends and theories alike have long tried to explain this "burping lake" in the Finger Lakes chain. Researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY) have finally solved the mystery.

The 'Guns of Seneca'

The "Lake Gun" is a mystery. It is a sound resembling the explosion of a heavy piece of artillery, that can be accounted for by none of the known laws of nature. The report is deep, hollow, distant, and imposing.

Famous American writer James Fenimore Cooper used the "Guns of Seneca" legend in his 1850 short story, The Lake Guns. According to Cooper's telling, the booming sound is the voice of an indigenous Great Spirit commanding a punished demogogue, who was turned into a floating tree. It's all very James Fenimore Cooper.

The story shows, anyway, that by the mid-nineteenth century, the lake was already known for its loud, booming eruptions. Also described as drums, the noise comes seemingly at random and without warning, just a loud, muffled sound issuing from the water.

By the early 20th century, the more scientifically minded were proposing erupting natural gas. But as one 1934 article admits, "The physics of the phenomena were yet unexplained."

A secret pockmarked lakebed

It's a difficult problem to tackle. The incidents are random and relatively infrequent, and the lake itself is large and deep, holding more water than any other Finger Lake.

The case was cracked by a sonar survey, which, in fact, wasn't trying to solve the case at all. It was a state-funded initiative to map the lake and get high-resolution images of shipwrecks. What they found, however, were 144 large craters.

Knowing these craters could be the key to the Seneca Guns, a SUNY research team led by researcher Tim Morin set out to investigate. They've taken samples of the material inside these deep, lakebed pockets. It may take months for the results to come back and confirm the theory once and for all.

The likeliest explanation, however, is this: Natural gas trapped inside the Earth is seeping up toward the lake. "Methane or other geologic gases are penetrating the ground surface and bursting like a big pimple," Morin explained to The New York Times. The bursting forms the craters and creates the sound.

Gas bubbling out from beneath lakes can be dangerous, even deadly. The results of Morin's tests will reveal more about the types of gases present and whether there is any cause for alarm. At the moment, however, officials don't consider the Seneca Guns a danger.

An Egyptian magician-prince who delves into the crumbling sepulchers of his ancestors in search of forgotten lore: It sounds like the pitch for an early 20th-century pulp adventure novel. But Prince Khaemwaset, living in the 12th century BCE, really was an archaeologist, adventurer, and explorer of his own already ancient civilization.

The Egypt of Prince Khaemwaset

People were farming and forming permanent settlements in Egypt as early as the 6th millennium BCE. By around 2900 BCE, Egypt was ruled by Pharaohs who built elaborate monuments, used hieroglyphic writing on papyrus, and worshipped gods like Horus. All this to say, when Prince Khaemwaset (also spelled Khaemweset, Khamwese, Khaemwes, and so forth) was born around 1281 BCE, his homeland already boasted a rich history.

He was the son of one of Egypt's most famous kings, Ramesses II, he whose vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Though his mother was only the king's second wife, Isetnefret, his father didn't hold it against him. At least in official depictions, Khaemwaset is right next to Amun-her-khepeshef, the son of Ramesses' beloved first wife, Nefertari.

The two princes were born in the reign of their grandfather and reared in the turbulent days of Ramesses' early reign. Khaemwaset must have been a good student at school, because he soon entered the priesthood. His order was dedicated to the worship of Ptah, the Egyptian creator-god associated with sculptors and craftsmen. It was his experience there that led him to the efforts he's remembered for today.

High priest and archaeologist

The priesthood has been the dumping ground for extraneous heirs across time and place. Prince Khaemwaset, however, seems to have been genuinely passionate and well-suited for a career with Ptah. Ptah, incidentally, became part of the modern word, "Egypt"; from Hikuptah (House of the spirit of Ptah) to the Greek Aigyptos, thence into English as "Egypt."

More relevantly here, Ptah's priests were the keepers of royal tradition and of one of the greatest temple libraries in Egypt. Skill, dedication, and, let's be honest, nepotism, accelerated Khaemwaset's career. By the time he was thirty, he was the High Priest of Ptah, gaining the title Setem. The title came with great responsibility, as well as a presumably very cool-looking panther-skin robe.

According to inscriptions he had written, the prince was "never happier than when he was reading the records of earlier times." It upset him that so many ancient monuments were falling into ruin. By the New Kingdom, some of Egypt's most famous wonders, including the pyramids and the Sphinx, were neglected and crumbling.

His new position as High Priest gave Khaemwaset the power to pursue his passion. He launched an extensive campaign, finding, restoring, and labeling the monuments and artworks of past dynasties. Like modern museum labels, the inscriptions he added to ancient statues explained who had built them, and when (and by whom) they'd been restored.

Khaemwaset at Giza

Though his priestly duties were extensive, and deaths in the family eventually made him the heir apparent, Khaemwaset only accelerated his restoration work. His greatest efforts came after a visit to Giza and the Old Kingdom necropolis of Saqqara. The monuments there were well over a thousand years old and were half-forgotten and in disrepair.

Using historical documents, he painstakingly matched the ruins with archival records. Then he wielded his position for funds to restore them, and added his inscription labels. He worked on the mastaba of Shepseskaf, the sun temple of Niuserre, the pyramid of Unas, and many others.

His most famous site is undoubtedly the Great Pyramid of Khufu -- the largest of the Giza pyramids. Khaemwaset not only restored but also conducted excavations around the pyramid. During these excavations, he uncovered a statue of Kawab, the son of Khufu. He seemed to have been particularly delighted by this statue, which he restored and placed in a special "museum" chapel at Memphis.

The inscription he added says where and how he found the statue, and that he restored it "because he loved the noble ones who dwelt in antiquity before him, and the excellence of everything they made."

Ancient Egyptian pr?

Some academics have pointed out, quite rightly, that the restoration of ancient monuments was a political act which advertised the power and prestige of Khaemwaset's dynasty, glorifying him and his father. They sometimes cite this in opposition to his popular reputation as a scholar and the first Egyptologist.

I personally find this a strange argument. It's like saying Captain Scott wasn't a real explorer because he was motivated by a desire to glorify himself and the British Empire. But yes, I suppose if we're quibbling, Khaemwaset didn't do all the monument restoration and research purely for the love of the game.

Whatever his motivation, his archaeological fervor kept his memory alive long after his death. Khaemwaset never became pharaoh. He died in his fifties. Ramesses II died much later and was instead succeeded by another of his many, many sons. But today and in ancient times, Khaemwaset is far better remembered than his younger brother, the pharaoh Merneptah.

Even during his lifetime, Khaemwaset had a reputation for possessing mystical, ancient knowledge. Khaemwaset's compositions used cryptography and obscure, archaic styles, and his willingness to enter ancient tombs garnered both admiration and fear. After his death, this reputation evolved into a mythology which became a literary genre.

The Setne (from his title, Setem) stories from Ptolemaic-era Egypt are adventure tales, about the exploits of the magician-Prince Setne-Khaemwese. These stories have Setne using his antiquarian knowledge to navigate ancient tombs, recovering magical books, and encountering the restless spirits of the dead. The influence of these stories on later Western fiction, and eventually Hollywood, is obvious.

A man of enduring mystery

Into the modern era, Khaemwaset is a figure of both mystery and appeal. Egyptologists give him the honor of being one of them, while Ancient Egyptian appreciators of a more, shall we say, supernatural interest have likewise turned to Khaemwaset.

He appears to have been a person of interest in early 20th-century Western esoteric thought. In fact, this author found a number of blog posts from the depths of the internet suggesting that Khaemwaset still occasionally figures in what, out of respect for our crystal-owning readers, I will only describe as non-typical spiritual belief.

But to return to more stable ground, Khaemwaset presents yet one more great mystery to modern Egyptology.

It was Khaemwaset who founded the Serapium, a massive joint tomb for the sacred Apis bulls. These bulls were incredibly important to ancient Egyptian worship and fell under the purview of Ptah. Rather than entombing them in individual mausoleums, Khaemwaset had one massive tomb constructed, which was in service for centuries afterward.

In 1852, Auguste Mariette found the Serapium and began excavations. In the oldest section of the ruin, he found a store of treasures bearing the names of Khaemwaset and his father. Finally, he came upon a gilded coffin. Inside were nondescript remains and a man's golden mask. For many years, Egyptologists believed this was the tomb and corpse of Khaemwaset.

But the body wasn't his. In fact, it wasn't even human; instead, it was yet another sacred bull. The actual tomb of Prince Khaemwaset, High Priest of Ptah and first Egyptologist, still lies undiscovered beneath the sands of Egypt.

Adaptability is the trait that, before all others, allows a species to survive when its environment is changing. At the end of the last Ice Age, grey wolves turned to different prey, allowing them to survive while the mortally inflexible dire wolf died off. A population of Namibian lions has, seemingly, taken this lesson to heart.

Where once they roamed the Namib desert, now they prowl the Atlantic beaches. Meet our planet's only known maritime lions.

What's old is new again

Namibian desert lions have endured decades of changing environments and difficult human-lion relationships. Into the mid-20th century, there was a firmly established population of beach-dwelling, seal-hunting lions. But farmers and tourists killed them in droves, so they retreated into the arid Namib Desert.

Namibian desert lions are famed for their endurance. They can travel great distances without water and food, hunting at night and using complex ambush strategies. But ongoing droughts made their desert retreat increasingly inhospitable. After abandoning the seaside decades earlier, descendants of these beach lions began returning to the coast.

The first few lions appeared in 2002. But conservationists worried that their unique hunting behavior, targeting seals and seabirds, had been lost forever. The lions were back on the Skeleton Coast, but they weren't hunting in the sea.

Then, over a decade after they returned, three young lionesses (nicknamed Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie) began rediscovering the ancient maritime hunting techniques. Now, a small population of lions is living, hunting, and even breeding on the Skeleton Coast again.

"Their resilience is a lesson to us all," photographer Griet Van Malderen told the BBC. "To face change, to adapt, and to act before it is too late."

Van Malderen has been following the coastal lions for years, observing and recording their behavior.

Daily lives of maritime lions

A recent study into the lions' behavior and diet confirmed that they had, indeed, re-learned ocean hunting techniques. Three young lionesses killed two flamingos, 60 cormorants, and 18 seals in a year and a half. Drought, habitat loss, and human encroachment drastically decreased the availability of land-dwelling prey. By switching to an around 80% maritime diet, the lions avoided starvation.

As exciting as this is for lions and lion-enjoyers, there are some potential concerns. Fishermen and livestock farmers didn't go away, and they remain a threat to the lions, which in turn threaten their safety and livelihoods. Tourists, likewise, are a potential source of conflict.

In an attempt to protect people and lions from each other, conservation group Desert Lion Conservation collaborated with Namibia’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry, and Tourism to put up a "geofence."

The geofence is not an actual fence. It's an invisible border around a 40km swath of coast. When one of the lions, which are fitted with tracking collars, crosses the border, it sends out an alert to clear the area.

Now that Namibia's drought has finally broken, terrestrial prey species will likely return. But it remains to be seen whether the maritime lions will follow them back to the desert or stay in their new coastal home.

When you think of Herman Melville, you probably think of his Great American Novel, Moby Dick, being assigned reading in high school English class. But during his life, people mostly knew Melville as "The Man Who Lived With Cannibals."

Before he was a writer, Melville was a sailor, whaling man, and all-around maritime adventurer. Melville's writing often drew from his personal experiences at sea in his youth, none more so than his very first novel. Typee, published in 1846, is an autobiographical account of his time in the Marquesas Islands.

It was his most popular book during his lifetime, and it haunted him for the rest of his career.

Melville, the explorer

Most people are, as I've said, at least passingly familiar with Melville the writer. Melville the explorer, however, is less well remembered. But his biography is as complex and mysterious as his novels.

The scion of two prominent East Coast families with American Revolutionary pedigrees, the Herman Melville born in New York City in 1819 had a life of luxury to look forward to. When Melville was 11, however, his father told his family the truth: His prosperous business was a front for failure and debt. They fled to Albany, leaving bills unpaid, and when their father died two years later, Melville and his brother Gansevoort had to leave school to work.

After several failed ventures, Herman went to sea for the first time in 1839. He worked as a novice sailor on a merchant ship transporting cotton to Liverpool. In 1841, he signed up for a whaling voyage on the Acushnet.

Despite his poetic flights about the noble whaling life in Moby Dick, it didn't seem to suit him very well. After 15 months -- perhaps a third of the expected voyage -- he'd had enough. The ship had stopped to pick up supplies in the Marquesas Islands, and Melville bolted into the jungle along with a friend. The plan was to explore and live off the land.

Instead, Melville was basically immediately captured and spent a month living with the Tai Pī people of Nuku Hiva. Three years later, he published the book Typee.

Typee, A Romance of the South Sea

The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of coconut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bamboo temples...

Herman Melville, Typee

Typee opens with Tommo, the semi-fictional stand-in for Melville, on a whaling ship in the bay of Taiohae, on the South Seas island of Nuku Hiva. Sick of the bad food and their ill-treatment at the hands of the ship's captain, Tommo and a fellow whaler, Toby, decide to make a break for it. Ignoring the captain's warnings that the island is dense with cannibals, they slip away from a shore party and into the mountains.

Almost immediately, their adventure goes belly-up. Tommo injures his leg, they're hindered by dense vegetation, and they run out of food. According to their limited knowledge of the area, they are on the border between two groups. The Happar are friendly and might help, while their enemies, the Typee, are vicious cannibals.

After days of struggle in the jungle, they meet a group of islanders who, of course, turn out to be the Typee.

Reputation and reality

The pair is fed and sheltered in the home of a leader, Mehevi. Suspicious of the Typee, Toby soon escapes, while the injured and more complacent Tommo remains. There, he befriends several of the Typee. Eventually, however, they push him to fully integrate into the group, and he flees back to the bay, hopping aboard a passing European vessel.

The bulk of the novel covers Tommo's time with the Typee, and the adventure takes a backseat to something more like anthropology. Melville describes the food, houses, religious traditions, and social organization of the valley, which has had very limited contact with Westerners.

But his time in the valley, and the book itself, is haunted by an act which never actually takes place, at least not explicitly: cannibalism. Both Tommo and the readers are constantly led to question the truth of the Typee's reputation for anthropophagy, and what it means if they do practice cannibalism.

Before Toby escapes, he and Tommo attend a feast. When they are served meat, Toby refuses to eat, insisting it's a "baked baby," or "dead Happar." Tommo, not so sure, takes a closer look and confirms that the dish is only a pig.

However, weeks after, Tommo finds four preserved heads, including one that seems to be from a white man, belonging to Mehevi. Later, Tommo is barred from attending a celebration feast and religious ceremony involving the bodies of recently slain enemies.

‘Why, they are cannibals!’ said Toby on one occasion when I eulogized the tribe. ‘Granted,’ I replied, ‘but a more humane, gentlemanly and amiable set of epicures do not probably exist in the Pacific.’

Herman Melville, Typee

Fame and controversy

The book never fully resolved the cannibal question. While Tommo never witnesses it, he leaves still convinced that the Typee do, on some occasions, practice it, though only against defeated enemies.

But by the end of the narrative, Melville approaches the subject with an impressive degree of cultural relativism. After all, he argues, what is "the mere eating of human flesh," compared with European practices like drawing and quartering?

Typee became an immediate success, but it was also an immediate controversy. One of the main reasons for this was Melville's harsh criticism of Western treatment of South Pacific natives, and his criticism of missionaries in particular.

The same month Melville arrived, the French Navy claimed possession of Nuka Hiva. Melville criticized the French for their use of violent force, proceeding to castigate colonial efforts in the region in general.

"The enormities perpetrated in the South Seas upon some of the inoffensive islanders will nigh pass belief," he opined.

As for the civilizing influences of Christianity and Western civilization, "Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question."

Passages like these provoked a flurry of negative reviews from conservative Christian publications. Writing for the New York Evangelical, William Oland Bourne called Melville a traducer (slanderer) of missionaries and an "apostle of cannibalism." Another reviewer said the book abounded in "slurs and flings against missionaries and civilization."

Melville the fabulist?

Bourne dedicated much of his scathing review to the morality of Typee. But he ended off with an attack on the honesty of Melville's account: "We are inclined to doubt seriously whether our author ever saw the Marquesas; or if he did, whether he ever resided among the Typees."

While many reviewers accepted Typee as a mostly accurate autobiography and ethnography, with perhaps a few names and details changed for publication, a vocal minority were in Bourne's camp. Much of the contemporary criticism stemmed from his sympathetic portrayal of Polynesian islanders. An anonymous reviewer wrote that "those who are at all familiar with the character of the South Sea islanders" would know that Melville's descriptions of happy, kind people were false.

Galled by the disbelief, Melville defended his own veracity. But to the surprise of all, another figure emerged to champion him: Toby. In July of 1846, Richard Tobias Greene revealed himself to be Melville's erstwhile companion, who had escaped several weeks before him. In a published letter, he offered to testify to the complete honesty of Typee, or at least the parts he was there for.

The varnished truth

In the forward to Typee, Melville claimed to have written "the unvarnished truth." From what modern investigations have found, he seems to have told a somewhat varnished truth.

Melville scholars in the 20th century revived the debate over Typee, searching for evidence of veracity or fraud. Besides the collaboration from Toby, researchers have found a legal record from the Acushnet's captain. Since desertion was a prosecutable offense, the captain produced a signed record of desertions during his voyage. There, in plain ink, is "Richard T Greene and Herman Melville deserted at Nuku Hiva July 9th 1842."

The most in-depth detective work came from Anderson Roberts with 1934's Melville in the South Seas. Citing the findings of a 1920 scientific expedition to Polynesia, Roberts concludes that Typee is surprisingly accurate to the environment, customs, and material culture of the Marquesas. But Roberts also discovered that Melville had used earlier published accounts extensively.

There are a number of details in Typee that we know are false. Tommo rows a canoe on a lake that doesn't match any location on Nuku Hiva. While Tommo was on the island for months, Melville was only missing for 26 days. The whaling vessel is the Dolly in the book, and the Acushnet in reality.

The general arc of the story -- that Melville deserted at Nuku Hiva and spent at least a few weeks living there -- is fact. But what exactly happened to him there, and how well Typee reflects his experience, will probably always be a mystery.

 Legacy is a funny thing

It is only a very lucky few writers who manage to be remembered for their work. Of those who are, they don't get to decide what work they're known for. Arthur Conan Doyle was sick to death of Sherlock Holmes, and hoped to be remembered his now-forgotten historical novels.

For many decades, it seemed Melville would be similar; remembered for the controversy around his first novel, while his profoundest literary efforts were forgotten. As the man himself wrote to his friend (it's more complicated than that, but if I get into it we'll be here all day) Nathaniel Hawthorne that "[The] "reputation" H.M. has is horrible...To go down to posterity is bad enough, anyway; but to go down as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'!"

Moby Dick was a failure on release. Commercially, it was catastrophic enough to nearly bankrupt the publisher. Critically, reviews were mixed. The London Literary Gazette said Melville should go back to writing autobiographical adventure travel, instead of wasting his time on works like Moby Dick. A New York magazine said Melville "might have been famous," if he'd stopped at just one or two books.

By the early 20th century, Melville was neglected and long out of print. But in the late 1910s, Melville underwent a revival. Literary scholar Raymond Weaver released the first biography of Herman Melville in 1921, then published Melville's previously unpublished final novel, Billy Budd.

The "Man Who Lived with Cannibals" was forgotten. But over the first half of the 20th century, the author of the Great American Novel was born.

In the descriptively titled Mount Fairweather Traverse, Yakutat to Haines, Alaska, Luc Mehl, Danny Powers, and Graham Kraft take on a month of hiking, skiing, climbing, and rafting through the Alaskan wilderness. The adventure peaks at the summit of 4,663 Mount Fairweather on the Alaska-Canada border.

The group starts off from the airport of the sparsely populated town of Yakutat. The first leg of their trip is a 160-kilometer hike down the coast, joined by Kraft's girlfriend, Lindsay Johnson. Clear skies keep the week going smoothly, aside from unnerving run-ins with bears. Although brown bear attacks are rare, there are a few tense moments when the group has to wait for bears to clear out of the area.

At the end of the beach hike, Lindsay parts from the group while another friend, Marcus Waring, joins the party. He's brought along their ski equipment, and they strap in for the next leg. Toting their unwieldy packs through the backcountry, they make their way to the snow-covered slopes of Mount Fairweather.

Summiting Mount Fairweather

Dodging crevasses, they climb (and trudge) all the way up to the 4,670m summit. They joyously ski all the way back down, except for Powers. His equipment broke, so he had to trudge down.

Powers and Mehl aren't done. Their route continues after the base of Mount Fairweather to the settlement of Haines, Alaska. After more skiing and trudging, they break out their inflatable packrafts and take to the Tsirku River. Finally, the pair hit soundings in Haines, completing their traverse.

The briskly paced video is a tight five minutes, a highlight reel of the ambitious adventure. Mehl hosts a longer write-up, with details of the route, equipment reviews, and practical recommendations, on his personal website.

Stories of ancient Roman artifacts and ruins being dug up in back gardens or disrupting construction projects are common. It seems that a British pensioner can hardly dig a new plot for potatoes, nor an Italian municipality put in a new road, without Roman artifacts interfering.

But New Orleans, an ocean away from the former Roman Empire, should have been a safe bet. Not so. Last spring, Tulane University anthropologist Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, found a Latin-engraved and seemingly ancient stone in their backyard.

Could it be real?

Their first concern was that, like many New Orleans constructions, their home was built on an older cemetery. Santoro reached out to D. Ryan Gray of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. Gray, a fellow professor of anthropology, helps map the hidden cemeteries and burial grounds of New Orleans.

He checked the location, but the couple's cheerful yellow house in Carrollton, New Orleans, didn't lie on any known burial site. That's when Gray turned to the curious Latin inscription. While Gray sent it to an expert in Austria, Santoro passed the inscription onto a colleague at her university, Dr. Susann Lusnia. Both classicists returned with the same conclusion: This wasn't another Roman artifact hoax.

The stone reads, roughly, as follows:

To the Spirits of the Dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe of the Bessi, [who] lived 42 years [and] served 22 in the military, on the trieme Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made [this] for him [who was] well deserving.”

How did it get to New Orleans?

It's an obvious question. How did a 2nd-century Roman navy man's headstone end up in Louisiana? The two experts provided a vital clue. You see, modern archaeology had already uncovered the tombstone of Sextus Congenius Verus, near an old Roman port in Italy.

For decades, it had been listed as missing from the local museum. The city of Civitavecchia, which Sextus would have known as Centumcellae, was a target of intense Allied bombing during the Second World War. In the destruction of the bombs and the chaos of post-war Italy, much of the collection was lost or destroyed.

The story of the mysterious ancient Roman tombstone made it on the news, where Erin Scott O’Brien recognized her old home -- and her old decorative garden stone.

O'Brien had placed the stone in the garden in the early 2000s and left it there when she moved out a decade later. She'd inherited what she thought was a piece of yard art from her maternal grandparents. Her grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr, was a WW2 vet who had spent much of the war in Italy. Paddock brought the stone, and his wife Adele, back from the war.

The couple had put the stone in a display case in their home. There it remained until they both died in the 1980s. Eventually, it ended up with his granddaughter, Erin O'Brien.

Now, finally, it's going back to Italy. The tombstone is now in the hands of the FBI's Art Crime team, who are working to repatriate it to Civitavecchia.

Botswana's Okavango Delta is a sprawling inland floodplain home to a diverse array of animals. There is a brisk trade in canoe journeys for tourists, who can journey down the waterways past hippopotamuses, crocodiles, and elephants. But for one dugout canoe full of safari-goers, the trip turned terrifying when an elephant charged and then attacked their boat.

The whole incident was filmed by one of the tourists and uploaded to a conservation group on Facebook. In the footage, you can see a large bull elephant, a short distance away. He trumpets then charges at the canoes, using his tusks to upend the nearest one. People spill into the water, retreating, as guides continue shouting in an attempt to scare him off.

With everyone in the water, the chaos only continues. A mother and calf look on at a short distance as the bull charges one of the shocked people standing in knee-deep water. He knocks her over and uses his trunk to hold her under.

Luckily, he let her go after only a few seconds, and she was not seriously injured. In the final clip, he trumpets his anger one final time and rejoins the mother and calf. All three begin moving off as guides continue to shout.

Why did this happen?

According to the witnesses, the bull became aggressive after guides, misjudging the safe distance, came too close to a mother with her calf. The bull was acting to drive off a perceived threat to the herd, not from random aggression.

Still, while his cause was understandable, the elephant could very well have killed one of the tourists. Several different companies run the canoe safaris in Okavango, but none have put out an official response.

Hopefully, this incident will lead to increased precaution. While elephants may not be the animal you'd think of first when you think of attacks on safari, it's happened before. Just last July, two women were trampled by an elephant in Zambia while on safari. In the same area the year before, an elderly American was trampled as well. In March of 2024, an elephant attacked a safari truck full of tourists in South Africa.

Worldwide, elephants are responsible for as many as 500 human deaths every year, and that number is going up. As a recent study demonstrated, poaching, habitat loss and changing climate are leading to more human-elephant conflict. Another study found elephant attacks in Myanmar directly correlated with habitat destruction.

Elephants are highly intelligent, social animals that aren't innately aggressive. Attacks happen when elephants are forced into human territory -- or when humans force themselves into elephant territory.

Interested in exploration reading but don't know where to start? Or perhaps you have a library card burning a hole in your pocket? For those looking to dive into the history of discovery, we've assembled the following introduction, ordered by chronological eras.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg; beware, for you soon may find yourself hankering for exploration literature that can only be acquired by getting your Swiss friend to scan something from the University of Geneva's special collections (theoretically).

The mythological dawn of exploration

The earliest exploration literature is indistinguishable from mythology. The Hellenistic explorer Megasthenes wrote Indica, about his travels to India around 300 BCE. It's now a lost work, surviving only in fragments, just like his peer Pytheas's account of exploring Northern Europe.

In this period, Greeks and then Romans were expanding into Gaul and Britannia, now encompassing Western Europe and the British Isles. They were also spreading into North Africa and India. To the east, Chinese explorers like the monk Faxian were also traveling to India and Central Asia.

Polynesian explorers undertook vast voyages across the Pacific, settling on islands separated by thousands of watery kilometers. Oral tradition records the legendary Ui-te-Rangiora, who reached a bitterly cold region that some believe may have been Antarctica.

For this genre of mytho-historical exploration writing, try the Alexander Romance. In late classical and early medieval writing, Alexander the Great's military exploits often took a back seat to his role as an explorer of India and Persia. The Alexander Romance, though partly compiled from the accounts of those who knew him, is a fantastical work composed in Ancient Greek. It's been translated over a hundred times and fueled a thousand years of Western imaginings about India and the East.

Explorer-monks of early medieval literature

The stories of medieval exploration, especially in the early medieval era, were still interwoven with fictional, allegorical, and religious elements. While the journeys themselves may be more verifiable, their details are often just as fantastic as those of classical explorations. Many key exploration narratives were only written several hundred years after the fact, further obscuring reality.

One early medieval voyager who exemplifies the blend between history, myth, and religious allegory is Saint Brendan the Navigator, who undertook a legendary sea journey in search of a blessed island. His 6th-century voyage is recorded in the 10th-century work, Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan).

Meanwhile, in China, exploration of India continued. By far the most famous of these early medieval Chinese explorers is Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk from the early 7th century. Xuanzang undertook a 17-year journey to India to bring back and translate important Sanskrit texts.

You can read his account, Records of the Western Regions, detailing his 16,000km journey down the Silk Road. Or, you can read the famous 16th-century Chinese novel, Journey to the West. It's a much less useful historical source, but has far more demon fights.

Viking intermission

When they weren't busy pillaging Irish monasteries and blood feuding with each other, the Scandinavian voyagers of the High Middle Ages were exploring the edges of their known world. A pair of Norse sagas record how Vikings, led by Eric the Red and then his son, Leif Eriksson, crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

The explorers of the Grænlendinga saga, or Saga of the Greenlanders, and Eiríks saga rauða, or Erik the Red’s Saga, were the first Europeans confirmed to reach North America. There, they established a settlement named Vinland. But battle with the indigenous inhabitants, family drama, and the logistical challenges of maintaining a colony so far from home eventually led them to abandon Vinland.

Exploring during the High Middle Ages

Meanwhile, back on the Eurasian continent, in Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree -- and an Italian was there to write it down. His name was Marco Polo, known to schoolchildren as the inventor of a popular swimming pool game.

Of course, Marco Polo did not invent that game; he was actually a Venetian who traveled through Asia along the Silk Road in the late 13th century. Eventually, he came to reside in the court of Kublai Khan, Mongol emperor, ruler of China, and grandson of Genghis Khan. Polo wrote his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, from a Genovese prison. His account gives an outsider's perspective on daily life in Asia and what it was like to travel the Silk Road at the height of its importance.

In 1324, a young Amazigh man named Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta left his home in Tangier to go on Hajj -- the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage required of every Muslim. The journey to Mecca and back should have taken about 18 months. Instead, Ibn Battuta returned after 24 years of travel through Africa, Asia, and Iberia, covering over 117,000km. Finally back in Tangier, Ibn Battuta wrote his travel memoir, The Rihla.

The Age of Exploration

Around the 15th century, Europe started getting serious about exploring. The causes are complex: new technology, changing political and economic structures, power shifts in the Middle East cutting off trade routes -- you could fill a book, and many have. But the upshot was that over the next few centuries, a lot of men got into rickety wooden boats and pointed them at the horizon.

Mediterranean powers, including Portugal, Spain, and various Italian city-states, set their sights on new routes to the Indies. Some of these expeditions ended up in the Americas, where they bravely made the best of things by pillaging America instead of Southeast Asia.

The seminal man of the era was Christopher Columbus, who treated the indigenous people he met so badly that Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish monarchs who were implementing the Spanish Inquisition and expelling the Jewish population from Spain, had him dragged back in chains.

But the most crucial introductory account of Spanish exploration and conquest in the New World is A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas. De las Cases spent four decades in Spain's colonies and dedicated his life to campaigning against the horrors being wrought there. The resulting writings are as fascinating as they are grim.

The search for trade routes

The discovery of vast new lands didn't mean European markets forgot about the wealth of spices and luxury goods in Southeast Asia. Portugal had attained early dominance of the spice trade by pioneering a new route around the bottom of Africa, via the Cape of Good Hope.

Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator in the employ of Spain, tried another route, heading the other way, around the bottom of South America. In 1519, Magellan set sail with five ships and nearly 300 men. In 1522, 18 of those men, in the one remaining seaworthy ship, returned to Spain, becoming the first people to circumnavigate the globe. Magellan died on the way.

The First Voyage Round the World is an account by one of the survivors, the Venetian Antonio Pigafetta. They faced storms, starvation, and scurvy, undertook the first navigation of the Strait of Magellan, and battled their shipmates in a brutally repressed mutiny.

England, meanwhile, had begun a long-standing obsession with sending people to die in the Arctic looking for the Northwest and Northeast passages. The Dutch, also trying to dominate the spice trade, tried to pioneer a northern route as well. Eventually, they gave up and went back to using the route around Africa, but England stuck with it. More on that later.

An account of the voyages

As the Enlightenment and the rise of mercantilism and the nation-state affected social, political, and economic thought, the motivation for exploration changed. Wealth and power were still huge factors, but the twin desires of scientific discovery and patriotic fervor joined them. Expeditions were still sponsored by companies and governments, but as we entered the 19th century, organizations like the Royal Geographical Society and French Société de Géographie grew in prominence.

James Cook, who explored the Pacific and Southern oceans in the late 18th century, was a model for later explorers. A British Royal Navy captain who turned to discovery, the goal of his first voyage was to confirm rumors of Australia and claim it for the British crown. He landed in Botany Bay and, while Cook was firing cannons at the Aboriginal Gweagal people, botanist Joseph Banks did some botany.

Cook went on two further voyages to the region, accomplishing feats of discovery and antagonizing the locals. He finally died on Valentine's Day, 1779, when he tried to kidnap the Hawaiian king, Kalaniʻōpuʻu, and was clubbed to death.

In 1773, John Hawkesworth published An Account of the Voyages (title here abbreviated considerably). This work includes Banks' and Cook's personal accounts of their voyage together, as well as journals from two other contemporary voyages in the South Pacific.

The race to record the world

Now that everyone knew how many continents there were, the goal became more exact maps, more efficient routes, better navigation methods, and to claim more "firsts" for one's country. Areas deemed "unexplored" were shrinking, as explorers focused more on the polar regions, as well as the vast interiors of Africa, the Americas, and Australia.

As well as claiming land, there was now another way for an explorer to advertise success: scientific specimens. The great scientific societies of Europe wanted specimens of new species, and owners of the great gardens of Europe hankered for exotic plants.

By far the most famous of the naturalist-explorers is Charles Darwin. Better known for a later book, Darwin wrote The Voyage of the Beagle about his time as a naturalist on a five-year voyage around the world.

Any progress on the Northwest Passage?

The Royal Navy still had its eyes on the Poles. They sent dozens of expeditions to the Arctic after those fabled passages, and several more to the Antarctic. It was in the Antarctic that HMS Erebus and HMS Terror cut their teeth under Sir James Clark Ross, and the eternal second-in-command, Francis Crozier.

In 1845, Erebus and Terror went to the Arctic under Sir John Franklin. It didn't go well.

Helen of Troy's face launched a thousand ships, and Franklin's missing one launched a thousand more. One of the searchers was by Elisha Kane Kent, who wrote Arctic Explorations: the Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin about his arduous, failed effort.

Success went to John Rae, who discovered what happened to Franklin by asking the people who had been there (the local Inuit), something no one else had tried before. He brought back the true story and promptly had his name dragged through the mud by Charles Dickens. No good deed goes unpunished.

The whole affair temporarily cooled polar exploration fever, and the bulk of interest and funding turned to Africa and the Amazon.

The Heroic Age

The so-called Heroic Age began with a renaissance of interest in polar exploration. The "heroic" title comes from the perception that these explorers were overcoming great adversity, testing their physical and mental endurance.

While many explorers framed their expeditions as being for the sake of science, pride, fame, and fortune were often the true reasons. You didn't get funding to look at plankton in the Antarctic Ocean; you got funding to plant your country's flag at the Pole.

Here we come to the heavy hitters of exploration literature: memoirs from the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration. There are hundreds of them, and many are quite good, but I've narrowed it down to a few.

Fridtjof Nansen is best described as your favorite polar explorer's favorite polar explorer. As well as being a neuroscientist, polymath, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nansen helped kick off the Heroic Age with his 1888 traverse of Greenland and the even more influential 1893–1896 Fram expedition. Chronicled in his book Farthest North, the expedition was a daring, years-long effort that took him and companion Hjalmar Johansen to 86°13.6′ N, setting what was then the record for farthest north.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott's The Voyage of the Discovery is another quintessential work. It's his account of his 1901 Antarctic voyage with several other men soon to etch their names into the annals of Polar history: Edward Wilson, Frank Wild, Tom Crean, and Ernest Shackleton.

Polar hardship literature

Roald Amundsen claimed the South Pole in 1911, while the North Pole was first reached by Frederick Cook. Scratch that, it was Robert Peary, Richard Byrd, it was Roald Amundsen again. It was briefly popular to claim you reached the pole, then fail to provide evidence. Roald also got the Northwest Passage, hat trick!

While Amundsen's books are interesting, I must reluctantly admit that they are not topping any lists focused on literary value. There's not as much drama when good planning, skill, and luck result in everything going pretty smoothly. The best books of the Heroic Age are from expeditions that did not succeed.

South by Shackleton is one of those classic tales of an indomitable human spirit. Shackleton tells a mostly honest, if tonally positive, account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which abruptly became a struggle for survival when their ship, Endurance, became trapped in the ice and sank. The most astonishing part of the story is that, unlike nearly every other similar tale, the crew all lived.

If you read any of the books mentioned in this article, let it be Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World. Cherry published the book, a memoir of his experience in Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition, a decade after the actual events. Cherry's account of the expedition is funny and tragic in turns, but always deeply personal. Some literary types, including travel writer Paul Theroux, consider The Worst Journey the best travel book ever written. The 70-page account of their winter journey in quest of emperor penguins' eggs is truly magnificent, but then there are another 500 less interesting pages on the Scott expedition to wade through before you come to the last two or three pages of the book, which manage to attain the heights of great literature.

Modern explorers and adventurers

In an age of radar, satellites, and accurate maps, exploration, at least on Earth, has changed. Some seek new horizons among the stars or deep beneath the sea. Others turn to the past, using experimental archaeology to learn more about historic explorers.

Of these, perhaps none is more quintessential than the work of Tom Severin. A British explorer, author, and historian, Severin spent 40 years recreating and testing legendary voyages. His most famous brings us back to Saint Brendan the Navigator.

In 1976, Severin built a replica of Brendan's currach, an ancient Irish hide-covered boat, and successfully sailed it over 7,000km from Ireland to Canada. He published an account of his journey in The Brendan Voyage, which became a bestseller.

Doubtless, the future of exploration lies beyond our planet. It's a topic I don't dare insult by cramming it in at the end. But while what I've left out dwarfs what I've managed to include, I hope the interested newcomer has at least found enough to get started.

The Endurance set sail from Plymouth in 1914 with a crew of past and future polar icons aboard. But true fame only found the ship after she sank. In November of 1915, she was crushed by the ice, launching her former passengers into a legendary ordeal.

The ragged crew, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, returned as heroes, immortalizing the ship Endurance in polar history. She was far from the first, or the last, ship to be caught and crushed by polar ice. Since the 2022 discovery of the wreck, however, researchers have been investigating further. A new study suggests that Endurance was doomed by her own design flaws.

The strongest ship of her day?

As with any oft-mythologized historical incident, the 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition has its own established narrative, which is not always married to reality. Shackleton wrote in his own book, South, that his ship was one of the strongest polar vessels of the era. She had one Achilles heel -- a vulnerable rudder -- which failed, sinking the ship. Later writers took Shackleton at his word.

A research team led by Finland's Aalto University combined archival research and structural analysis of the wreck to see if the Endurance was really designed to endure.

It wasn't.

Originally named Polaris, the vessel was sponsored by former Antarctic commander Adrien de Gerlache, whose employment a young Roald Amundsen attempted to quit, while they were all still frozen into an Antarctic winter. I share this fact only to illustrate that having a ship he sponsored sink automatically was very much in line with Gerlache's general history.

Built in Norway's Framnæs shipyard, the vessel was sold to Shackleton at a loss. Originally intended for summer tourism in the Arctic, her flaws became fatal when they encountered Antarctic winter ice. The deck beams, which Endurance needed to withstand the compression of pack ice, were not strong enough. The hull was weakened by a long machine room and an absence of diagonal beams. The general shape of the ship was longer and less round than ideal polar vessels like the Fram.

A calculated risk

Researchers examined the wreck to see whether the flaws on paper manifested in reality. While at first glance the wreck seems to be mostly in one piece, in truth, she was shattered structurally. The deck beams were, indeed, too weak, and we can see that they buckled. The keel has been torn off completely, the closest thing to a killing blow. Most of the damage, however, is hidden by the mud of the seabed. Under the waterline, now the mud line, the ice will have done its worst.

Jukka Tuhkuri, a professor of solid mechanics at Aalto University and part of the team that discovered the Endurance, said in a press release that "even simple structural analysis" showed that the ship wasn't designed for the ice. Early 20th-century shipwrights knew, he went on, how to build a ship that would hold up. "So we really have to wonder why Shackleton chose [Endurance]."

Archival records showed that Shackleton, at least, was aware of the defects. He knew the importance of diagonal beams and had recommended them in another ship. In a letter to his wife Emily, he admitted that Endurance was not as strong as Nimrod, his previous vessel.

The ship may not have been ideal for polar exploration, but in his defense, most polar vessels weren't. Scott's Terra Nova, for instance, was a refitted whaler that nearly foundered off New Zealand.

For Shackleton, time was short, with the first World War closing in, and money was tight. But as Tuhkuri says, we can't say for sure why Shackleton chose Endurance.

Shackleton would make a similar gamble on his next, last voyage. Though the problem was not the ship, the Quest, but his own body. His heart, like the Endurance, gave out just as the expedition began.

Blackfly is a classic animated short from Canada's celebrated National Film Board. Dizzying, frenetic animated scenes provide visual accompaniment to a song by Canadian folk musician Wade Hemsworth. Hemsworth wrote The Blackfly Song in 1949, about his experiences as a surveyor in Labrador, Northern Ontario, and Quebec. The song is now considered a classic of Canadian folk music.

A cartoon menace

As the song recounts, Hemsworth went up north to work on a crew surveying the Little Abitibi River for a future dam project. In this region, the black fly, really a whole crew of flies in the Simuliidae family, are an extreme nuisance for much of the season.

In the accompanying animation, expressive anthropomorphic black flies pursue Hemsworth and the crew with malicious intent, sighting them with binoculars and chasing the men underwater using miniature scuba gear. The animation has a charming sketchy style which leaps easily from one visual gag to the next.

I particularly liked the scene wherein a dinner party of man-sized black flies feasts on human bones. As they do, Hemsworth sings that he'll "die with the black fly a-picking my bones."

They really do sound like a nightmare. Hemsworth recounts, through cheerful verse, swarms of biting insects crawling through his beard and hair, getting into the food and drink, and following them wherever they went. It's a common theme for Canadian explorers and adventurers. As much as the cold makes the northern winters harsh, the insects make the summer misery.

Hemsworth's song was already a well-loved staple in 1991, when director Christopher Hinton animated it. The result buzzed and swatted its way into the hearts of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, securing an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short. All in all, a delightful way to spend five minutes.

A new paper, still in pre-print, unveils the discovery of seven mummified, 4,000-year-old cheetahs in a Saudi Arabian cave.

Ancient cultures like the Egyptians sometimes mummified cheetahs, but these are the first naturally mummified ones ever discovered. Even more importantly, researchers might be able to use these animals' remains to help their living descendants.

Why caves?

Deep underground in the Lauga cave network of northern Saudi Arabia, researchers found the remains of over 50 cheetahs, ranging in age from over 4,000 to less than 200 years old. Seven of the individuals had been naturally mummified.

The remains were in five caves, with one main cave, accessible only by sinkhole, serving as the center of cheetah operations. None of the caves would have had fresh water, and there were far more cheetah remains than there were cheetah prey remains. So it's not clear what the big cats were using the caves for.

We do know that they used them for centuries. The oldest remains were skeletal, radiocarbon dated to around 4,200 years ago, while the most recent were from the late 19th or early 20th century.

Researchers, led by Ahmad Al Boug from Saudi Arabia's National Wildlife Research Center, extracted genetic information from the remains. Unsurprisingly, the most recent matched the profile of J. venaticus, the Asiatic cheetah. But the older individuals seemed to be more closely related to J. hecki, a different subspecies that inhabits the Sahara.

The cheetahs of the Arabian Peninsula

Cheetahs have experienced a 98% decline from their historical range, which once included much of Africa and Asia. The Asiatic cheetah, in particular, which once ranged across the entire Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, is now confined to a small area in Iran.

Large predators play a crucial role in balancing an ecosystem. A notable example is the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone. Returning the wolves caused cascading changes, boosting beaver populations, willow tree health, and more. As re-wilding efforts begin in Saudi Arabia with gazelles, ibex, and oryx, filling the role of the missing cheetahs is critical.

While the seven mummified cheetahs and 54 skeletal cheetahs will not be able to balance the ecosystem due to being dead, they may provide vital insights. See, it might not be possible to introduce a healthy breeding population of cheetahs from the tiny remaining Iranian population. Their status is so critical, and their genetic diversity so low, that conservationists are looking at other options.

Thanks to the genetic information the mummified cheetahs provided, we now know that the Northwest African Cheetah can also thrive in the environment and ecosystem of the Arabian Peninsula.

The discovery has also opened new avenues of research into how caves might have been part of the ancient Arabian cheetah's lifestyle. We don't have a lot of evidence for modern cheetahs using or living in caves, but clearly, they were once an important part of their habitat.

Botswana's Karowe mine recently produced a record breaking 2,492-carat diamond, the largest diamond unearthed in over a century. It's the biggest in a line of massive stones that have come out of the mine in the last several years. As the stone, named Motswedi, awaits a price, the find is a reminder of the strange marriage between geology and economy.

How to find massive diamonds

The largest diamond ever found was pulled from the earth in South Africa in 1905, then under British colonial rule. British officials gifted the 3,106-carat Cullinan Diamond to King Edward VII, who had it cut into nine pieces and added to various crown jewels. The pieces are still there today, alongside other large pieces extracted, or outright stolen, from colonial holdings, like the Koh-i-Noor.

Such was the fate of the largest-ever diamond. But all of the runners-up have come from Karowe. In 2019, they found Sewelô, a 1,758-carat gem sold to Louis Vuitton for an unknown amount. In 2015, the mine unearthed the 1,111-carat stone known as Lesedi La Rona. Why does this region, and this mine in particular, produce so many exceptionally large diamonds?

Diamonds are made of compressed carbon, formed deep beneath the Earth in the mantle. They're brought up to the crust, where we can mine them, through the eruption of kimberlite volcanoes. As the magma moves explosively upwards, it picks up diamonds and carries them to the surface. Meteor strikes can also create diamonds, but they are small and not of gem quality.

In Botswana and South Africa, the land is rich in kimberlite pipes due to ancient volcanic activity.

In addition to their geological advantages, Lucara has a technological trick: X-rays. An X-ray camera system in the mine measures the atomic density of material. The very dense diamonds stand out against the normal rock, and miners can retrieve them unbroken.

Making diamonds pay

Since opening in 2012, the Karowe mine in Botswana has produced hundreds of notably large, gem-quality diamonds. But mineral wealth isn't always easy to translate into material wealth, at least for the country from which it is extracted.

In Botswana, the government is considering legislation that will ensure more of the profit from its massive diamonds goes back into the country itself. It's also trying to diversify its economy. Diamonds may be forever, but deposits aren't endless. Amidst growing fear that diamond deposits will bottom out, Lucara has acquired permission to move the Karowe mine operations deeper underground in the coming decades.

But for now, they have the world's second-largest gem-quality diamond on their hands, and no one is quite sure how much it's worth. Lucara has partnered with Belgian firm HB Antwerp, which told French outlet Agence France-Presse that it was hard to put a price on the gem.

The monetary value of a diamond is hard to judge, since it's all made up. Perfect diamonds can be grown cheaply in the lab, and the rarity of diamonds is partially artificial and sustained by an intense centuries-long marketing campaign by the De Beers corporation.

So, how much is the second-largest diamond ever found worth? Whatever some chump is willing to pay for it.

The year 1916 was a fantastic summer on the Jersey Shore, if you liked the threats of war, polio, and a deadly attacker stalking the waterways. That was the summer that a series of strange, violent incidents forever changed the way humans saw sharks.

Decades later, the grisly string of attacks that terrified East Coast swimmers partially inspired a novel by Peter Benchley. The novel was adapted into the movie Jaws, the first summer blockbuster. It still frames our interactions with ocean predators.

The cultural impact has only grown, but the truth behind the attacks is still murky. Did they really ever catch the guilty shark? Was it even a shark at all?

A shocking incident

Nicknamed Queen City, Beach Haven, New Jersey, was a popular beachfront for well-off oceangoers. On July 2, 1916, crowds of people were out enjoying the sun and the water. One of them was Charles Epting Vansant, the 25-year-old son of a Philadelphia businessman.

Vansant was swimming fewer than 15 meters from shore, playing with a dog. Then, bystanders on the beach looked out onto the water and saw a fin cutting through the surf behind Vansant. They shouted out desperate warnings for him to swim to shore. Vansant listened and began to make his way back to the beach, but the pursuing fish was closing fast. A moment later, Vansant was pulled under.

In a stroke of fortune, one of the people on the beach was Alexander Ott, who had been a member of the American Olympic swim team in 1912. Ott took to the water and made for Vansant, but by the time he reached the struggling man, the damage was done. Nevertheless, Ott hauled a heavily bleeding Vansant back to shore.

His leg had reportedly been torn open, from thigh to knee. Vansant only survived for a few hours, dying that night in a nearby hospital. He was only the first.

Blood in the water

Vansant's death was a strange tragedy, but it wasn't enough to spark a panic. People were still enjoying the water in the middle of a hot July. But then on July 6, at Spring Lake beach, 32 kilometers away from Beach Haven, there was a second grisly incident.

Charles Bruder, a 28-year-old hotel worker and Swiss native, was swimming beyond the life lines at Spring Lake beach. Suddenly, lifeguards heard him cry for help. They quickly launched a lifeboat and began heading toward him, but before they could reach him, he cried out, and the water began to turn red.

A woman on shore, seeing the red shape, yelled that a red canoe had been overturned. There was no canoe; the red shape was Bruder's blood. The lifeguards reached him only in time for him to name his attacker -- a shark -- and lose consciousness. When they dragged him into the boat, they realized in horror that both his legs had been bitten off, one above, the other below, the knee. There were also bite marks below his arm on his left side.

Lifeguards attempted first aid, but Bruder died of shock and blood loss right there on the beach. The community was shocked, especially the workers and guests at the nearby resort where Bruder had worked and was well known. According to a contemporary New York Times article, "Many persons were so overcome with horror... that they had to be assisted to their rooms."

Dire warnings up the river

While the Spring Lake community mourned, taking up a collection for Bruder's mother back in Switzerland, local authorities took steps to prevent further attacks. Swimmers left the water, and a squad of boatmen began patrolling the coast to drive off any large sharks.

But preventive measures, it seems, were localized. Or maybe the boys who went to bathe and play at Matawan Creek thought they were safe. After all, they were several miles from the seashore, where the Coast Guard had reported huge numbers of sharks that very morning.

Lester Stillwell was an 11-year-old factory worker who'd left work with a group of friends to visit the creek. Around the time he was leaving work, at a nearby trolley bridge, retired sea captain Thomas Cottrell saw a long, dark shape gliding upstream with the incoming tide. Recognizing it as a shark, Cottrell ran to phone the barber, who was also the chief of police.

The chief dismissed it as a prank. Cottrell tried to spread the word himself, warning off one group of boys. Meanwhile, a group of teens who'd also seen the shark warned Lester's group. According to Lester's best friend, Albert O’Hara, they also thought it was a joke and went swimming anyway.

It was Albert who later felt something like sandpaper brush against his legs under the water. Then he caught a glimpse of something that looked like a submerged log. A moment later, Lester was pulled under the water.

On a single tide

Realizing what was happening, the boys began screaming and ran for help. Stanley Fisher, a 25-year-old man who had been close by, came running and leaped into the creek. He dove down to the muddy bottom and emerged with the body of Lester, who was already dead. Before Fisher could even make for shore bearing the body, witnesses saw him scream and go under, as teeth tore into his thigh.

Two men in a boat were able to pull him from the water and take him to shore, as Lester's body slipped from his arms. Ashore, a doctor who saw the wound estimated that ten pounds of flesh were missing from Fisher's leg, but he was unable to see visible bite marks. The resulting blood loss and shock were too much for his body to bear, and he died that night.

But while doctors were still trying to save Fisher's life, only about a kilometer away, 14-year-old Joseph Dunn and his brother were going for a swim with some friends. Thomas Cottrell, not yet aware of the tragedy which had already struck, was still trying to warn people. When he saw Dunn and the other boys, he warned them to get out. They started swimming for shore, but before they reached safety, Dunn was pulled under.

His elder brother and a friend dove back into the water. The submerged attacker released Joseph long enough for Cottrell to grab him and pull him to safety. Joseph, his leg mangled, was rushed to the hospital.

The great New Jersey shark hunt

Joseph had lost a lot of blood and was rushed into the operating room. That night, between emergency procedures, he refused to give reporters his home address. He didn't want his mother to find out about his attack; he didn't want her to worry. Against the predictions in the papers, Joseph not only survived but kept his leg.

The body of Lester Stillwell was found several days after the attack, a few hundred meters from the site of the incident. Witnesses said his small body had been bitten almost in half.

But even before Lester was found, a frightened and vengeful populace took up arms against what lurked in the water. The banks of the Matawan were lined with people wielding "rifles, shotguns, boat hooks, harpoons, pikes, and dynamite," according to a contemporary newspaper. To prevent the killer from escaping, chicken-wire nets were stretched across the creek both above and below the attack site.

That stretch of creek was then shot into, stabbed at, and exploded with dynamite charges, but no sharks were killed. This was despite a handsome reward -- $100 per shark -- offered by the local authorities.

The coast itself swarmed with amateur shark hunters, who in the next few days managed to bring in several large sharks. But when their stomachs were cut open, they were exonerated post-mortem by the absence of human remains.

The culprit caught?

As experts debated the attacks, sharks took on a mythical status. The article quoted above went on to say that a shark's thick hide "would hardly take an impression from buckshot," and was even impervious to bullets. The doctor who treated Stanley Fisher, Dr. George Reynolds, reported that there had been a "poisonous liquid" in the shark bite, and it was the poison that had killed Fisher.

In the following weeks, vigilantes killed hundreds of sharks along the East Coast. The federal government budgeted $5,000 for eradication efforts and discussed sending in the Coast Guard.

Then, on July 14, eccentric local taxidermist and former lion tamer Michael Schleisser announced he had caught the Matawan Man Eater. As evidence, he produced a two-meter-long, 158-kilogram white shark. As appropriate to his profession, he promptly taxidermied it.

But first, Schleisser had scientists from the Natural History Museum examine it. Inside the shark's stomach, they found what they believed to be human bones. The bones and the taxidermy shark were lost sometime over the past century, so it's impossible to test them. However, it must be said that there were no further attacks.

Birth of a man-eater

In a culture saturated with the imagery and mythology of aggressive, man-eating sharks, it's hard to imagine that we haven't always looked at this particular fish family with terror. When we read that large sharks had been seen in the area before the first attack, we wonder why people were so slow to get out of the water.

In fact, the 1916 panic and the media reputation it inspired birthed our fear of man-eating sharks. Prior to 1916, most people considered them fairly harmless.

In 1893, a wealthy eccentric named Hermann Oelrichs, asserting the harmlessness of sharks, offered $500, about $18,000 today, to anyone who provided a verifiable shark attack story. Oelrichs also tested his assertion himself by jumping into the sea and swimming up to a three-meter-long shark. He emerged unharmed and never paid out the $500.

After the 1916 incidents, officials declared that they'd been wrong: sharks were man-eaters. Our new fear of sharks led to hundreds of millions of them being culled over the past century, threatening many keystone marine predator species.

Nowadays, we know that the truth is somewhere closer to our pre-1916 understanding. Sharks are usually indifferent to humans, and attacks, especially a series of attacks, are usually due to something like habitat disruption or learned behavior.

Rather than hungering for human flesh, most shark attacks are a case of mistaken identity. Mistaking a paddling hand or flashing jewelry for a seal or a silvery fish, sharks take an exploratory nibble. Even these are rare. There are about 64 shark bites annually worldwide, and less than a tenth of those are fatal.

Was the great white framed?

When we discuss the "man-eating shark", the first thought is the white shark, commonly known as a great white. It's the shark in Jaws, the species of shark that Schleisser caught, and it's the largest predatory shark species. But nowadays, many are skeptical that a white shark was the species behind the Jersey attacks.

While the white shark appeared on the suspect list at the time, contemporary reports mentioned the tiger shark just as often. A scientific write-up titled The Shark Situation in the Waters About New York names 19 shark species found in the area. Half a dozen of them could have been responsible for some or all of the attacks. These include hammerhead sharks, thresher sharks, brown or sandbar sharks, tiger sharks, and great white sharks.

One NYT letter to the editor proposed that it had not been a shark at all.

"I have spent much time at sea and along shore, and have several times seen turtles large enough to inflict just such wounds," the writer claimed. Moreover, the turtle had "a vicious disposition."

Bull sharks actually the man-eaters?

Today, however, the top of the suspect list is the up to three-meter-long bull shark. While white sharks are actually rare in the area, bull sharks are somewhat less so. The key points in the bull shark's favor are its reputation for aggressiveness and its ability to swim upriver into freshwater. A bull shark wouldn't balk at swimming 18 kilometers upriver to the attack site, which would have been very unusual for a great white.

We know that bull sharks have been responsible for attacks in Australia, South Africa, Nicaragua, India, Florida, and more, with many incidents occurring tens of kilometers away from the open ocean.

But if there really were human remains in the stomach of Schleisser's great white, there's a good chance it was responsible for at least one of the attacks. Perhaps a great white killed the first two victims, on the beach, and a bull shark was responsible for the tragedies in Matawan Creek. Experts continue to speculate on which of these two species was most likely responsible. We will likely never know. It probably wasn't a turtle, though.

Sharks, submarines, and paranoia

Whichever species it was, the behavior it exhibited in 1916 wasn't normal. Why the sudden rush of attacks? As with most animal attack stories, the answer was probably habitat disruption.

Even before the first bite, the public of 1916 was nursing a fear of what lurked beneath the waves. While America hadn't yet joined WWI, Germany had engaged in a strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Germany's infamous sinking of RMS Lucitania, a neutral U.S. passenger ship, only stoked submarine paranoia.

As well as contributing to the general atmosphere of maritime fear, many believed the submarine activity had led to the shark attacks. One letter to the editor expressed a common belief that "sharks may have devoured human bodies in the waters of the German war zone and followed liners to this coast," which would explain "their boldness and their craving for human flesh."

The sharks probably hadn't become addicted to human flesh, but all the commotion of guns and torpedoes on the European side of the Atlantic may have led to increased numbers on the American side. They may have also been attracted to the ample food source offered by commercial fishing castoffs.

Coming full circle, after 1916, American political cartoons began depicting the submarine threat using shark imagery. Like with the millions of young men killing each other across the ocean, the Great War had turned peaceful coexistence into violent confrontation. If it were fiction, they'd call it too on the nose.

In The Traverse, alpinists Matteo Della Bordella and Leo Gheza attempt to complete Patagonia's iconic Fitz Roy Traverse. It'll mean over 4,000 vertical meters of climbing, at the mercy of Patagonia's famously changeable weather.

The film launches right into it with little preamble. The weather was good, so they took their chance. Immediately, they realize that they may have been overly sanguine regarding the weather. Strong winds whip their ropes, sending them dancing near-horizontally above the chasm beneath. The two-man team presses on, ticking off the first peak, Aguja Guillaumet, in only a few hours.

Making their way down from the second peak, Aguja Mermoz, Della Bordella and Gheza find a flattish patch of rock to set up for the night.

At the mercy of the winds

Day two dawns with perfect, clear weather. But the climbing is intense, and soon it becomes unfeasible to simul climb. The wind continues to pick up, slowing their pace and making them fight for every meter gained.

Three hundred meters from the summit, Matteo decides it isn't safe to continue. With the wind blowing and water running, the chance of an accident is too high. The pair pop up a tent on the summit of Goretta.

Day three begins, seemingly, in conditions designed to reward their prudence. The rock is dry, and the wind has died down. The pair is only one sheer 300m wall of rock away from the summit.

"Now, this is climbing," Matteo remarks in Italian. Indeed, they're making good progress under a bright sun. Before noon, they're on the summit of Fitz Roy. Della Bordella has summited Fitz Roy three times already. There are still two more peaks to go, however, before they've bagged the traverse.

At the peak, they hear on the radio that the weather is about to turn dramatically. There is no way they can continue.

"In the mountains, it's like this," Matteo says with a rueful laugh. He doesn't regret the decision at all, he says. The pair will return one day to complete it.

At this point, it's fairly common knowledge that the content of your average kitchen cupboard would inspire near-fatal fits of envy in the people of the past. Tea, sugar, vanilla, pepper, salt -- these are commodities that people fought, died, and were enslaved to procure.

But perhaps none developed so extensive and ancient a mythology as cinnamon. An aromatic bark obtained from several species in the laurel family, cinnamon was prized for thousands of years. This desire extended outside of its normal range, and long, complex trade routes developed to get cinnamon to consumers.

The massive and terrible cinnamon bird, the nets which hang over the end of the earth, protective winged serpents: For millennia, these were the sorts of beliefs that cinnamon's mysterious manufacture inspired. It wasn't an accident, but a deliberate thousand-year deception.

The spice of life

Ancient Greeks and later Romans imported a great deal of cinnamon, but not for use in their cooking. It doesn't appear very frequently in classical recipes, but it did appear frequently at funerals.

Sulla, the infamous general of the late Republic, had a lavish state funeral with statues of himself carved out of cinnamon. Emperor Nero is recorded to have burned a year's supply of Rome's cinnamon at the funeral of his second wife, Poppaea Sabina, as a show of grief. He reportedly kicked her to death.

It's not clear how much exactly a year's supply was. But considering that a Roman pound of cinnamon was worth four years of wages for the average laborer, it must have been an expensive funeral.

The other major use for cinnamon was in medicine. Romans in gastrointestinal distress reached for cinnamon. (And let's be honest, in a pre-handwashing, unrefrigerated world, you were probably always in gastrointestinal distress.) It was also prized in perfumes and to flavor wine.

So the people of the ancient Mediterranean imported a lot of cinnamon. They bought it from merchants living on the Arabian Peninsula, who charged a premium for their valuable spices. The Greeks and Romans who paid dearly for boatloads of dried leaves and sticks put a great deal of thought into where the Arabian traders got their wonderful leaves and sticks. But for many centuries, they remained in the dark.

The Cinnamon Bird of Herodotus

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE Greek historian and travel writer, wrote detailed and completely incorrect accounts of how spices were gathered in Arabia. To gather frankincense, they had to burn a kind of gum which produced acrid smoke. The smoke drove off the multicolored winged snakes that he claimed guarded frankincense trees.

There were two types of cinnamon, and both required bravery and skill to acquire. The first, called cassia, grew in a shallow lake guarded by fierce bat-like beasts. Arabian cassia-pickers covered themselves in oxhide armor and fought through the creatures to reach the plants.

The other cinnamon, called, well, cinnamon, presented even stranger challenges. Even the people of Arabia, Herodotus claimed, weren't sure where cinnamon came from. They believed it might have been "where Dionysus was reared." While several more well known tales have Dionysus spending his youth in India, he was in general an outsider diety who came from abroad. So the place where he was reared may have been a poetic way to say an unknown, faraway land.

Wherever the cinnamon came from originally, the rumor was that it was brought to Arabia by giant birds. The birds used these cinnamon sticks to build their nests, high up on inaccessible peaks. To get the sticks, Arabians brought offerings of dead cattle, donkeys, and oxen to the base of the mountain.

The birds flew down, picked up the meat and dropped it in their nests, which promptly collapsed from the weight. Once the nests fell to the ground, cinnamon-gatherers could pick up the sticks.

Aristotle and crew agree

"That seems right," said fellow classical authors, hearing about the cinnamon bird.

In Aristotle's History of Animals, he lists the cinnamon bird alongside real animals like storks and sparrows. His account agrees with that of Herodotus, except on how the spice traders get the nests down. He proposes that they attach heavy lead weights to their arrows and then shoot at the nests, knocking them down.

The 2nd century CE historian Claudius Aelianus wrote an entire book listing animals he knew about, because publishing was easier back then. In it, he mentions the cinnamon bird twice, citing Herodotus, Aristotle and "others.".According to Aelianus, more commonly called Aelian, the existence of the cinnamon bird is "certain and beyond dispute."

He goes with Aristotle's version of extraction -- lead weighted arrows -- but instead of coming from Arabia, he claims that the cinnamon bird lives in India. Gaius Julius Solinus, writing in the early 3rd century, gives us the same story, but he places the bird back in Arabia, and claims they build their nests in very tall trees, rather than cliff faces.

Pliny the Elder weighs in

Anyone even passingly familiar with Pliny the Elder will be surprised to hear he is a voice of reasonable skepticism in this case. Pliny was a 1st century CE Roman author, known for writing the earliest surviving encyclopedia and for being the most famous person to die in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

His 37-volume encyclopedia, Natural History, is an ambitious, genuinely groundbreaking work. At the same time, it's full of blatantly ridiculous assertions, sometimes uncritical repetition of unreliable sources, and outright comical medical treatments. None of these things are unique to Pliny, but he is particularly notorious for them.

Pliny, who reported that snakes came from the spinal marrow of a human being, thought the cinnamon bird was too much of a stretch. He described several of the legends detailed above, and then dismissed them all. Surprisingly cannily, he said that "these tales [had been] invented by the natives to raise the price of their commodities."

In reality, he went on to say, cinnamon is grown in Ethiopia. There were also, he recorded, 180-foot-long serpents in Ethiopia. So you can't blame later authors for not taking his word on what was and was not grown in Ethiopia.

The Cinnamolgus of medieval bestiaries

Cinnamon birds were a common staple of medieval bestiaries, alongside more familiar beasts like unicorns and mermaids, and even stranger ones like Blemmyae and Sciapods.

In their medieval form, the cinnamon bird largely followed the description given by Solinus. The name medieval writers gave to the creature was the "cinnamolgus." The entry from the 1230 CE Rochester bestiary describes it as an Arabian bird which "weaves its nests on very tall trees, from the fruits of the cinnamon tree."

Authors never described the bird physically, and illustrations showed a fairly generic looking bird of varying coloration. What was important was what it represented: the value of, and difficulty in acquiring, cinnamon. Our friend, the stick that smells good, was still in high demand as the centuries wore on.

Across medieval Europe, cinnamon was immensely popular both as an aromatic and a cooking ingredient. It also played a role in medicine. According to the humoral system, it was warm and dry, making it good for digestive complaints. In an era where people thought bad smells could cause disease, the strong, pleasant smelling cinnamon could ward off sickness.

A string of middle men from Asia, to the Arabian peninsula, to Venice and from there, to the rest of Europe, became rich off cinnamon and other spices. Its legendary origin myth drove up prices and scared off would-be competitors. But not forever.

The secret revealed

For Europeans, the world had grown slightly more familiar since the time of Herodotus. The Crusades, the Silk Road, and a growing interest in trade and exploration made the distant fantastical lands of their ancestors real, visitable places.

Still, when the chronicler Jean de Joinville visited Egypt during the Seventh Crusade and asked about cinnamon, he got strange answers. At the edge of the world, the Nile's source, cinnamon was fished up using nets. That was in 1248.

In 1292, John of Montecorvino, an Italian missionary, sent a letter back from his voyage to India. In it, he described how cinnamon came from a tree which was grown in Sri Lanka. From there, it was carried not by a mythical bird but by Indonesian rafts. Cinnamon rafts landed in East Africa. From there, the spice worked its way, through middle men all tacking on fees, to Venice.

But the rise of new Mediterranean powers disrupted the flow of spices. When the Ottoman Emperor Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, it kicked off a race to find another route to Asia and the spices therein.

This article could have been the lighthearted prologue to a book called Europe Pillages the World in a Relentless Quest for Spices. Maybe ancient Arabian traders had the right idea about keeping cinnamon's origin secret.

Conventional images of the Earth and the moon place them close together, the moon hovering, seemingly, right over our planet's shoulder. Of course, this isn't accurate; we know just from looking at the moon in the sky that it isn't nearly so large or close. But every image of the Earth and moon, and of the solar system in general, is out of proportion.

To Scale's short film The Solar System opens by laying this out and asking the viewer if they've noticed it.

Wylie Overstreet, the man on camera, has noticed. Taking it a step further, he concludes that "the only way to see a scale model of the solar system is to build one."

Building the solar system to scale

The project takes Wily to Nevada's Black Rock Desert with his friend and cameraman, Alex. They start setting up, laying vast circles over seven miles of desert. It takes that much space to make a scale model using a marble-sized Earth. By chasing lights around the orbits at night and filming from an overlooking mountaintop, they hope to give an accurate idea of the scales involved, from above.

To check proportions, Alex stands with the camera at mini-Earth's orbit while Wiley raises the meter-and-a-half-wide sun. Then, they wait for the (actual, full-scale) sun to rise. Its size exactly matches the model, standing from the perspective of "Earth." Their math was right.

It makes for a fascinating visual display. But the point of the project wasn't just a matter of proportion. Wiley reminds us that only a few dozen people have gotten to see the entirety of Earth from space. Onscreen, old footage plays of a few of them, describing how it felt to see the Earth so small and distant. They use different words but all describe the same sight: the Earth, "all you've ever known," as small as, well, a marble.

By depicting the solar system to scale, Wiley's goal was "to try and capture [that] we are on a marble, floating in the middle of nothing. When you...come face to face with that, it's staggering."

In a new study, an international research team found that pre-Neolithic people in Southeast Asia were mummifying their died by smoke-drying them. This would make them the oldest human mummies made intentionally, predating the previous contenders by thousands of years.

This find is an entire new chapter in the history of human funerary practice. Not only was this burial method widespread, it's still being practiced today.

An ancient practice

For the Dani (also known as Hubula) people in West Papua, Indonesia, it's important to preserve important deceased community members. They will pose and wrap the bodies of their loved ones into a fetal position, then expose the wrapped body to smoke in order to preserve them. This results in what are called "hyper-flexed" remains.

Hsiao-chun Hung, a researcher with the Australian National University in Canberra, was familiar with the Dani's funerary practices. So when she was in the field in Vietnam in 2017, she immediately noticed the similarity between the ancient burials and the modern Dani ones.

Hyper-flexed or crouching remains were a common practice among the ancient peoples of Southeast Asia. Traditionally, archaeologists have classified them as "primary burials." Primary burials are when the deceased is buried directly in the ground shortly after death. Secondary burials, in contrast, are defined by post-mortem treatment of the body prior to internment.

But Hung, observing the similarity to Dani practices, hypothesized that these Vietnamese burials may have been more elaborate than we thought.

They tested 69 remain samples from southern China, northern Vietnam and Indonesia. The sites were burial mounds, caves, and open-air. While all the remains were curled up, some were flexed on their sides while others were sitting upright or even prone. But over 80% of them showed signs of significant heat exposure.

Smoking the dead

The team used several different tests to gauge whether the remains had been heated after death, including a simple eye test. Many of the bones are visibly burnt, especially in the cranium, lower limbs, and elbows. This suggests that they were deliberately exposed to controlled heat, rather than fully cremated. The bones only burnt in areas with a thinner covering of flesh.

But not all heat treatment leaves visible marks on the bone. X-ray analysis examined the chemical structure of 20 samples. Nine had been heated above 525˚C, and another eight may have been exposed to lower temperatures.

To investigate the lower-temperature treatments, researchers used infrared spectroscopy. Heat exposure changes materials on a structural level, so by examining the bone crystallinity, scientists can tell whether bone, even ancient bone, has been heated above 400°C. Of the 64 samples they tested this way, only eight had not been exposed to heat.

The study suggests that most of the bodies were tightly bound shortly after death, then smoked over low heat for a long time, before being buried.

The most famous early mummies, like those of Egypt or Peru, were desiccated. The dryness of their surroundings sucked out any liquid, leaving a dry, preserved body. But in climates like East and Southeast Asia, the environment is too damp. Instead, they resorted to smoking their dead in order to preserve them. And as these new findings suggest, they've been doing it for a long time.

Oldest human mummies

Before this find, the oldest known man-made human mummies were the Chinchorro mummies of modern-day Chile. The oldest of these dates to 5050 BCE. The Chinchorro people preserved bodies through a complex process of disassembly, heat treatment, and reconstruction. The arid Atacama Desert helped preserve these ancient remains.

But the oldest sample Hsiao-chun Hung and the research team examined was from over 14,000 years ago, roughly twice the age of the Chinchorro mummies. Not only are these mummies much older, but they're from a climate very different from what is usually associated with mummification practices.

While the 14,000-year-old specimen is the oldest we know of, Hung believes the practice may be even older, citing flexed burial sites across the region from as much as 42,000 years ago. In much of Southeast Asia, the practice faded out once people adopted farming 5000 to 3500 years ago.

The geographic range is also massive, extending across most of Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Australia. One of the tantalizing unanswered questions is whether the burial practices of Papua share a common lineage with those of the ancient Southeast Asians.

Are similar sites in Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia all descended from one tradition? How ancient really are the oldest human mummies?

I regret to inform you that one of our great institutions, whose honor we all thought we could count upon, has been sullied. That's right: the World Stone Skimming Championships have fallen.

We laugh, but for the 400 competitors, these championships are serious business. Serious enough for at least a few to risk their integrity in order to get ahead.

Starting as a small community charity event in 1997, the championships take place every year in an abandoned quarry on Scotland's Easdale Island. The small island is situated in the Firth of Lorn and has a population of only 61. But this September, 400 competitors and 2,000 spectators came to take part.

The competition is deceptively difficult. In the first round, competitors must skip their stones 62 meters across the quarry. The second round is a "toss-off" between everyone who passed the first round. Competitors find their own stones, which must be less than three inches across and be naturally formed from the island's wealth of slate. This is where the problem arose.

Suspiciously circular?

The official toss master, Kyle Matthews, was the adjudicator at the center of the drama. Competitors approached him, sharing their concerns over suspiciously circular skipping stones. According to a BBC Radio interview, the judges were also hearing "rumors and murmurings of some nefarious deeds."

Matthews handled it with discretion, approaching the accused in private. To their credit, Matthews said, the perpetrators admitted to their crimes immediately. The stone-doctorers accepted their disqualification, presumably ashamed of the disgrace they had brought upon the noble and ancient sport.

While the organizers acknowledge that the competitors selecting their stones "is one of the highlights of the competition," they say that if this issue continues, they will be forced to use pre-vetted stones.

The competition continued despite the disruption, with Lucy Wood taking her sixth victory in the adult women's category. Yes, the sport is segregated by gender. No, I don't know why, either. The overall victory went to Jonathan Jennings, the first American to claim the title.

Named 3I/ATLAS, this comet is the third-ever interstellar visitor to our solar system to be observed by astronomers. By the end of this month, it'll pass behind Mars and be blocked from our view, reemerging in December. Somewhere between 5.6 kilometers and 320 meters across, 3I/ATLAS is traveling at 209,000kph. That's fast enough to go from Earth to the moon in about an hour and a half.

For most astronomers, the chance to observe 3I/ATLAS is an opportunity to better refine our understanding of the objects that pass through our solar system. But for one controversial Harvard physicist, it represents something more: intelligent extraterrestrial life.

An alien emissary?

Avi Loeb, a somewhat notorious Harvard science professor, was quick to jump on the story of 3I/ATLAS. Only days after it was first sighted, he was questioning whether it was a comet or "something else." Two weeks after finding out about it, he released a preprint (meaning it has not been formally published or peer reviewed) paper. Raising the possibility that the comet was alien in origin, he outlined several key points.

These points included the fact that the orbital plane of 3I/ATLAS was very close to Earth's, within five degrees, which he felt was an astounding coincidence. Second, the object seemed to be extremely large, over 20 kilometers in diameter, which is vanishingly rare for a comet. There was also the fact that it was going to pass near Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, which he again cited as an unlikely coincidence. Finally, he claimed that there wasn't good evidence for the cometary gas trail we expect from a comet.

Relying on the "Dark Forest" solution to the famous Fermi Paradox, Loeb has gone on to suggest that the intelligence behind 3I/ATLAS may be malicious and planning on targeting Earth. Its path worked out so that it would pass behind the sun, hiding it from Earth, and at the exact point where it could use the Sun's gravity to swing back around toward Earth, presumably to destroy us all.

For months, he's been publishing blog posts on Medium almost daily, outlining his theories as more information comes out about 3I/ATLAS. But other astronomers, and now NASA, have come out with information debunking his theories.

An interesting exercise

Even Loeb himself is unwilling to commit to his theory. In the recent paper, Loeb et al claim to "not necessarily ascribe," to the theory, but feel it is "an interesting exercise in its own right, and is fun to pursue."

He also pursued this exercise in 2017, when he claimed that 'Oumuamua, the first confirmed interstellar object to enter our solar system, was possibly of artificial origin. He tasked radio astronomers with watching for alien signals coming from the object. They did, and there weren't.

Three years before that, Loeb thought a meteor entering the atmosphere could be the wreckage of an alien spaceship, citing seismic data he gathered from the crash site. Last year, planetary seismologist Benjamin Fernando led a team that found the cause of the odd readings. It was a truck driving by the sensor.

In a follow-up interview with The New York Times, Fernando said the two takeaways were "One, if you want to do seismic analysis, it’s ideal if you check with a seismologist first. The other is, it’s not aliens."

Point one goes a long way in explaining why Loeb's "interesting exercises" have received so much skepticism (and outright derision) from his fellow astronomers. Loeb isn't actually an expert in any of the science he's doing. Astronomy is a big field, and a man who is (like Loeb) a scholar of galaxy dynamics may not be qualified to speak on, say, comets.

Once respected within his field, Loeb's papers now mostly remain in preprint, with colleagues like Professor of Astrophysics Steve Desch saying that Loeb is "conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room."

If it looks like a comet and quacks like a comet

The more we find out about the comet, the more absurd and hasty Loeb's claims become. For one thing, it isn't nearly as large as Loeb claimed. Observations from the Hubble telescope now show that 31/ATLAS is somewhere around, or smaller than, 2.8 kilometers. A far cry from Loeb's 46 kilometers. In fact, Loeb himself cited the paper which showed it's 2.8 kilometers, and simply... chose to ignore that.

As on the previous occasions, other astronomers were unimpressed with the science behind Loeb's bold theory. Steve Desch called the paper "sloppy work beneath the level of an undergraduate" and graded it accordingly.

Sorry it took me so long to grade your August 20 assignment, Avi Loeb. Are you sure you're ready for a class on comets? You might need to learn about things like bow shocks and chemistry.

[image or embed]

— Steve Desch (@deschscoveries.bsky.social) 9 September 2025 at 20:20

The comet does have interesting properties. It comes from outside our solar system and may have a different chemical composition than we're used to seeing. But as Tom Statler, NASA's lead scientist for solar system small bodies, told The Guardian, "It looks like a comet...It does comet things. It very, very strongly resembles, in just about every way, the comets that we know. It's a comet."

To Loeb's argument that 3I/ATLAS brightens strangely, Statler agreed -- because it's normal for comets to do that. Even ones from within our solar system can react unpredictably as they grow closer to the radiation of the sun. Comets are mostly ice, and the heat of the sun melts chunks of ice, causing changes in size, brightness, and composition.

It isn't merely boring alien haters bashing on the visionary who dares to dream the impossible dream. Many of the scientists criticizing Loeb's work are from institutes like SETI, which is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. They feel that Loeb's attention-grabbing, unsupported claims discredit the whole field, making it harder to do actual science.

You can follow the comet's path live on NASA's website.

Where is the true "middle of nowhere?" Philosophically speaking, it's always about two hours drive from your home town. Scientifically, it's Point Nemo: a place which is important due to the immensity and scale of its unimportance.

A deep blue spot of nothing located roughly 48°52.6′S x 123°23.6′W, Point Nemo is the farthest point on Earth from any landmass. It's also the future tomb of the International Space Station.

The Pole of Inaccessibility

Point Nero is the oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, the solution to the "longest swim problem." This problem presented the challenge of finding the point on earth where, if one fell over the side of a ship, they would have to swim the longest possible distance to reach any land.

The solution came from Czech engineer Hrvoje Lukatela, who published his findings in 1992. By mathematical necessity, the Pole of Inaccessibility would have to be equidistant between three or more coasts. If one piece of land were further away than the others, then the swimmer could head for one of the two closer islands and would therefore not be completing the longest possible swim.

Using software he himself developed, combined with the only dataset of coastlines then available, Lukatela found what he would come to call Point Nemo. The three vertices are Ducie Island, of the Pitcairn Islands, Motu Nui, an islet off the more famous Rapa Nui, and Maher Island in Antarctica.

Lukatela named the point for Captain Nemo, meaning "no one", from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The book was one of his favorites. Lukatela further explained in a 2015 interview that because Nemo "vowed to...never to set his foot on dry land again," his name "seemed to me to be appropriate for that point on the world's oceans that is most distant from any land."

In 2022, he ran the calculations again using newer, more accurate data. The three vertices were the same, but everything had moved by a few kilometers. The Point Nemo of today, at around 48°52.6′S x 123°23.6′W, is slightly off from the Point Nemo of the 2000s. But when you're aiming from space, a few meters here or there don't mean much.

Where do we put our space trash (other than space)

You're probably aware that we've been putting a lot of stuff up in space over the past seven decades or so. We now have quite a lot of stuff up there and are beginning to realize we may have been a bit intemperate with the practice.

The European Space Agency is tracking 40,230 man-made objects currently in low earth orbit (LEO). Others too small to track number somewhere in the hundreds of millions. The knock-on effects are substantial. Debris can damage spacecraft or cause destruction when it falls to Earth. NASA estimates that we've had an average of one piece of junk per day falling to Earth over the last 50 years.

It's a problem that requires creative solutions, like the wooden satellite designed by Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency. Various global agencies have also considered (and even tested) harpoons, nets, robots, and lasers.

Then there's the related problem: When we bring old crafts and satellites down, where do we land them (considering "land" is the polite word for "crash")? Well, the farthest possible spot from anywhere else, obviously. Point Nemo has been a satellite graveyard for decades.

In fact, we've dumped nearly 300 satellites, manned and unmanned, into the point's general area over the past 50 years. This includes the progenitor of the ISS, Mir. 

Tomb of the ISS?

In recent years, NASA has been handing over the reins to near-Earth space to private companies, most notably SpaceX, in order to focus on more distant exploration. Also, after 24 years, everything on it is getting pretty old and broken and would be a real expensive hassle to replace.

The execution date is set for 2031. The place? The middle of nowhere.

Given its history and properties, Point Nemo was the obvious choice for de-orbiting the International Space Station. In fact, the ISS and Nemo have something of a history already. When the ISS passes over Nemo, it becomes the nearest human habitation. Point Nemo is so isolated that it's closer to the space station than to anywhere else.

"The fish probably don't enjoy having space garbage rained on them," you say. Apparently, though, fish don't hang out at Point Nemo either. This area, lying within the South Pacific Gyre, has such low productivity that scientists have called it an oceanic desert.

Still, ocean pollution travels. There is a degree of concern, especially since some of the material being dumped is radioactive. The Point Nemo graveyard plan isn't a perfect solution; it's more like harm reduction.

This week's documentary chronicles the maritime adventure of two Irishmen, who spent two months kayaking the 1,500km circumference of Ireland. The pair are Jon Hynes, who had dreamed of the trip for two decades, and his paddling partner Sean Cahill.

Experienced paddlers

Jon shares the history of his life and his friendship with Sean as old footage plays. Growing up in County Limerick, Jon began kayaking on the Shannon and nearby Lough Gur. Traveling to Nepal and Africa's Zambezi River, he soon graduated to sea kayaking and more extreme rivers.

He met Sean in the French Alps in 2000, where Jon was a river guide. They immediately became fast friends. Over a decade later, Sean proposed that they kayak around Ireland. An experienced kayaker himself, Sean turned from whitewater to sea kayaking to better suit his aging body's limitations.

After two years of planning, they finally managed to fit everything into the boats, and in early summer, they set off.

Out from Old Head

The pair set out from a headland called Old Head, near Kinsale in County Cork. They paddled into the wind and the tide for hours; an inauspicious start. In fact, according to Jon, the first week was the hardest. The incessant fog pushed them to use all their navigational skills as they rounded the bottom of Ireland.

After the first ten days, Jon's hands were horribly blistered, forcing him to cut the wedding ring from his swollen hands. By then, they'd reached County Clare's famous Cliffs of Moher. But bad weather continued to plague them, which is actually Ireland's national slogan. The pair waited in a tent for the skies to clear as they prepared to round the top of Northern Ireland.

Their wait was eventually rewarded. Cheers erupted as they rounded Fair Head, at the top of the island, under bright sunshine. As with every stop along the way, strangers waved from the cliffs and beaches as they passed.

Three days from home

But once they were on the East Coast heading south, strong winds made for tricky crossings. Right after they passed Dublin, entering County Wicklow, a gale forced them back onto land.

While filming the conditions, a gust of wind blew Jon off a fencepost, hurting his leg. In an informal confessional from a doctor's office in Wicklow, Jon admitted that he hoped their luck would turn. He convinced Sean that he was not too injured to keep going, not when they were almost home, but the pain was bad, and so were the conditions.

Back in the kayak, they finally turned west. But they had to push through strong winds as they limped back to Old Head. They passed through a symbolically appropriate sea cave and emerged into the light of their final day, touching beach on Old Head at last.

"Wonderful privilege, lads," Sean says at their welcome home dinner, "to get to paddle around your own country."

In the late 19th century, settlers pushing into the American Midwest looked up from their newly planted fields to see a black shape covering the sky. The air hummed with the sound of billions of insect wings. Devouring crops, blocking out the sun, and poisoning the rivers and streams: It was as if doomsday had come, and the horseman of the apocalypse was the Rocky Mountain Locust.

The American government feared that successive plagues of grasshoppers would end westward expansion. The frontier farmers and settlers of the Midwest feared starvation. Together, they launched a war against the grasshopper menace.

And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt

For the new settlers of Kansas and the surrounding territory, 1874 needed to be a good year. The westward push had only reached the area twenty years earlier, and many families were planting their first crops.

The past few years had included a series of setbacks, with fires and hailstorms devastating crops, and the ever-present danger of reprisals from the people whose land they'd stolen. But it was a very dry summer, and the farmers anxiously watched the sky for rain. They didn't think too much about what was hopping about their feet.

Then one hot, hazy day in late July or early August, they looked up to see a veil drawn over the sky. It grew darker and thicker, like a gathering storm cloud, as a thunderous sound filled the air. Lillie Marcks, who was twelve at the time, described how "a solid mass filled the sky. A moving grey-green screen between the sun and the earth."

Then the locusts descended. Another witness, Mary Lyon, recalled that as they dropped down, it was like a snowstorm, "where the air was filled with enormous flakes." They covered the earth, four inches deep in places, and visited devastation on anything they touched. Their voracious appetite spared nothing.

Biblical destruction

The swarm didn't just eat the crops; it ate everything. Once the crops were gone, they stripped the leaves from the bushes and trees. When all the growing things were nothing but sticks, the swarm turned to the houses, munching on food stores and anything made of wood. Finally, they literally ate the clothes off people's backs. The insect's corpses and excrement polluted the water supply. The swarm was thick enough to stop trains, as mountains of their little bodies, crushed beneath the locomotives, slicked up the tracks to an unworkable degree.

The result was an estimated 200 million dollars in damages across vast swathes of the U.S. and Canada, from Texas to the Northwest Territories.

The newspapers were swarming with stories of the plague. One article in The Donaldsonville Chief compared it to the Great Chicago fire, going on to say that men who woke up rich, ready to harvest their crops, were going to bed beggars.

Regional authorities received piles of letters from settlers begging for aid. One elderly farmer wrote to Minnesota Governor Cushman Davis that grasshoppers had destroyed his crops, and "we can see nothing but starvation in the future if relief does not come in time."

He was one of many, as a Cottonwood country commissioner reported: "I have in my district many familys [sic] that are about on the verge of starvation."

The U.S. vs locust swarm

Across the country, the government organized to protect its starving people, or -- if you are a cynic -- protect the imperialist project of westward expansion. They also rushed to downplay the problem, fearing that the true scope of the locust plague would deter settlers. As many as one in three of Kansas' new settlers had packed up and headed back east after that summer, and migration to the Great Plains sharply decreased.

Both private and state aid were distributed. Governor Davis raised $18,959 for relief efforts, and the state government granted a further $5,000 for direct relief. Similar grants were made throughout the affected region, and many philanthropic societies donated clothing to replace the settlers' locust-eaten garments.

Meanwhile, the settlers themselves tried all they could think of to fight back. At first, they covered their gardens in thick cloth; it was no good, the locusts just ate the cloth. They tried fire, but it had limited effectiveness. Lillie Marcks watched her father and his hired man dig a massive trench and light it on fire, only for the mass of grasshoppers to smother the flames.

Enterprising farmers-turned-engineers invented the "hopperdozer," a device pulled by horses, and meant to roll over fields catching the locusts. But it only worked on flat fields and was overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. Entomologist Charles Valentine Riley urged people to try eating the grasshoppers, which have been eaten around the world for thousands of years, but it didn't catch on.

A natural history of the Rocky Mountain Locust

Locusts are a subcategory of grasshoppers. Environmental pressures trigger these grasshopper species to merge into massive swarms. This transformation isn't just behavioral but physical. Under the influence of the call to swarm, grasshoppers can change color and grow stronger wings, coming together as a huge force that behaves collectively.

The life of a locust is a series of transformations. The Rocky Mountain Locust, Melanoplus spretus, laid its eggs in the dry Rocky Mountains Plateau, emerging in spring without wings. They hopped about voraciously devouring all they could, and when they reached their adult stage, they grew wings and took flight.

Melanoplus spretus was the only North American locust, and the 1874 event was not its first appearance. Smaller-scale plagues had occurred across the region in the preceding half-century. In 1818 and 1819, swarms hit Minnesota and Manitoba, and a year later, one appeared in Missouri. In the 1850s, Texas was hit hard for several years in a row.

But none of these compares to the scale of the 1874 swarm.

Wrong place, wrong drought

It was a case of bad luck and bad timing for the new Kansas farmers. The exceptionally long, dry summer made perfect conditions for grasshopper eggs. When the many hungry grasshoppers emerged, they found that the drought had withered the plants. A lack of available food triggered their horror-movie style transformation into a ravening horde.

Up to 12.5 trillion individual insects swarmed and took flight. According to one account, the size of the swarm was so great that it blotted out the sun for six straight hours. Modern estimates are that it covered 5,200,000 square kilometers of land.

An introduction to the Missouri entomological reports on the subject wrote that the locust "constitutes today the greatest obstacle to the settlement of much of the fertile country between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains."

When the locusts returned in 1875 -- though in comparatively fewer numbers -- it seemed the colonial project of western settlement was doomed. In 1877, the Nebraska Legislature went so far as to declare the insect a "public enemy," which its citizens were now legally obligated to destroy.

But every year, there were fewer locusts. Every year, more crops survived, more farmers came, and the westward push continued. The last confirmed sighting of a living Rocky Mountain Locust was in 1902.

Extinction (we think)

Many factors contributed to the rapid extinction of the Rocky Mountain Locust. But the main cause was likely the large-scale destruction of their eggs. While their range was large, the locusts' permanent breeding ground was small, only a few thousand square miles. When farmers started turning and irrigating that soil, their trillions of eggs were killed.

Some argue that Melanoplus spretus may still survive in small populations, living and dying in its solitary form. If isolated populations do survive, they're keeping their heads down. In 2014, the IUCN officially declared them extinct. But they left a mark on American culture, appearing in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book, On the Banks of Plum Creek. 

Few mourned the loss of the Rocky Mountain Locust. But their extinction was certainly a blow to the northern curlew, which lived off the locusts during their annual migration. These once-common birds are now also presumed extinct.

Funnily enough, the de-extinction startups aren't suggesting they bring back the Rocky Mountain Locust. I get it, but on the other hand, 12.5 trillion locusts might give America an exciting, new problem. Sometimes, that's the best you can hope for.

Space is packed with hazards and health risks, and researchers have spent decades discovering what space travel does to the human body (answer: nothing good). But a new study suggests that the effects are more fundamental than we realized. Spending time in space can actually speed up the physical aging process on a cellular level.

Cells in space

The recent study, funded by NASA and conducted by the University of California San Diego's Sanford Stem Cell Institute (UCSD), examined the effects of space travel on human stem cells.

Specifically, these were human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, or HSPCs. Stem cells are cells that are not yet fully differentiated, meaning they can become various types of cell. HSPCs can become blood cells and are an important part of the immune system and vascular health.

SpaceX periodically sends craft to the International Space Station on resupply missions. For this experiment, the UCSD team, led by Dr. Catriona Jamieson, sent some cells up with them. The scientists cultured the cells inside a "nanobioreactor" of the team's own invention. The nanobioreactor kept the HSPCs in a stable environment and monitored a number of important health indicators.

The cells spent 32 to 45 days in space across several different supply missions. Once they got home, researchers compared them to a control group that never left Earth.

Cells hate being in space

The cells that went to space came back changed. They were more vulnerable to mutations, were less able to make new, healthy cells, and were losing their DNA protection more quickly.

In some ways, their findings corroborated earlier findings. Most importantly, the famous "twins study," where astronaut Scott Kelly went to space while his brother Mark stayed home. The stem cell study confirmed what the Kelly brothers demonstrated: Space is bad for telomeres.

Telomeres are a protective cap at the end of your DNA. When DNA is copied, a little bit at the end is chopped off. The telomeres get chopped off first, so you don't lose anything important -- until you run out of telomeres. Scientists believe that losing your telomeres is an important element of the aging process. It seems that space travel inhibits telomere maintenance.

Exposure to damaging ionizing radiation in space also made the cells more likely to mutate. We've been aware of possible increased cancer risks for astronauts for a long time, but this new evidence will help provide direction for future research.

The cells showed broader signs of stress, wear, and aging as a result of space. The mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) exhibited stress responses, which could decrease immune health. The cells became more active, burning through stored-up energy, inhibiting their ability to recover.

Good news for the HSPCs (and space enjoyers)

It isn't all bad news. The research team kept monitoring the cells after they returned to Earth and found they showed signs of recovery. After spending 12 days cultured on healthy young bone marrow stromal layers, the cells were perking up and increasing their capacity for self-renewal.

This data confirms at a cellular level much of what the twins study suggested. Once Mark Kelly returned to Earth, many of the negative effects of time in space reversed, at least partially. But, as the study's authors warn, the effects of longer-term space travel may be more dramatic and more permanent.

As we continue to send people to space, we'll need research like this to better understand how to protect astronauts from the physical consequences. As Dr. Jamieson said in a UCSD press release: "This is essential knowledge as we enter a new era of commercial space travel and research in low Earth orbit."

Named "Spot," the quadruped robot from developers Boston Dynamics has been on the cutting edge of canine-like robots for several years now. Its newest trick is a triple backflip.

While there isn't a great deal of utility in a triple backflip, the technical challenge demonstrates advanced precision. A robot that can nail a triple backflip can navigate hazardous environments and get back up when it's knocked over.

Training Spot is "like training a dog"

Arun Kumar, a robotics engineer who works on Spot, claimed the development process can be similar to training an actual dog. Engineers teach Spot tricks through reinforcement learning. They repeatedly ask it to achieve a result or perform a task, and reward it when it succeeds. Robot dogs have no desires or joys, so while a dog might get a treat, Spot gets a few lines of code affirming that it has achieved the desired outcome.

That stage, however, is just the software part. Once Spot has learned how to theoretically perform a triple backflip, the physical machinery has to be able to perform the required movements. The hardware deployment, Kumar admits, "never works the first time."

Tricks like the triple backflip force engineers to push their creations. These experiments help them find the limits and flaws that wouldn't be revealed by simpler, more practical tasks.

Is the robot dog part of our future?

Over a thousand robot-dog models have been deployed worldwide, for things like search and rescue, police work, and even airport wildlife safety. But as they become more advanced and more common, many people express concerns about this technology.

Part of the backlash was emotional. Many find the quadruped robots creepy and are reminded of science fiction dystopias. Picture the terrifying mechanical hound used by law enforcement to chase down the protagonist of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, for example. But there were also practical concerns.

Spot has been adopted by several police departments in the United States, provoking backlash. With ballooning budgets and increasing protests against police militarization, many residents objected to spending $75,000 of taxpayers' money on each robot dog.

These objections only increased once police forces deployed the bots. In 2021, public pressure made the NYPD return their Spot. New Yorkers had significant concerns about its use to surveil and police underprivileged neighborhoods. The NYPD has since re-purchased several Spots from Boston Dynamics.

Boston Dynamics has pledged not to militarize its general-use products, but there is no law preventing them from changing their minds. After all, they originally developed the technology that became Spot in 2005, under contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. For now, the technology is only used for things like surveillance, yet drones were also originally designed for surveillance. Time will tell.