Believe it or not, salt is an incredibly important tool when you’re trying to keep a ski mountain running during a warm spell. Unfortunately, the organizers of the Sochi Games did not believe this fact, and late last week, that oversight almost ruined the Olympics.
     |
An entire drowned city has become the world’s most mind-boggling scuba-diving attraction. Consider booking a trip to Qiandao Lake, China, where you can wreck-dive a 1,800-year old flooded metropolis.
| |
You don’t even need a flashlight to look for cave paintings in the dark: you just need the sound of your own voice. By listening to echoes as they walk through Spanish caves, acoustic archaeologists are unlocking the secrets of underground soundscapes.
| |
Rising and falling in this week’s landscape news: the rise of artificial snow and the fall of a Chinese agricultural spy, the rise of corn and the fall of male frogs.
| |
The 1950s were an optimistic time. Houses and cars were affordable, the economy and the birthrate were booming, and—oh yeah, America was detonating hundreds of nuclear bombs in its own backyard.
| |
In an article primarily about the potential folly of holding onto stockpiles of smallpox virus for research purposes—a now-eradicated plague that humans no longer have natural immunity to and that would very likely cause a worldwide catastrophe should it escape from the lab—the BBC includes one awesomely horrible detail. Could the frozen bodies of smallpox victims in Siberia, now thawing because of climate change, re-release the virus into the environment and thus start a global pandemic?
| |
Sad Janka Kráľa is one of the oldest city parks in Europe, dating back to 1774—though parts of it go back to the 1400s. Today, the park coexists with modern Bratislava—itself an ancient city. Both were shot by Viennese photographer Lukas Furlan, whose portfolio is definitely worth a look. [Lukas Furlan on Facebook and 500px]
| |
Science fiction is often charged with naïve technological optimism and historical amnesia. But for present-day Californians struggling with a wide range of environmental and social problems, science fiction might just provide the perspective we need to successfully pivot from the boom times of the twentieth century to the messy prospect of the century ahead. It won’t be the techno-futurist elements of science fiction—miraculously clean energy sources, flying cars, off-planet factories—that are going to save us, though. The classic works of science fiction have a different, more fatalistic side that speaks more usefully to our current condition, awash as we are in the environmental and social consequences of the Golden State’s postwar boom.
| |
The seam where a city meets the country is an uncanny place. It’s not rural, yet not exactly urban, either, a non-place often full of half-finished streets and isolated developments. Most of us only see these environments through the windows of our cars, but photographer Alexander Gronsky has spent the last four years in Moscow’s outskirts, watching and photographing.
| |
Cities popping up in the middle of nowhere. Blackened landscapes of industrial runoff, including lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, like something from the moons of Saturn. Vast transportation systems snaking over previously empty hills and ranches, pulling not human passengers but tankers. This is the new geography of fracking.
| |
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
