Amusing Planet

Batagaika Crater, Siberia

2017-01-30T15:56:00.001+05:30

In the heart of Siberia’s boreal forest, a massive crater the locals call the “gateway to the underworld” has been growing for the last fifty years. It appears in the form of a huge gash on earth, a kilometer long and one hundred meters deep at one end.

Named after the nearby flowing Batagayka river, a tributary of the river Yana, the Batagaika crater is what geologists call a thermokarst depression —cave-ins which results when the permafrost melts, and although the Batagaika crater has no connection to the underworld, as the Yakutian people believe, it is still something to be feared of as these “slumps”, that are increasingly appearing across the northern hemisphere, could represent an ominous sign of things to come as the world continues to warm.

Aerial view of the Batagaika Crater. Photo credit: Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North/Alexander Gabyshev

A Blast From The Past: Episode 32

2017-01-29T11:03:00.001+05:30

From the archives of Amusing Planet.

Parting of the Sea in Jindo

The Jindo county is an archipelago of 250 islands, of which Jindo Island is the third largest in Korea. Every year at the end of February and again in mid-June, extremely low tide causes a natural land pass 2.9 km long and 10–40 meters wide to appear connecting the main Jindo island and a small Modo island to the south of Jindo. The pass stays for about an hour before being submerged again. The event is celebrated by a local festival called "Jindo's Sea Way" when visitors and tourists gather to watch the phenomenon and walk the path in the middle of the sea.

The World’s Smallest Mountain And Mountain Range

2017-01-28T16:44:00.001+05:30

That little bump ahead, just beyond the fork in the road, is the world’s smallest registered mountain. Located in Australia’s low-lying Terrick Terrick Range, Mount Wycheproof stands 148 meters above sea level, which is pretty decent for a small mountain. However, it rises only 43 meters above the surrounding plain, and because the ground rises gradually to the summit, it’s hard to say where the mountain begins.

The mountain is located on the town of Wycheproof, which in turn is located on the hill’s south western slopes. The town was officially established in 1875, although the settlement dates back to 1846. The town's name is derived from the Aboriginal language, 'witchi-poorp', which means 'grass on a hill', a reference to Mountt Wycheproof just east of the highway.

Mount Wycheproofite, the world’s smallest mountain. Photo credit: Whroo70/Panoramio

The Zion Curtains of Utah

2017-01-27T21:10:00.001+05:30

A source of confusion among many first time visitors to the US state of Utah are the bars. Like any regular bar, there are stools lining the shiny counter, but instead of facing the bottles and the bartenders, they look straight at a wall of clouded white glass that rises from the middle of the counter, obscuring both on the other side. These barriers are nicknamed Zion curtains, a dig at the Church of Mormons that hold a large influence over the population of Utah.

In Utah, you cannot watch a bartender shake and mix your drink, because the state’s law requires —in accordance with Mormon’s religious views on drinking— that bartenders perform the act behind a curtain, lest the more impressionable and underage audience should see it and be tempted to indulge in liquor. To spare their virgin eyes, state lawmakers dictated that all alcohol-serving establishments within the state, especially those that opened after 2010, erect a 7-feet 2-inches high partition separating the bartenders from the patrons.

A frosted glass curtain hides a portion of the bar at Brio Tuscan Grille at Fashion Place Mall. Photo credit: sltrib.com

The Chemical Valley of Sarnia

2017-01-27T12:54:00.001+05:30

These tall chimneys billowing thick, toxic smoke stand on the banks of the Saint Clair River, on the outskirts of the Canadian city of Sarnia, in Southwestern Ontario. Stretching for over 30 kilometers along the riverbank from the southern tip of Lake Huron to the village of Sombra, this region has been nicknamed the Chemical Valley, because of the large concentration of petroleum and chemical factories that are packed together here, elbow-to-elbow, within an area the size of a hundred city blocks. Sarnia’s Chemical Valley is home to sixty-two chemical plants accounting for nearly 40 percent of Canada's chemical industry. These industrial complexes are the heart of Sarnia's infrastructure and economy, creating —directly and indirectly— more than fifty thousand jobs in the area.

Photo credit: P199/Wikimedia

The Floating Bridges of Seattle

2017-01-25T23:18:00.001+05:30

A bridge of concrete and steel that floats may seem highly unusual, if not impossible, but there are twenty such bridges around the world, five in the U.S. state of Washington alone, of which four are the longest floating bridges in the world.

Floating bridges, also known as pontoon bridges, are usually temporary structures built out of wood during times of emergencies such as war. Wooden floats and sometimes boats are lashed together and flat planks are laid over creating a roadway, allowing men and materials to cross bodies of water. Pontoon bridges have been used to great advantage in many battles throughout history, including the Second World War and during the Iran–Iraq War.

Homer Hadley Floating Bridge and Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge. Photo credit: Atmoc Taco/Flickr

Playgrounds From The Space Age

2017-01-25T16:59:00.001+05:30

The rocket holds a special place in history. It’s an icon of technological progress that’s both revered and feared at the same time. During the sixties of the last century, the United States and the Soviet Union was gripped by the space-age fever, and the rocket emerged as the fundamental symbol of the space rivalry. Throughout America, as well as the Eastern bloc, rocket shaped structures began popping up across children playgrounds to foster curiosity and excitement about the space race among kids. Aside from rockets there were other fixture resembling various space-age equipment such as satellites, radar tower, planets and even submarines that kids can climb, swing and slide from.

A rocket slide at a playground in Iowa, United States. Photo credit: Carl Wycoff/Flickr

The Execution Dock on River Thames

2017-01-24T22:18:00.001+05:30

Travellers to early modern London, while approaching the port city up the river Thames, were greeted by a ghastly sight. The riverbank was lined with gallows, from which hung a number of rotting corpses, bound in iron cages. They swung in the wind and made a horrid creaking noise that both terrified and offended wayfarers. But the gallows at London’s infamous Execution Dock would remain for nearly four hundred years.

This was a time when Britain was expanding its empire. The British crown, driven by commercial ambitions and the necessity to one-up the competition with Spain and France, began setting up colonies at far-flung places across the oceans. The crown traded extensively with its colonies. The colonies provided essential raw materials for England, and at the same time, served as markets for British manufactured goods.

A replica gallows by the River Thames in London. Photo credit: Toby Bradbury/Flickr

The House Where Hitler Was Born

2017-01-23T20:55:00.001+05:30

Braunau am Inn, on the south bank of the Inn river, close to the border with Germany, is a charming little town in Austria. But it carries a dark legacy.

Not far from the main square is the street Salzburger Vorstadt, where stands a nondescript three-story, beige-colored brick building, bearing house number 15. It’s the house where Adolf Hitler was born.

The leader of the Nazi party was born here on 20 April 1889. At that time, the building was a modest guest house where Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler Sr., was staying with his wife and Adolf’s mother, Klara Pölzl, during the years when Hitler senior was posted as minor customs official at the nearby Austrian–German border. The Hitlers lived in the building only for a few weeks, before the family moved to another address in Braunau. When Adolf was three years old, the family left the town for good. Hitler returned only briefly to Braunau in 1938, on his way to Vienna, after he annexed Austria to Nazi Germany.

Photo credit: Michael Kranewitter/Wikimedia

The Terrifying Beauty of Melting Icecaps

2017-01-23T12:33:00.001+05:30

Every summer, as the air warms up and the sunlight beats down on the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, pools of brilliantly blue melt water are formed across the pristine white landscape. While summer time melting is normal, over the past several decades, the rate of melting has been alarming high and these deep blue lakes are appearing in increasing numbers, higher and higher up on the ice cap.

These pictures, by photographer Timo Lieber, document the phenomenon.

“I’ve always had a passion for the ice, Leiber told The Guardian. “I’d been to Iceland seven or eight times, to Arctic Norway and to Greenland. Greenland’s contribution to global sea-level rise is about three times that of Antarctica. I saw how fast the landscape was changing and wanted to put it into a body of work.”

Photo credit: Timo Lieber

The House Made of Newspapers

2017-01-21T15:29:00.001+05:30

If you go to Rockport someday, in Massachusetts, the United States, take some time to drive down Pigeon Hill Street and look out for a sign that says “Paper House”. Park your car near the sidewalk and go visit this unique, one story red house that looks like an ordinary log cabin, but is actually made of paper.

The paper house began in 1922 when Elis Stenman, a mechanical engineer, began building a small summer home. It started out like any other home, with a timber frame, shingle roof and floors, but when it came to the walls, Stenman had different ideas. The walls of the Paper House is made up of layers upon layers of old newspapers, glued together until they are about an inch thick, then finished off with a nice coat of varnish. Everything inside the paper house is also made of paper. Stenman built chairs, tables, bookshelves and even curtains and a clock out of newspaper and magazine pages. Only the piano is made of wood and covered with paper to maintain uniformity, and the fireplace is made of bricks, for obvious reason.

Photo credit: Danielle Walquist Lynch/Flickr

Ecce Homo: The Botched Painting That Saved a Town

2017-01-20T15:49:00.001+05:30

Eighty-three year old amateur artist Cecilia Giménez had nothing but good intentions when she turned her attention towards a deteriorating fresco of Jesus Christ painted on the walls of the Sanctuary of Mercy church, in the small Spanish town of Borja. The fresco titled Ecce Homo (meaning “Behold the Man”) was made by the Spanish artist Elías García Martínez in 1930, and although the work was of “little artistic importance”, according to the general opinion amongst the press, because “Martínez is not a great artist and his painting Ecce Homo is not a ‘masterpiece,’” the fresco nevertheless held some sentimental value within the local community. So when the original paint on the fresco started flaking, Cecilia Giménez, who had no formal training, took it upon herself to restore the ageing artwork.

The damaged fresco of Ecce Homo on the left, and the ‘restored’ version on the right.

A Hanging Tree, Graves And Hemingway: The Colorful History of Captain Tony's Saloon

2017-01-19T15:54:00.001+05:30

There appears to be nothing remarkable about Captain Tony's Saloon housed in a yellow, two-storied building at 428 Greene Street in Key West, Florida. But the inside is steeped in history.

Said to be the oldest bar in Key West, what is now Captain Tony's Saloon was the original Sloppy Joe's Bar, where legendary writer Ernest Hemingway spent most of his evenings. It was at Captain Tony's Saloon where well known folk country singer Jimmy Buffett got his start, playing for tips and beers —an experience he later described in the song "Last Mango in Paris." The pub’s other celebrity patrons include Truman Capote, Bob Dylan, Duane Cahill, Tommy Newell, and even John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman, among others.

Photo credit: Sam Howzit/Flickr

Kitsault: The Ghost Town Where Lights Are Still On But No One’s Home

2017-01-18T11:08:00.001+05:30

Think ghost town and you’ll probably imagine ruins —roofless houses, dirty broken windows, rotting floors, but at Kitsault, on the North Coast of British Columbia, Canada, you’ll find rows upon rows of immaculately kept houses, shopping centers, restaurants, banks, pubs and theaters, all abandoned and sitting empty but untouched and spotless. The town’s lights are always on, the streets are lined with neatly trimmed trees and there are freshly mowed lawns, yet no one has called Kitsault home since 1982.

The town of Kitsault, near the Alaskan border, situated about 115 kilometers down the gravel road from Terrace, had a very brief existence. It began in 1979 as a community of workers of the molybdenum mines. Molybdenum forms hard, stable carbides in alloys, and is often used to provide hardness and corrosion resistance properties to steel. But just as life was getting started in this pristine mountain utopia, the market for molybdenum crashed and the entire town of some 1,200 residents abandoned it.

Photo credit: Bob Steventon/Flickr

The Infamous Mauthausen Stairs of Death

2017-01-16T23:08:00.001+05:30

The Mauthausen concentration camp, situated about 20 kilometers east of the city of Linz in Upper Austria, was the hub of one of the largest labor camp complexes in the German-controlled part of Europe, with a central camp near the village of Mauthausen, and nearly one hundred other subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. Among these Mauthausen had the most brutal detention conditions. It was classified “Grade III”, where the most “incorrigible political enemies of the Reich” were sent to be exterminated, often through exhaustion by grueling forced labor. The SS called Mauthausen Knochenmühle, or the bone grinder.

The camp was located on the edge of a granite quarry where camp inmates were sent to work. Indeed, the site for the camp was chosen because of the quarry’s close proximity to Linz, a city Hitler planned to rebuild with grandiose buildings as envisioned by Albert Speer.

The Stairs of Death at Mauthausen concentration camp, then and now.

La Pascualita, The Corpse Bride

2017-01-16T15:49:00.001+05:30

Peering out from behind the glass window of a small bridal shop in Chihuahua, Mexico, stands a tall, slender figure dressed in bridal costume. For close to ninety years, this unnervingly lifelike mannequin at La Popular —the bridal store— has been beguiling visitors from across America and Europe. The mannequin’s pallid skin, her veined hands, the wrinkles on her palms, and her worn out fingernails have people more than convinced that La Pascualita, as she is popularly known, is not a dummy but a perfectly preserved, embalmed corpse.

La Pascualita, or “Little Pascuala”, first appeared on the windows of this well-known bridal store on March 25, 1930. The mannequin’s wide-set glass eyes, real hair and blushing skin tones immediately struck passersby, including the store employees. It wasn’t long before someone noted the strikingly similarity between the mannequin and the recently deceased daughter of the store owner. The stage for the rumor was set.

Photo credit: Xavi Valero/Flickr

The Second Life of Wind Turbine Blades

2017-01-12T21:14:00.001+05:30

As the world pushes towards renewable energy, the wind energy industry comes to the forefront as a clean and a genuinely green energy. And like any other industry, the wind industry too is technologically evolving producing bigger and better upgrades, which means that old wind farms are being regularly decommissioned and refitted with upgraded equipment. Herein, comes the question of recycling, and the wind industry has a reputation to hold. Unfortunately, one of the largest component of a wind turbine —the blades— are completely unrecyclable.

Turbine blades are made from glass or carbon-fiber composites. These materials are strong, lightweight and has a significant aerodynamic advantage, but they are nearly impossible to recycle. Hence, at the end of their lifecycle, most of these blades end up as waste on landfills. According to one estimate, there will be 50,000 tons of blade waste in 2020, which will rise to more than 200,000 tons by 2034.

A playground in Rotterdam built out of decommissioned wind turbine blades. Photo credit: Denis Guzzo/Flickr

The Frankincense Trees of Wadi Dawkah

2017-01-11T22:47:00.001+05:30

For more than 5,000 years, the Arabs have traded two highly prized fragrances —frankincense and myrrh— obtained from trees that grow exclusively in the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. The dried, aromatic sap was transported by caravan across the Sinai desert to Egypt, via the so called “incense route”, from where they were loaded onto ships and sailed to far away destinations across the Mediterranean Sea.

Frankincense and myrrh were in high demand from Europe to Asia. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Israelites and numerous other cultures used these perfumes as part of their religious ceremonies, and in burial rituals as an embalming material, and as an offering to the departed. Frankincense was one of the three gifts brought to the baby Jesus by the three wise men, according to The Gospel of Matthew.

Photo credit: Chris Price/Flickr

Semaphore: The World’s First Telegraph

2017-01-11T12:08:00.001+05:30

Smoke signals and beacons have been used to relay messages over short distances since ancient times, but the only reliable way to send messages over long distances was to dispatch a horse-riding messenger or a homing pigeon —until the arrival of the electrical telegraph. But fifty years before dots and dashes killed the messenger, for a brief period, there was another kind of telegraph in Europe —the optical variety, based on the same principle of flag waving that the Navy still use today. It was called the semaphore, and relics of this amazingly efficient 19th century network can still be found around Europe.

The semaphore was the first successful and large-scale communication network that allowed transmission of messages faster than horse-riding messengers could carry. Indeed, the very word “telegraph”, which means distance writing, in Greek, was coined to describe this nationwide network of semaphore.

Illustration of a semaphore tower in Napoleonic France. Photo credit: Internet Archive

Rosalia Lombardo: The Mummy That Blinks

2017-01-10T11:00:00.001+05:30

Rosalia Lombardo was only two years old when she died from pneumonia in 1920. Her premature death left her father so heartbroken that he approached the noted embalmer, Alfredo Salafia, and asked him to preserve Rosalia’s body. Alfredo Salafia, a skillful embalmer and taxidermist, performed such an excellent operation on Rosalia that nearly a hundred years after her death, the little girl appears to be merely dozing beneath the glass case in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy, where she rests. Her little cheeks are stiff puffy. Tuffs of blonde hair are gathered around a knot above her head and tied by a silk bow. Even her internal organs are intact, as revealed by X-ray scans. Nicknamed the “sleeping beauty”, Rosalia Lombardo has gained the reputation of being one of the world’s best preserved mummies.

Rosalia’s perfectly preserved body is only part of the attraction. Visitors who come to see her swear that the little girl actually blinks here eyes. These sequence of pictures show her eyelids eerily opening and closing by a fraction of an inch. Her blue eyes are intact, like the rest of the body, and can be seen glistening in the low lights inside the catacombs.

The Museum of Bad Art

2017-01-07T15:19:00.001+05:30

On rare occasions, a thrift store or a pawnshop can yield items of extreme value, but these are hardly the places you can expect to bump into the museum director of the Louvre or the Metropolitan. But Michael Frank is the head of a museum of a different breed, and a thrift store or a flea market is exactly the sort of place he would visit whenever he wants to enrich the museum's collection.

Frank works for the Museum of Bad Art, the only museum in the world “dedicated to bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences”. The museum has three galleries in Brookline, Somerville and South Weymouth, all in the Boston area, where up to seventy pieces of atrocious artwork are displayed at a time, although the museum's actual collection numbers about 600 pieces.

“Charlie and Sheba”, a painting at the Museum of Bad Art, where “art is too bad to be ignored.”

London Necropolis Railway: The Train For The Dead

2017-01-06T15:36:00.001+05:30

It was a difficult time to be alive in 1848 London, and worse still to be dead. A cholera epidemic had just swept through the city killing nearly 15,000 of its inhabitants, and bodies were literally pilling up besides churches waiting to be buried. But there was one problem: there was no space to bury.

The population of London was soaring. In 1801, the city had less than a million people living. In 1851, that figure had more than doubled to almost two and a half million. But the 300 acres allotted for burial space remain unchanged, requiring old graves, and some relatively fresh ones, to be regularly exhumed to make room for new burials. The old corpses were crumpled and scattered contaminating the soil and water supply resulting in fresh bouts of epidemics. Cholera, smallpox, measles, typhoid were pervasive in Victorian London.

A third class coffin ticket issued to passengers of the London Necropolis Railway. Photo credit: qi.com

Oasis Bordello Museum: A 1988 Cat House Frozen in Time

2017-01-05T15:30:00.001+05:30

In the heart of the Silver Valley mining district in the US state of Idaho, is an old dusty town called Wallace with a population of about eight hundred. But when the mines were booming in the early to the mid 20th century, there were four times as many residents. At that time men outnumbered women 200 to 1, so brothels were another thriving business.

Wallace had several active whorehouses servicing the men at night after a laborious day of work at the mines. When prostitution was outlawed in 1973, all but one closed. Run by Madame Ginger, the Oasis Rooms simply took down its sign and continued operation. Madame Ginger made sure that enough donations were made to the local police fund to keep trouble out of the way. Law officers weren’t the only ones who benefitted from Madame's philanthropic activities. She also made generous contribution to the local economy, sponsoring the Wallace High School’s band uniform, for example. So when the FBI got wind of her illegal operation and prepared to raid her brothel in January 1988, Madame Ginger was tipped off. The employer along with all the girls grabbed whatever they could carry and vanished, never to return again.

Photo credit: visitidaho.org

The Anti-Communist Dwarves of Wroclaw

2017-01-04T15:05:00.001+05:30

Scattered throughout the city of Wroclaw, Poland, are hundreds of small bronze statues of dwarves. They began appearing in the streets in 2005, but their roots go back to the 1980s, to an anti-communist underground movement called the Orange Alternative.

In the 1980s when Poland was still under the communist rule, the Orange Alternative Movement started in Wroclaw as a way to peacefully protest against the authoritarian regime. The group found creative ways to stage protest, often bordering on silliness, such as dressing up as dwarfs and painting figures of dwarfs over all communist symbols throughout the city. The idea was to use absurd and nonsensical elements so that participants could not be arrested by the police. The movement spread to other cities around Poland like Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin, and Tomaszów Mazowiecki, eventually becoming a part of the larger Solidarity Movement that led to the fall of Communism in Poland.

Three dwarves —one blind, one in wheelchair and one who is hard of hearing— in front of the Old Town Hall in Wroclaw, portray Wroclaw’s image as a disabled-friendly city. Photo credit: Piotr/Flickr

Casey: The Small Town of Big Things

2017-01-03T23:35:00.001+05:30

At just over two square miles and with less than 3,000 inhabitants, the town of Casey in Illinois might be among the smaller towns of the United States, but it's home to some of the biggest things in the world. These include a wind chime, a rocking chair, knitting needles and a crochet hook, a mailbox, a pitchfork, a golf tee, a pair of wooden shoes, a coin, a birdcage, a yardstick, a pencil, a ear of corn, saguaro cactus and many more. Eight of these have found place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Behind all these big attractions is a single man —local businessman Jim Bolin.

Bolin is the vice president of Bolin Enterprises Inc., which started out as a small paint and body shop operating out of his family garage. Today it employs 240 people and does oil and natural gas pipeline maintenance work across nearly half the country. But not all businesses in Casey shared Bolin’s success. Over the years Bolin watched several Casey businesses close shop — a shoe factory, a tools and manufacturing shop, a hardware store, a feed store. When the recession hit in the late 2000s, even Bolin started to feel the crunch. That’s when he decided that he needed to boost tourism to the town to help the local economy.

Photo credit: bigthingssmalltown.com