Posts Tagged ‘exploration’
“Dust to dust”*…
Back in 2016, we visited Jay Owens and his fascinating newsletter on dust… which went silent a couple of years later. Those of us who missed it, and were worried about its author were relieved to learn that he’d pulled back in order to turn his thinking into a book. That book is now here: Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, and The Guardian is here with an excerpt…
… Nobody normally thinks about dust, what it might be doing or where it should go: it is so tiny, so totally, absolutely, mundane, that it slips beneath the limits of vision. But if we pay attention, we can see the world within it.
Before we go any further, I should define my terms. What do I mean by dust? I want to say everything: almost everything can become dust, given time. The orange haze in the sky over Europe in the spring, the pale fur that accumulates on my writing desk and the black grime I wipe from my face in the evening after a day traversing the city. Dust gains its identity not from a singular material origin, but instead through its form (tiny solid particles), its mode of transport (airborne) and, perhaps, a certain loss of context, an inherent formlessness. If we knew precisely what it was made of, we might not call it dust, but instead dander or cement or pollen. “Tiny flying particles,” though, might suffice as a practical starting definition…
…
Dust is simultaneously a symbol of time, decay and death – and also the residue of life. Its meaning is never black or white, but grey and somewhat fuzzy. Living with dust – as we must – is a slow lesson in embracing contradiction: to clean, but not identify with cleanliness; to respect the material need for hygiene while distrusting it profoundly as a social metaphor…
A fascinating sample of a fascinating book: “Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world,” from @hautepop in @guardian.
Pair with: “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand” and “In every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.”
* from the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer
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As we examine the elemental, we might send exploratory birthday greetings to Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt; he was born on this date in 1769. The younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander was a geographer, geologist, archaeologist, naturalist, explorer, and champion of Romantic philosophy. Among many other contributions to human knowledge, his quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography; he surveyed and collected geological, zoological, botanical, and ethnographic specimens, including over 60,000 rare or new tropical plants.
As a geologist, Humboldt made pioneering observations of geological stratigraphy, structure (he named the Jurassic System), and geomorphology; and he understood the connections between volcanism and earthquakes. His advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
For more, see: The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World.
“Trees are sanctuaries”*…
John Lewis-Stempel recounts a day in the life of an oak and the creatures that call it home…
Our friends the trees have an unremarkable life, or so it seems to us. They come into leaf, their fruit drops, or is gorged on by birds and the winds of autumn strip them of their dressing to leave them as the cold, bare sentinels of winter.
However, if we were to stand, tree-like ourselves, in a British copse and watch a single oak tree for an entire 24 hours — say when spring hatches out of winter — what would we see?…
Among their deceptively inert branches, trees shelter feathered Pavarottis, scuttling beetles, opportunistic fungi and fierce owls. A quick– and delightful– course in woodland ecology: “A day in the life of an oak tree, from mistle thrush in the morning to mice at midnight,” from @JLewisStempel in @Countrylifemag.
* Herman Hesse
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As we deliberate on the deciduous, we might send fertile birthday greetings to John Bartram; he was born on this date in 1699. An American botanist, horticulturist, and explorer, based in Philadelphia for most of his career, he was judged by Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to be the “greatest natural botanist in the world.”
He started what is known as Bartram’s Garden in 1728 at his farm in Kingsessing (now part of Philadelphia)– considered the first botanic garden in the United States. His sons and descendants operated it until 1850; it still operates under a partnership between the city of Philadelphia and a non-profit foundation, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
“Oh the places you’ll go”*…
The amazing life of “Gudrid the Far-Traveled” has, Frank Jacobs argues, been unjustly overshadowed by her in-laws, Erik the Red and Leif Erikson…
She’s been called “the greatest female explorer of all time,” and the “best-traveled woman of the Middle Ages.” Just after the year 1000 AD, she gave birth to the first European baby in North America. And she concluded her global odyssey with a pilgrimage on foot to Rome. Yet few today can name this extraordinary Viking lady, even if they have heard of Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, her father- and brother-in-law…
An extraordinary story: “The Viking woman who sailed to America and walked to Rome,” from @VeryStrangeMaps in @bigthink.
* Dr. Seuss
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As we tag along, we might recall that this date in 2014 was purportedly the date of the final battle in Ragnarök, a series of events (many natural disasters) culminating in a catastrophic battle and the end of the world-as-we-know-it: giants and demons approach from all points of the compass and attack the gods (Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdall, Loki, et al.), who meet them and face death like heroes. At the conflict’s end, the sun darkens, the stars vanish, and the earth sinks into the sea. (Happily, afterward, the earth rises again, the innocent Balder returns from the dead, and leads hosts of the just to a life in a hall roofed with gold.)
In the event, of course, the world did not end that day. The prediction had been promoted by the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England, intended to draw attention to an event that the institution was to hold on that date. In an obvious lift from the 2012 Mayan Prophecy frenzy, the Centre attributed the claim to a “Viking Calendar,” though no such calendar is known to have existed. Authentic scholars were predictably (and understandably) irked, though as philologist Joseph Hopkins noted, the media response was an example of a broad revival of interest in the Viking Age and ancient Germanic topics.
(Historians believe that Gudrid did in fact exist and did make the journeys discussed above.)
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”*…
As Dylan Matthews explains, 80 percent of young Americans still live within 100 miles of where they spent their teenage years…
A new paper by Harvard’s Ben Sprung-Keyser and Nathaniel Hendren, and the Census Bureau’s Sonya Porter, takes an in-depth look at young adults leaving home. The big takeaway is … they do not.
At age 26, the authors find, 30 percent of Americans live in the census tract they lived in at 16. Fifty-eight percent live less than 10 miles away;80 percent live less than 100 miles away; 90 percent live less than 500 miles away. Census tracts are tiny, hyper-local designations, with populations between 1,200 and 8,000 each; mine is only 0.2 square miles in area. The small town where I grew up has three tracts within it. Staying within your tract is an extreme level of residential stasis, but 30 percent of young adults do just that…
As the demographers and sociologists reading this are likely to point out, the finding that people mostly stay put is not new. Indeed, residential mobility inside the US has been cratering for years, and kept falling even during the pandemic, despite narratives about city residents fleeing…
How race and class play into this trend, how distant job opportunities don’t, and what might be done to change the pattern: “The great millennial migration that wasn’t,” from @dylanmatt at @voxdotcom.
* Albert Einstein
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As we get moving, we might recall that it was on this date in 1610 that explorer and navigator, Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into (what we now know as) Hudson Bay in (what we now know as) Canada. While Hudson is rightly remembered for this and his other explorations and chartings of the northern reaches of North America, it was at the time a disappointment: Hudson initially believed that he had finally found the Northwest Passage through the continent. Months of further exploration and mapping, of course, proven him wrong.
“Sharks. I never saw that coming.”*…
While many land-based predators (like wolves) avoid cities, scientists tracking sharks in Florida’s Biscayne Bay found the fish spent just as much time near Miami as away from it. Warren Cornwall explains…
Certain kinds of wildlife are notorious for thriving in urban settings. Think rats, rock pigeons and even the occasional coyote. Now, Florida scientists have added another creature to the list: sharks.
While many large predators show little appetite for city living, an intriguing project tracking the movements of sharks as fearsome as hammerheads revealed the fish are unexpectedly tolerant of life up close to the 6 million humans of greater Miami.
“We were surprised to find that the sharks we tracked spent so much time near the lights and sounds of the busy city, often close to shore, no matter the time of day,” said Neil Hammerschlag, director of the University of Miami’s Shark Research and Conservation Program.
Ecologists group animals into two main categories when it comes to their tolerance for human development. Some, like raccoons or rats, have figured out how to capitalize on the trash we make and the nooks and crannies we build. They are “urban exploiters.” Then there are the animals like mountain lions, lynxes and wolves that generally give human infrastructure a wide berth, often abandoning habitat where roads or buildings encroach. These are the “urban avoiders.”
As that list suggests, on land, big, toothy predators generally keep their distance from the din of the city. But less is known about their aquatic counterparts. So, a group of researchers set out to see if the sharks of Miami’s Biscayne Bay might shed some light on the matter…
“The new wildlife in town: Sharks,” from @WarrenCornwall in @AnthropoceneMag.
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As we hug the shore, we might send deep birthday greetings to Robert Ballard; he was born on this date in 1942. An oceanographer, explorer, retired naval officer, and professor, he noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is probably best known for his discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998, and the wreck of John F. Kennedy’s PT-109 in 2002. But he believes that his most important discovery was the existence of hydrothermal vents.
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