Author: Ms. R.

If you look at a world map, Cascadia is shaped like a whale swimming south. British Columbia’s temperate rainforest forms the bulk of its body, along with Washington state, Idaho, and much of Oregon. Mountainous Vancouver Island is the pectoral fin. The tail extends north to the southern tip of Alaska, and the whale’s open mouth, facing south, just catches northern California. Tall, dense forests of pine, spruce, and cedar blanket the bioregion. Aquatic species, from barnacles to sea……

Read More

When thinking of a volcano, one probably envisions a giant mountain, with tufts of smoke rising from the top. This is not always the case however, especially if the volcano is created on a sandy beach and is also underwater.  The Priest’s Bathtub is the result of an artesian aquifer erupting millions of years ago. An artesian aquifer is a source of water that is trapped between two impenetrable layers of soil, like clay. This puts pressure on the……

Read More

The Kozukappara Execution Grounds were established in 1651 in the city of Edo, known today as Tokyo, during the days of the samurai. The site was named as one of the Three Major Execution Grounds of Edo, along with Suzugamori and Ōwada. Reportedly, around 200,000 people were put to death here until it was closed in 1873 in order to match the human rights standards of the west. Generally, prisoners were crucified, burned at the stake, or beheaded with……

Read More

Giulio Gelardi walks from tree to tree, making precise incisions on each one with a billhook. He’s surrounded by 100 acres of ash trees, and each cut reveals white sap that also coats fishing lines he has hung from collection points on the branches. Overnight, the sap dries into stalactites that Gelardi plucks and places in a basket. Dark clouds roll in above. “If it rains too much, it could mean the end of the season,” he explains. “I……

Read More

A town hall is often intended to represent the city that it is in—a point of local pride, as large as possible given the local finances. But when the town is tiny and money short? You might just end up with Europe’s smallest city hall.  Sigtuna was once the capital of Sweden and one of the country’s biggest and most bustling cities. However, that was a millennium ago, and the capital has since moved twice, to from Uppsala and……

Read More

Everybody know that Philadelphia has a Rocky Balboa statue—it is a part of Atlas Obscura and one of the more popular sights in the City of Brotherly Love. There was another, a replica, in San Diego that was bought at auction by a private collector in 2017—who turned out to be Sylvester Stallone himself. And then there’s a third one—in Žitište, Serbia. Not a copy of the A. Thomas Schomberg original, it was made by Croatian sculptor Boris Staparac in……

Read More

Along the Carrickfergus promenade sits a restored Churchill MK VII Tank from World War II. The tank was originally designed and produced by Belfast’s Harland and Wolff factory during the war. However, during The Blitz, Belfast and other parts of the United Kingdom decided to move certain manufacturing operations to safer locations. One location was Carrickfergus. Along the Woodburn Road, these types of tanks and others such as the Matilda and Centaur series were constructed. The Churchill MK VII……

Read More

In the early 1940s, between the Winter War and the Continuation War, tensions were high in Finland. The Soviets could invade, seemingly, at any moment. As a result, in 1940, Finland began the construction of Salpalinja (the “Salpa Line”), a system of more than 700 field fortifications made from concrete or excavated from rock along Finland’s eastern border.  Stretching 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) from the Gulf of Finland in the south to modern-day Pechengsky, Russia, in the north, Salpalinja consisted……

Read More

On a foggy July morning in Seoul, 76-year-old Moo-Dae was sitting on a bench in the belly of the Saejeol metro station when he felt the need to write a poem. In the humid summer heat, he was imagining a lonely winter scene: a woman sitting by a flickering candle in the 1970s, waiting for her husband to come home. “I wanted to write about loneliness,” Moo-Dae recalls a few days later, in his native Korean. His real name……

Read More

Leafless trees that cascade shadows in the dark are often synonymous with fear, derived from our world of horror movies and Halloween adventures. A normal tree does the job quite well, but these trees found in Sweden, with their twisted, irregular forms, create an element of creepiness even in light. Dwarf beech trees are a cultivar of European beech trees. Also known as vresbok, a rare mutation disrupts this species growth cycle causing it to sprout in what appears to……

Read More