The Pillars of Hercules The Mediterranean Sea stood at the center of the world for many archaic cultures of Europe, Asia, and Africa. To the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, and all but the most intrepid Phoenician Sailors, the western reaches of the great sea represented the end of the world. This area reportedly bore the slogan Ne […]
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The Atlantic Fall Line The United Nations estimate that approximately 40% of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of an ocean. A Reddit user named gnfnrf performed some back-of-the-napkin calculations and determined this area accounts for somewhere between 1.5% and 12.15% of Earth’s total landmass (measurements of coastline are notoriously difficult to determine), meaning people pack
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The Sami Speedster On 27 July 2023, Kristin Harila and Tenjin Sherpa stood atop K2, the world’s second-highest peak. By itself, this summit represents a world-class achievement; significantly fewer than 1,000 people have ever occupied this location. For Harila and Tenjin, however, success on the Savage Mountain represented something even more stunning. In 2019, Nirmal Purja
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The Meg Jaws doesn’t own a monopoly on horror films with giant sharks. 1999’s Deep Blue Sea features a glorious death scene, where Samuel L. Jackson proselytizes in a way only he can, before being devoured by genetically modified makos. In 2013, SyFy introduced the world to the Sharknado universe, in which sharks emerge from tornados inside hurricanes. Most shark
Deep Blue & Haole Girl In the novel Jaws by Peter Benchley, the great white shark that terrorizes Amity Island in New York is approximately 20 feet long. For the film version, Steven Spielberg created an animatronic beast they dubbed Bruce, who reached 25 feet in length. As the sequels rolled in over the years, the sharks
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Shark Week In July 1988, Discovery Channel launched a programming block based on sharks. The first iteration of the theme began with a piece called Caged in Fear, about abalone divers who developed a contraption to keep them safe during their harvests. Now in its 36th season, Shark Week is the longest-running cable television event in history. The
The Corpse Flower Today’s featured object is chock full of interesting and bizarre tidbits. We’ll start with a sentence you probably never thought you’d read: anthophiles worldwide flock to the smell of corpses. Fret not, it’s not human bodies attracting plant lovers, just a scent similar to the one that might emanate from dead bodies.
The Beach Primeval Members of my family have spent holidays at the New Jersey shore for at least 70 years, likely longer. My mother and her siblings traveled with their elders to the boroughs of Seaside Heights and Seaside Park, which sit on a strip that locals call “the barrier island.” The Barnegat Peninsula, also
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Porphyrios Of what precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. — Herman Melville, Moby Dick The Gladises – a family of orcas likened to the combatants of the Roman
The Magic of Hot Water We take for granted many of the comforts of modern life. If an apocalyptic event neutered our system of specialists and severed our ability to access information instantaneously, how many of us could recreate most of the mechanical wonders in our homes? We’re surrounded by wires, fiber optics, and pipes,
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