Timeline of the Far Future This article features the first new content for this project after its fourth birthday. Anniversaries inherently elicit exercises in tense: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? I tried to envision what an episode of The Mountains Are Calling might look like in a year or five. […]
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Hair Ice/Frost Beard Documentarian Ken Burns called the National Parks “America’s Best Idea.” The splendor conserved within the boundaries of the park system features some of the planet’s greatest scenery. The humans who serve within the National Park Service also deserve plaudits. They oversee the pragmatics of the units and contain a wealth of knowledge to share
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The Walking Sticks of Ball’s Pyramid Today’s topic might win an award for the most misleading title. Given our penchant for hiking, one might surmise we’ll explore a special cane used on trails to a majestic pyramid crafted by humans (or aliens, amirite?) to look like a sphere. I’m not exactly sure how a spherical
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The Whitest White We learned the Blackest Black has some incredible applications, beyond turning objects into mind-melting black holes. A substance that can absorb nearly all the light that hits it can work marvels on telescopes or solar cells. The secret to carbon nanotubes – the structures that make the serious blacks possible – is to bounce
Eigengrau Close your eyes. What color do you see? Disregard any of the artifacts that linger from light sources that impacted your eyes before you closed them. Those kaleidoscopic blobs are fascinating, but they’re not what we’re after here. They should fade relatively quickly. Some people experience these light shows all the time, thanks
The Blackest Black Color is a prismatic subject, if we can strain an adjective to its limits. Are black and white colors? Open your box of crayons; white and black will likely nestle in the neat rows. So, they’re colors, right? In physical optics, however, black and white are not treated as colors. Check a
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The World’s First Forest If you had to guess, where would you place the planet’s oldest forest? The world’s oldest known tree – a bristlecone pine called Methuselah – is nearly 5,000 years old. Technical definitions of “forest” are nebulous, but they largely revolve around biomes that contain numerous trees. Forests see trees come and go, some
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The Crabs of Christmas Island In 1615, about 200 miles south of the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra, Europeans first spied a 52-square-mile spit in the distance. Nearly three decades later, Captain William Mynors sailed aboard the Royal Mary for the East India Company. On 25 December 1643, Mynors spotted the same isle and decided to
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Mortal Flower That Perishes Like All That Is Pure One of life’s great small pleasures is the glory that emerges from translating proper native names into other languages. Sometimes we garner a euphonious moniker with a plain strict translation. For example, Katahdin is a musical name that means “Great Mountain.” While Maine’s High Point certainty is a
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