Theatrum Orbis Terrarum

Ends of the Earth

2007-11-27T10:59:00.000-08:00

Long gone now are the days of dangerous expeditions, S. A. Andrée's attempt to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon, or Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

Though I fully intend to see the top of the world, reaching the North Pole is no longer the great feat it once was. There's cell service, you're flown up in a toasty plane to a landing strip on the ice sixty kilometers from the pole (cleared seasonally - and as the ice allows - by a bulldozer), and visitors are lodged at Camp Borneo, complete with heated tents, cots, and regular trips in aging Soviet helicopters straight to 90° N.

Of course, the six feet of ice over the pole is constantly shifting, so you're never able to stand there for very long. The bulldozer that clears the runway fell through the ice this year, and in an NPR article last week (still looking for the link), I listened to a woman who, while recording, fell into a crack in the ice - cracks which constantly dis- and reappear. If the runway breaks up, nobody leaves.

At the other end of the world, NASA released their new map of Antarctica yesterday, comprised of over 1,000 true-color satellite photos. Still, the South Pole remains a slightly more challenging destination than its opposite, if only for monetary reasons (tours to the actual pole average US$35,000 - $50,000), but getting there is still quite possible. There are tours around the fringes of the continent as well (by helicopter, coast-hugging ships, or some combination of the two), and, of course, the Ice Marathon.

Having every square meter of a place mapped out from the air doesn't mean it's given up all its secrets. Liquid lakes are still being found beneath the ice (the most famous of which is the massive Lake Vostok), which have given rise to much speculation over the possibility of life in the water, and - given their similar environments - on Europa.

Last week, I was reminded by a coworker that within 15 years, the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro could be gone. If I put off trips to the poles long enough, it will be as simple as a boat ride, or a nice hike with a light jacket, to make it to the ends of the earth.

Abandoned Train Stations (US)

2007-09-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

While there's no great lost continents left to discover, human expansion provides. Multiplying at an exponential rate, building over and around what already exists, fossilizing the past for future generations to discover.

I've always kept sites I've found myself secret, and I never myself publish anything that I think might be undiscovered or otherwise sensitive (the location of the Golden Tunnel, for instance). I only repeat what's already been made quite public. The less forgotten these places become, the more likely it is that the proper authorities will come bearing padlocks, barbed wire, and security cameras.

That said, abandoned train stations & tunnels from NYC. The same rules apply when you're trekking through the mountains, "Take only photos, leave only footsteps." Don't be an jerk.

Socio-Economic Disparity

2007-09-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

I'm reminded of an incident a few years ago when I was in Michigan. A visiting scholar from the International Affairs College in Beijing sat in on a human rights course I was taking. Afterwards, myself and a friend, who had spent a semester in Beijing, approached the visiting scholar and asked her if she would like to go out for coffee. She agreed, and we went to a Caribou Coffee near campus.

My friend asked, "So, what do you think so far?" as she had never been to the States before. The visiting scholar replied, "Oh, well, everyone here has so much money." My friend and I exchanged looks.

The woman had been picked up at the airport by a few professors and whisked away in a car down the high-walled highways that lead out of the airport and the slums of Detroit and straight into the plush, sprawling lawns and massive homes that populate Auburn Hills, MI. She was most likely housed on-campus, and spent all of her time being hand-led around the university. Even if there was any sort of mass-transit in Michigan, she didn't have a lot of time for exploration.

Silently, my friend and I decided it was necessary to expand on her statement. "You know," I began, "Not everyone here is wealthy. In fact, there are many Americans who are very poor." She looked at both of us, my friend nodded, and mentioned that just a stone's throw from campus was Pontiac, MI (generally considered to be more destitute and broken than Detroit, and compacted into a much smaller area). Then my friend smiled, "Would you like to see it?"

The visiting professor clearly was an intelligent person, and as any intelligent person would, she wanted to have an accurate picture of the country she was visiting. She agreed, and off we went, down I-59 into the heart of Pontiac. Even before we were in the heart of the city, she, looking around, let escape an, "...Oh." We drove aimlessly through neighborhoods with burnt-out, boarded up houses and rusted cars on blocks. We definitely made an impact on her, and her view of America. Apparently it got to the university's president, as well, who was less than thrilled.

All this aside, the buildings in Pontiac, condemned and rotting though they were, and their proximity to obsessively manicured lawns (and owners), could not begin to compare to that of the living conditions of some of the world's most poor, the less-than-a-dollar-a-day crowd.

I find it even more interesting that we can look at pictures like the ones in the link above, and not notice the disparity in our own surroundings; parallels within our own home countries go unnoticed because we're simply so used to them. Like staring at a blank wall, eventually the corners of your vision fade to black.

The solution? Move around.

A Bricked-Over Doorway - Seattle, WA

2007-08-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

Walking around a few days ago, I peeked between two loose boards in the fence surrounding the construction hole between James & Cherry / 3rd & 4th (apologies for ineloquent directions, I wasn't raised in a city).

I noticed that, in it's southeast (James & 4th) corner has, at the bottom of what looks to be about five stories deep, a bricked-over doorway leading, it seems, under 4th Avenue. I'm not sure if it connects to the bus tunnel, City Hall, or somehow to Seattle's underground, but, man, I'd sure love to find out.

Chacabuco, Chile

2007-08-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

In northern Chile lies the Atacama Desert, 100 times more arid than Death Valley.

I'm not a big fan of heat. Perhaps it's where I grew up, but I've always felt that it's better to need layering up than stripping down, as once you reach nude, you've hit the wall. Freezing to death certainly seems to be preferrable to heat exhaustion; I've experienced Stage 2 hypothermia before on a few occasions and I would certainly prefer it to the convulsions, vomiting, and blindness which result from hyperpyrexia and dehydration (see William Langewiesche's delightful descriptions of death by hyperthermia in Sahara Unveiled).

Nevertheless, within this desert lies the abandoned ruins of several silver nitrate mining towns, abandoned in the 1930s after the invention of synthetic silver nitrate. Of them, Chacaburo is probably the most famous; repurposed under Pinochet as a concentration camp, it now lies surrounded by mines. A former prisoner of the camp, Pedro Barreda, became a self-appointed caretaker to prevent the ghost town from vandals and people from landmines. He died in 2006, at which time he was replaced by Roberto Saldívar.

Short of going to an abandoned scientific research base on Antarctica, I would dare say that Chacaburo would probably be the ultimate ghost town exploration.

Photosets of Chacabuco: 1 / 2

Trackback Notes:

Found Cacabuco from Wikipedia: Atacama Desert
Followed Atacama Desert from Wikipedia: Extremophile
Extremophile searched because of article on a liquid lake beneath Antarctica.

"What gives value to travel..."

2007-08-06T22:55:00.000-07:00

Today at lunch, after relating some tale of reckless adventure from my childhood, a coworker inquired:

"So, should we all be amazed that you're still here to tell us these stories?"

...and it reminded me of something I had read recently, an essay by Pico Iyer, entitled Why We Travel (takes a while to fully load, but well worth it). In it, Camus is quoted:

"What gives value to travel is fear."

Which is true. I have to admit I was a little aroused by the story my neighbor told me of an abandoned mine on the Olympic Peninsula, cut through a mineral so black that flashlights are rendered nearly useless, and I'm really tempted to try for Kurdistan when I pass through Turkey next year (see "Shooting in Iraq"). But why?

Writer that I am, I know part of it lies in having a great tale to tell. Part of it is seeing something new, something many people will never see. But there are scores of "safe" places which fall into those categories, and "having a good story" and "seeing new places" are the reasons why everyone travels, from socks-and-sandaled cruise shippers to more intrepid wanderers. So why is it that fear, uncertainty, the big Unknown, are all so alluring to those of us who aren't content with our reasonably green grass? The full quote by Camus:

What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity. This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure.

Balestrino, Italy

2007-07-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

44° 07' 27" N, 8° 10' 27" E

While my upcoming trip in February will probably not lead me into Europe any further west than Zagreb (and there are certainly a lot of abandoned castles and villages throughout the former Yugoslavia), a photoset of this little town on the Italian Riviera caught my eye the other day, and made me have second thoughts about not including a Europe leg.

Though the photoset would lead one to believe that the village is abandoned, from some brief Googling (including a very brief history on the town) it seems that Balestrino is indeed populated (~500). Checking the photos against Google Earth, it seems that the abandoned section is only the western part of town, south of the road (SP34) that bisects the village. Nevertheless, it's certainly on the list, and given it's proximity to the coast, it's certainly worth considering for a place to sleep that's out of the way, should I happen to find myself hitching from Genova to Monaco.

The website where I first found Balestrino, Abandoned But Not Forgotten, is now listed in the sidebar. Some of the pages have very little information, some without maps at all, which is of course half the fun. After all, if you want your sightseeing planned for you, Seattle has a splendid alternative.

The Great Blue Hole

2007-07-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

About 60 miles east of Belize City lies the Lighthouse Reef Atoll, home to the Great Blue Hole (which only sounds a little dirty), a large underwater cave which formed during one of the last ice ages, before it was submerged by the rising oceans. Indeed, diving in the cave, one passes by massive stalactites and stalagmites, evidence that the cave was once well above sea level (put that in your pipe and smoke it, creationists).

The Great Blue Hole measures around 1,000 feet across and over 400 feet deep, this is far too big and near civilization to be very far under the radar, and given the warm clime it's rather popular in extreme diving circles, but I feel that it's worth mentioning here anyway. There are several "blue holes" throughout the Bahamas; a great collection of information on blue holes can be found on the Blue Holes Foundation's website (including an article detailing the find inside an underwater cave of the first ever Lucayan Indian ceremonial canoe and human skeleton).

Unfortunately, there aren't any decent photo sets of the interior, though a small piece on diving to the end of the Great Blue Hole (and a single shot of the bottom) albeit on rather hideously designed page, can be found here.

I love caves and mines (having spent chunks of my teenagehood exploring abandoned copper mines in Michigan's UP), and the underwater variety are certainly all the more exciting given the added possibility of drowning, but given it's proximity to Belize City and its popularity, it seems more the sort of tamer thing I'll opt for when I've a wife and kids, and have grown enough sense to stop shrugging nonchalantly at death (e.g. my father used to cliff dive, now he rents a minivan and drives the family down to Ocean Isle Beach, NC).

Juvenile, Reckless Adventure

2007-06-06T13:33:00.000-07:00

A text message conversation this morning between my buddy Nate and I began with the logistics of growing ivory in a lab (and, consequently, how rich we could become). It quickly devolved into this:

Outbox Msg 12
6/6/07 11:45am
So, I'm thinkin' we get
some long-range paintball
guns w blue paint (leave
...little trace) and do our
our Halo thing in a real
glacier.

Inbox Msg 15
11:49 6/6/07
Brilliant! We should
totally do that. But we'll
need some adaptive
camouflage to make it as
fun as possible.

Outbox Msg 13
11:53 6/6/07
Think blue & white
camo, Alaska, kayak to a
remote glacier, and
demarcate play
boundaries w handheld
GPS units.

Outbox Msg 14
11:56 6/6/07
http://tinyurl.com/23wg4p

He and I only have a chance to get together over Christmas, at which time, as we have for the last several years, we engage in what we like to describe as a "gentleman's game" of Halo. (for those not hip to the video game, bear with me) He and I, on separate TV screens, match wits in duels which individually can take hours, played with sniper rifles in an expansive glacial canyon. There's no "woohoo"ing, no aggression or one upmanship - it's chess with guns.

For what it's worth, Nate is mostly joking, and he's far too sensible with his money to fly to Alaska with me for the World's Greatest Paintball Fight (though he probably doesn't know about crevasses, so convincing him is merely a monetary issue). But we've been friends long enough for him to know that I'm entirely serious, and it's not as though I'd pick the Khumbu Icefall as the locale (although, now that I mention it...). Wherever it might be held, it does sound pretty badass, if I do say so myself.

And thus, it's on The List.

Afterthought: We've also discussed - should we ever find ourselves both with a terminal illness - an actual battle to the death on Antarctica; however, I fear its theatrics would surely fall short of our imagination, due to the inevitable lacking in our ability to recreate the necessary Amok Time soundtrack.

Sarawak Chamber

2007-06-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

3° 57' N, 114° 47' E

I couldn't really find a good picture of Sarawak Chamber - part of the Lubang Nasib Bagus cave system in Malaysia - because one simply does not exist. It's hard to photograph a cave large enough to fit ten jumbo jets nose to tail.

This massive chamber - the largest in the world - sat undiscovered until 1981 (giving me hope there might be a few things left to be found) in what is now the Mulu National Park in Borneo's north. The British explorers who first stumbled upon the cave had no idea of its size, following one wall of the cave until they decided to cross to the opposite end, assuming it to be relatively nearby, despite not being able to see the opposing side with their lamps. Only after a lot of walking through darkness without end did they begin to comprehend the cavern's vastness.

In addition to the Sarawak Chamber, the Lubang Nasib Bagus includes Deer Cave, the largest cave passage in the world, and Clearwater Cave, the longest cave in Asia. Clearwater, incidentally, has never been crossed from end to end.

Now, I don't know... well, much of anything about caves beyond the childhood mnemonic device: "stalactites" hold "tight" the ceiling, and stalagmites are the other one. I've never planned any spelunking, but rather I explore the ones I stumble upon. In general, things like "basic familiarity," "dangerous tide shifts," or "a lack of a map of any kind" haven't really stopped me before, and the adventure points for this one are through the roof.

But I'm not a complete idiot (I'm still alive), and I always bring the necessary supplies and make the right preparations for a serious expedition. But I don't let something I'm a little green in get the better of me. Besides, I've seen The Descent, The Cave, and The Cavern (a trinity of crap if there ever was one), and I've read House of Leaves, so I think I've got all the info I need on caves, thank you.

Northern Hemisphere Tour 2008 Blog

2007-05-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

I've created a new group blog for the proposed trip around the world in 2008, which can be found here:

Northern Hemisphere Tour 2008

All posts on the trip - planning, locales, headaches, et cetera - will be there, excluding anything especially delicious that might find it's way back home to the Theatrum.

Update 2/21/08: The NHT08 blog is no more. It was never that interesting, I have enough trouble dealing with two blogs and a Twitter as is; the trip will be recorded in Hey, Nice Jacket.

Northern Hemisphere Tour 2008:Itinerary Planning, Part One

2007-05-24T19:14:00.000-07:00

In early April of this year, over many cocktails and a webcam, number one travel buddy Adela and I came upon quite the conundrum:

1. I'm flying to Osaka in February 2008 to spend a few weeks with Adela in Japan, where she is currently teaching English.

2. She and I are dying to go back to the ex-Yugo, and maybe pop into Turkey and Greece while we're in the neighborhood.

3. We're both rather impatient, and know that once I'm back in university and she's in grad school, it will be years before we embark on any serious travel.

So, what do two enterprising young bohemians do when presented with such a predicament?

Looking quickly on Google Earth, I say, eating the last olive of my fourth martini, "Well, it's only 10,000 kilometers between Osaka and Sarajevo..."

Northern Hemisphere Tour 2008

Seattle > Osaka > Mumbai > Kathmandu > Beijing > Ulaanbaatar > Moscow > Tbilisi > Athens > Sarajevo > Zagreb > Ljubljana > London > NYC > Seattle

While we haven't worked out, well, any of the kinks, we've established that the trip will begin shortly after my arrival in Osaka in February. After two weeks in Japan, I will (possibly, finances allowing) fly to Mumbai to meet ex Stephanie. From there, we will wander India for a few weeks in a roughly northerly direction towards Lumbini, Nepal, and then Kathmandu. From there we will head into Tibet and on to Beijing, where we will meet Adela and boyfriend Art.

After a brief stay in China, the four of us will get on the Trans-Mongolian railroad, heading through Ulaanbaatar to catch the main Trans-Siberian route to Moscow. From there, the route blurs. We may head through Ukraine and then south into Bosnia, or south from Moscow into Turkey and Greece and then to Bosnia.

After wandering the ex-Yugo for a while (Sarajevo, Split, various little spots along the way), we'll head towards London, catching a cheap flight Stateside.

More to come...

London's Subterranean Rivers

2007-05-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

Sigh. Again with the Wikipedia.

In my wanderings on the interweb, I dig up a lot of interesting little tidbits about the hidden right under our noses. If only I had known when I lived in London that right under my feet were miles of subterranean rivers, I would have spent a lot less time napping on the grass in Regent's Park, and a lot more time crawling around London's underbelly with a Maglite and a pair of neoprene waders.

As London developed, the need for space necessitated burying beneath the city the tributaries which fed the Thames and Lea, many of which were converted into sewers (and it would be just a little cool to contract the plague on an adventure). Today there are over a dozen of these tunnel systems running under the city. I haven't found a very good list of these rivers (some so large they were once navigated by barges), and everything I find has hints of rivers that are truly lost, no one sure of their exact location, or if they ever existed at all.

Sub-Urban, of course, has quite a few adventures within the rivers chronicled on their site, including the River Fleet, the largest of London's underground rivers. I appreciate their ability to show and not tell - nobody likes a loud mouth schnook who gives it all away (is that what this blog is all about, I now wonder?), as it is invariably followed by newly fenced-off entrances and CCTV guardians. After all, some secrets are better left so.

Next time I'm in London, I'm bringing rubber boots.

$100 Laptops In The Field

2007-05-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

This morning, I found a collection of videos of the $100 laptop in use in Brazilian and Cambodian schools.

If you haven't heard, the $100 laptop, designed by MIT for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), powered by batteries charged via a hand crank, running open source software, and, as mentioned, costing only US$100, is probably one of the best things to hit the Third World since Alfred Sauvy invented the term, thus damning them to a ambiguous but decidedly dark place in the First World's collective consciousness. Although, malaria shots were pretty cool, too.

While $100 is an unattainable goal for much of the world's poor, organizations like the Grameen Bank push that goal much closer to a reality, especially if used in conjunction with business ventures, sort of like the GrameenPhone.

Of course, if you're Bill Gates, projects like the $100 laptop, Village Phone and all poor who need them can suck an egg, unless you and your horrifying backwardness are lucky enough to fall into the category of an Emerging Market (which only sounds a little vaguely evil on it's own), or, as it's more commonly known, "exploitable." Gates and the $100 laptop.

And if you're thrifty and own a soldering gun, you could always make your own.

Redefining Blank Spaces

2007-05-12T20:16:00.000-07:00

...At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth...

But not so much anymore. I remember as a child my fascination with looking at the world. I'd xerox maps from books at the library and take them home to a box full of binders, the binders in turn full of articles from National Geographic and grainy photocopies of topographical maps and the (still grainy) color copies of temples and deep-sea fish.

Yesterday an article came out about the sharpest ever satellite imagery of the Earth, compiling 40 terabytes of data: every square foot of the planet.

I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this.

Part of me embraces the conquering of the unknown, which is, after all, what drove Ferdinand Magellan and Rene Caille to go into the blank spaces. Why Abraham Ortelius compiled the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

The other side of me, the romantic, the poet, looks upon the loss of blank spaces with remorse. Adventurers went into the empty spots on maps, thereby making them known. This was what I wanted to do; at eight, I did not predict Google Earth. And so, now, with all the world mapped, with aerial shots of the entire planet, what now is the place for an adventurer? Is just "being there" all we have to settle for?

It seems that half the allure of pointing to a spot on a map and just going, is the thought that, climbing into a canyon, happening upon a glacial lake, standing between two lines of contour in the middle of nowhere, is knowing that, just maybe, no one had ever been to that place before. I could stumble upon the ruins of a temple in Laos that nobody had seen in... centuries, perhaps, but if some schmuck is staring at a computer screen, looking at the same place I'm at through Google Earth, is some of the pleasure lost?

I'm not sure.

That's not to say that my heart doesn't race with excitement every time a rickety prop plane drops me in the middle of nowhere and then flies off, leaving me with no line of communication to the outside world. But my childhood was full of searching for a map to a place, and reveling in the occasion that there just wasn't one, that there were some places whose secrets were still held in the, if not blank, then, blurry spaces.

But we live in the Information Age. So, then, if we've Flickr'd every square inch, if you can follow my trip through The Congos on Twittervision, if we've got nifty little Flash apps like Earth Guide to fill in every last blank pixel remaining and then finish it off with a chart of human emotion, what's left? Space, it would seem, is the next logical step, but not for me. Sadly, what William S. Burroughs said in the late 1960s still seems to be very true today:

"It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live." These words inspired early navigators when the vast frontier of unknown seas opened to their sails in the fifteenth century. Space is the new frontier. Is this frontier open to youth? I quote from the London Express, Dec 30, 1968: "If you are a fit young man under twenty-five with lightning reflexes who fears nothing in heaven or on the earth and has a keen appetite for adventure don't bother to apply for the job of astronaut." They want "cool dads" trailing wires to the "better half" from an aqualung. Doctor Paine of the Space Center in Houston says: "This flight was a triumph for the squares of this world who work with slide rules and aren't ashamed to say a prayer now and then." Is this the great adventure of space? Are these men going to take the step into regions literally unthinkable in verbal terms? To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behnd: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to live alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there.

In the end, all this means is simply the need to redefine the notion of Blank Spaces. No longer do our maps have blank spaces in the traditional sense, no inscription of Here Be Dragons. Instead, technology and our visual conquering of the world necessitates that Blank Spaces exist on a personal level. My blank spaces may differ from yours: I have never seen this island, or watched the sunrise from atop that mountain, and as such, they are blank spaces to me.

Google Earth, GlobCover, et al. is Ptolemy's Atlas - reliable only as far as one's known universe - speculation and second-hand accounts are meaningless and serve only as a vague guide to one's own adventures towards those places and beyond. All the better if there's no reference at all.

Chances are, I'll never discover a lost city, or find myself stranded on an uncharted island, or stumble upon Shangri La. Where my childhood dreams have been dashed, I have found in their place the knowledge that, while some armchair traveler (much like touristas) may see the place, it takes a certain amount of dedication to experience it. A cruise ship through the Kenai Fjord is not the same as kayaking it, and no amount of maps, be they paper or pixel, will replace the sense of accomplishment felt by long nights in airports, hassles at the border, the chill of thin mountain air, and feet on the ground.

Advice to my Countrymen

2007-05-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

Buddhist Art in Nepalese Caves

2007-05-10T19:05:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, a story broke about a complex of caves found in the Upper Mustang region of Nepal, one of the most difficult places in Nepal to travel through, containing a treasure trove of art and artifacts dating to the 12th century and earlier, including a 55-panel mural of the life of Gautama Buddha.

The caves were rediscovered by a shepherd who took shelter in them during a storm. Word of these artifacts got to the right people, and a large team of archaeologists and art experts set out to climb the vertical cliffs to explore the caves. Details are pretty sketchy from the various news sources, and the location of the caves is being kept secret until it can be properly looted... er, preserved.

The man who discovered the caves didn't think much of his find at the time, and it really makes one stop and think about just how many lost relics and pieces of our collective human history are sitting out there, ignored and slowly disappearing to time. While I'm no fan of the sort of Father-Knows-Best "preservation" that the expeditionary British took it upon themselves to conduct - stealing statues from temples of the various places they conquered to fill their museums with the curios of the uncivilized world - it's far better than the alternative: tomb raiders.

Until the early nineties, the Mustang region had been entirely closed to foreigners, one of the only areas of Nepal that wasn't covered with touristas, empty water bottles, and - this writer would be so bold as to speculate - Maoist separatists. As more and more places once hidden, once forbidden to enter, are opened to the monied masses who fancy themselves Indiana Jones, one has to wonder how many of these lost relics disappear into places other than museums.

An Eventual Masters Thesis, part 1

2007-04-25T16:59:00.000-07:00

Maybe. I don't really know how I would pitch it, or plan its implementation, but I figure I have to put it out there... thesis squatting, of sorts. Mine!

an abandoned city
+ extremely dangerous conditions
+ renewable energy experiment
+ potential interplanetary applications
--------------------
= heaps of sweet, sweet grant money, buckets of adventure,
and a job anywhere I damn well please

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Welcome to Centralia, PA. (and a wicked ugly website)
40° 48' N, 76° 20' W

Ah, 1962. Bob Dylan's debut, the US levies a trade embargo against Cuba, DDT covers suburbia, and city policies of burning garbage... which ignited an exposed vein of coal which ran the length and width of the town. Oops. In 1984, Congress bought out most of the residents, except for a few yokels who stuck out the steady carbon monoxide poisoning and hundred-feet-deep sinkhole surprises until 1992 when Pennsylvania claimed eminent domain and condemned the town.

Apparently, burning garbage is a bad idea. Michigan had a much more effective trash disposal policy - just dump it in the swamps. No problem there, right? Right?

Still, with a group of adventurous folk organized like a glacier-walking trip (so as not to fall into sinkholes), plus gas masks (CO suffocation) and a couple burn kits, this could be quite the adventure. Even though most of the buildings have been demolished, there's sure to be quite a few left, and I did see one picture (though I don't know how recent) of the still-standing downtown...

Statement of Intent for an Eventual Masters Thesis
on the topic of Centralia and very alternative energy applications

So, keeping in mind that this thesis is only in the thinking-out-loud stage, here's the idea. The massive lode of Centralia's coal will be burning off for another 250 years. That's a lot of heat. I'm not necessarily thinking of a geothermal application, or of somehow harnessing the carbon monoxide produced by the fire. This project would revolve more around harnessing the heat created by the coal to produce steam to then produce power.

Siphoning water from underground may or may not be a problem, depending on whether the water table is used by any nearby residents, but I would imagine one could always collect the steam for reuse. The hardest part here would be building a mobile steam turbine generator, one that could handle rough and unstable terrain (hence potential interplanetary applications... random morning bus musing). Some sort of decommissioned tank...?

At first, I thought this idea just sounded sort of like when, at age ten, I spent a summer researching submarines at the library (with a card catalog, no less!) and designing plans for a perfect, fully-functional submersible vehicle out of the propane tank which heated our house (not taking into account, of course, that the propane tank was designed against interior pressure, rather than pressure from external forces). But writing this down for the first time, I'm realizing this endeavor actually has some merit to it. And, really, it's quite steampunk. Hm, I suppose I'll have to invest in some welding goggles. And date some chick with a Tank Girl vibe.

This thesis is sounding better all the time.

More to come.

Bokononism

2007-04-23T16:05:00.001-07:00

"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand."

- Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

The Books of Bokonon

The Splenda *Sara

2007-04-20T17:12:00.000-07:00

This site is just plain beautiful.

But more specifically, it's these Little Public Plaques that I'm interested in. Finding things like this online is easy enough, but in meatspace it's rare, and infinitely more romantic. I guess I'm just a sucker for stuff like this, beauty in the benign, the unexpected, the flower in the sidewalk crack. It's always a perk to stumble upon such things, especially while traveling (bum poetry I found one time written on strips of paper in Sacramento, an old lighthouse for sale in northern Michigan, "RATM" sprayed on the sidewalk in Sarajevo, stumbling upon the Temple of Mithras on Queen Victoria Street).

Statues, too, though usually rather dull - some forgotten or overblown figure from history obscura - occasionally find themselves worthy of a second look.

Gunkanjima

2007-04-10T17:53:00.000-07:00

32° 37′ 40″ N 129° 44′ 19″ E

I've found about five different names for this place, but Google Earth (which has been known for some slight inaccuracies in naming locations) tags it as Hashima Island. The inhabitance of the island centered around coal mining, beginning just before the turn of the 20th century, and in Japanese style was immediately crammed full of people, at one time boasting one of the highest population densities in the world.

To me, this translates as Lots Of Exploring.

Unfortunately, the island is "closed" - whatever that means. Such forbidden entry doesn't stop Action Squad, or my cronies back in Michigan who used to explore the Michigan Central Depot (before it was sealed off with warnings signed "Dept. of Homeland Security" - even I'm afraid of that) and the steam tunnels below Oakland University. The language barrier would pose an issue with finding a way onto the island, but surely there's some tourista spot where one could rent a boat...

There are a few phenomenal photographic collections taken during the later life of the town:

- Gunkanjima - Views of an Abandoned Island
- Tsuki no Michi - Borderland
- 1974 Gunkanjima
- Shijima

Gunkanjima is how I was first introduced to the Ghost Towns in Asia Wikipedia category, which seems a bit light. Perhaps I'll one day break down and (much to the chagrin of my Lit major friends) get an account and beef this section up a bit. Stranger things have happened.

Camcorders are Handy

2007-04-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

Reminds me that I really need a yacht, or a barge, but with sails... I'm thinking Waterworld, only with more jet skis. And wenches.

Ani

2007-04-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

40° 30' 27" N, 43° 34' 21"

Once home to upwards of 200,000 inhabitants, this medieval city-state now sits empty and slowly crumbling on the Turkish-Armenian border. I found out about this fantastic location just a few days ago while researching Gunkanjima [post soon to come], and came across a shamefully neglected Wikipedia category: Ghost Towns in Asia.

A wonderful website on the Ani ruins can be found here, featuring a map with lengthy descriptions on each individual site, complete with pictures. Of particular interest are the comparison images, showing the buildings as they appeared when (presumably) they were first photographed (around the turn of the century), and the amount of damage that has occurred (both by natural phenomena and intentional acts).

Sidebar:

Cultural cleansing of Ani, centuries-old Bhutanese Buddhist manuscripts being slowly eaten by worms, Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley... as has always happened, Alexandria et al, we are losing the history of our species by casual indifference and acts of hate.

It's nothing new, and I don't mean to be up on a soapbox. I'm not so idealistic as to believe we can restore these places, or even preserve most. It's our own fear of being forgotten which drives us - well, some of us - to try to preserve the memory of who we have no memory of. But, eventually, the Sahara will consume Timbuktu, and the mud wall madrasas will be gone forever.

My current employment finds me working with software that could, while not preserve such relics in original form, certainly preserve them electronically. Photosynth could save architectural wonders from ruin; Seadragon could preserve crumbling manuscripts, and, given the sudden new durability of ancient documents in a digital medium, would open their viewing up to the entire world.

Will this happen? I don't know. We have a responsibility to restore places and things of the people who came before us; it is a record of who we are. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre makes their attempts, but just as with my ideas as to how the aforementioned Photosynth and Seadragon ought to be applied, where there's no money to be made, there's no interest to be had.

Aniakchak Caldera

2007-04-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

56° 54' N 158° 09' W

Extremely remote, unpredictable weather conditions, surreal landscape, a six-mile wide semi-active volcanic crater. Delicious.

This is a trip I've been fantasizing about since I first saw a strange shape on a nautical map of the Aleutian Peninsula during a brief holiday with my dad (entry on the trip or the alternate take) in the summer of 2006. Less adventurous types tend towards a float plane drop into Surprise Lake, the crescent-shaped body in the northeast corner of the crater, or planned river-rafting trips up the river which flows out of Aniakchak, starting in Aniakchak Bay.

Which is fine... if you've got to hurry back for dinner on your cruise ship in Juneau.

This is what I'm thinking: a float plane drop at the bay to follow the 30 miles of river on foot, climbing through The Gates (a narrow sliver in the walls, the only entrance to Aniakchak), then 2-3 days of camping and exploring the crater's interior before a pick-up in Surprise Lake.

More info on the NPS's page on Aniakchak can be found here.