erhebung

Cracked

Fairly epic:

An ice island four times the size of Man­hattan broke off from one of Greenland’s two main glaciers, sci­ent­ists said on Friday, in the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.

The new ice island, which broke off on Thursday, will enter a remote place called the Nares Strait, about 620 miles south of the North Pole between Green­land and Canada.

The ice island has an area of 100 square miles (260 square km) and a thick­ness up to half the height of the Empire State Building, said Andreas Muenchow, pro­fessor of ocean science and engin­eering at the Uni­ver­sity of Delaware.

The Nares Strait (had to check that definite article, as Reuters uses it but Wiki­pedia omits it) looks like a place I’d like to visit. And Hans Island, situated in (the) Nares Strait, is subject to a ter­rit­orial dispute: Denmark and Canada, head to head (what a war that would be).

Wonder where the new island will go.

The Glass Age

Almost forty years ago, someone had an idea:

Man is fast running out of living space. Only a quarter of our planet is dry land; the rest is ocean. And our growing numbers are filling that quarter to bursting-​point. We have to find a new place to live if we are to survive. There are three choices: on other planets, under­ground, and on the sea. The last of these seems the easiest choice. With this in mind, the idea of Sea City has been born — and what a fant­astic idea it is! The archi­tects who have planned this amazing place have built beau­tiful scale models to show what they have in mind. Looking at the models, our thoughts catapult us into the future — to the day when Sea City could be a reality…

That passage is from an article that was pub­lished in TV21 Annual 1971 (you can read a tran­script of it here). The mas­ter­minds (or was it just one very crazy mas­ter­mind?) behind the scheme belonged to the Glass Age Devel­op­ment Committee:

The [Com­mittee] was estab­lished in 1937 by Pilk­ington [a glass man­u­fac­turer] to promote the use of glass as a building material in the United Kingdom. It com­mis­sioned designs for many large-​scale schemes, none of which were ever built. Notable schemes included a proposal in 1955 to demolish the entire area of Soho and rebuild it entirely in glass; a 1957 proposal for the replace­ment of St Giles’ Circus in London with a 150-​foot (46 m) tall glass heliport; and the 1963 “Crystal Span” proposal for the replace­ment of London’s Vauxhall Bridge with a seven-​story glass building strad­dling the River Thames, which was to have con­tained a shopping mall, luxury hotel, res­id­en­tial devel­op­ment and a museum to house the modern art col­lec­tion now housed at Tate Modern.

The Glass Age Devel­op­ment Com­mittee is best known for its ambi­tious 1971 proposal for a glass and concrete offshore city housing 21,000 people, to be anchored off the coast near Great Yarmouth and accessed from the mainland by hov­er­craft. The devel­op­ment was to have been called Sea City. The struc­ture would have been [1,400 metres] long and [1,000 metres] wide, and would have rested on concrete islands sup­ported by piers. It was intended that the devel­op­ment would have been eco­nom­ic­ally self-​sufficient thanks to [boat-​building] work­shops, fish farming, and the export of fresh water from an on-​board desal­in­a­tion plant, while a lagoon in the centre of the devel­op­ment would support a tourist industry based on skin diving and water-​skiing.

I’m looking every­where for the concept art that must surely exist, and when I find it, I’ll post again.

Across the Pacific

Yes­terday I happened upon an inter­esting article about a theory that might explain how pre­his­toric peoples migrated from Asia to America:

Mr. Enock indic­ates as the prin­cipal islands upon which [pre­his­toric relics] are to be found, Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, Tahiti, the Mar­quesas, Tonga […], Lele and Ponape of the Caroline Islands, and the Marianas or Ladrones. Tracing these islands on a chart of the pacific Ocean and it will be seen that they form points — “stepping stones” — reaching from the island region just off the southern coast of Asia to the coast of Chile in South America. On most of these islands there has been extensive work by wall-​building man, some of the vestiges of which are as puzzling as those found on the South American coast line of the Pacific.

[…]

[W]e are told, Mr. Enock refer­ring to Dr. Wallace’s letter […]: “It is the opinion of Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace that a stream of migra­tion from East tropical Asia, where the Veddahs of Ceylon, the early temple-​builders of Cambodia, and the Ainos of Japan, forming remnants of the Caucasian races, which emig­rants in con­junc­tion with Malay tribes produced the Mahoris of Samoa, Hawaii, and New Zealand, reached South America and were the origin of the Incas of Peru.“

Thor Heyer­dahl, a fas­cin­ating man who warrants a post all to himself, also believed that there could be a con­nec­tion between the South American Indian and Easter Island cultures. And there are other pieces of evidence indic­ating that there were links across the Pacific:

The fact that the sweet potato, a staple of the pre-​contact Poly­ne­sian diet, is of South American origin, and that there is no evidence that its seed could spread by floating across the ocean, indic­ates that there must have been some contact between the two cultures. Either Poly­ne­sians traveled to South America and back, or Indian balsa rafts drifted to Poly­nesia, possibly unable to make a return trip because of their less developed nav­ig­a­tional skills and more fragile boats, or both. Poly­ne­sian con­nec­tions in South America have been claimed to exist among the Mapuche Indians in central and southern Chile. The Poly­ne­sian name for the small islet of Sala y Gómez (Manu Motu Motiro Hiva, “Bird’s islet on the way to a far away land”) east of Easter Island has also been seen as a hint that South America was known before European contacts. Further com­plic­ating the situ­ation is that the word Hiva (“far away land”) was also the name of the islanders’ legendary home country. Inex­plic­able insist­ence on an eastern origin for the first inhab­it­ants was unan­imous among the islanders in all early accounts.

I’m now going to dive back into the dozen or so Wiki­pedia articles I book­marked while writing this post.

An illus­tra­tion from ‘Does Easter Island Solve Secret of the Pacific?’, an article pub­lished in The New York Times on the 4th of August, 1912. (Source)

Passages #1: The Last Man (1822)

I’m going to kick off Passages, a new ongoing series, with the opening para­graph of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man:

I am the native of a sea-​surrounded nook, a cloud-​enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shore­less ocean and track­less con­tin­ents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an incon­sid­er­able speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far out­weighed coun­tries of larger extent and more numerous pop­u­la­tion. So true it is, that man’s mind alone was the creator of all that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first minister. England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semb­lance of a vast and well-​manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves. In my boyish days she was the universe to me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwell­ings of my coun­trymen, and subdued to fer­tility by their labours, the earth’s very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have for­gotten which would have cost neither my ima­gin­a­tion nor under­standing an effort.

As descrip­tions of the British Isles go, “a sea-​surrounded nook, a cloud-​enshadowed land” is about as evoc­ative and true as anyone could possibly want. More passages from Mary Shelley’s writings will follow, I’m certain.

A very good hyper­text edition of The Last Man pub­lished by Romantic Circles can be found here; and the novel can be down­loaded in a variety of elec­tronic formats from its page on ManyBooks.net.

A fac­simile of the title page of the pirated edition of The Last Man that was pub­lished in America in 1833, seven years after the novel’s author­ised pub­lic­a­tion in both London and Paris. (Source)

Two Spirals

Wiki­pedia’s article about Spiral Island I and Spiral Island II caught my eye:

Spiral Island I was a floating arti­fi­cial island in a lagoon near Puerto Aven­turas, on the Carib­bean coast of Mexico south of Cancún. It was built by British eco-​pioneer Richart (or “Rishi”) Sowa begin­ning in 1998; he filled nets with empty dis­carded plastic bottles to support a struc­ture of plywood and bamboo, on which he poured sand and planted numerous plants, including man­groves. It was des­troyed by Hur­ricane Emily in 2005. Sowa has built a new Spiral Island II in Isla Mujeres, Mexico.

The original island sported a two-​story house, a solar oven, a self-​composting toilet, and three beaches. He used some 250,000 bottles for the 66ft (20 m) by 54 ft (16 m) struc­ture. The man­groves were planted to help keep the island cool, and some of them rose up to 15 ft (5 m) high.

Sowa is a musician, artist, and car­penter. Now in his fifties, he is an envir­on­ment­alist who believes in recyc­ling and low-​impact living.

I’d like to live on an island I made for myself out of bottles and mangroves.

Shutter Island

Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley (along with, to name just three from the very impressive cast, Ted Levine, Mark Ruffalo, and Max von Sydow) in a film based on a novel by Dennis Lehane and directed by Martin Scorsese: very prom­ising indeed. I’ve been looking forward to seeing Shutter Island since late last year when I first heard about it, primarily because of DiCaprio and Scorsese (it hadn’t registered that Kingsley was also in the mix), but also because of the con­nec­tion to the Dennis Lehane, the novelist behind the superb Mystic River and the engaging, if slightly flawed, Gone Baby Gone. Having laid eyes on this poster for Shutter Island I’m now pos­it­ively itching to get my hands on a copy\ticket:

A poster for Martin Scorsese’s new film, Shutter Island. (Source)

Create Your Own Island

Today my internet wan­der­ings led me to a lovely guide to making your very own Kirrin Island. If you ever read one of Blyton’s stories (The Secret Seven novels were my favour­ites) and then dreamt for weeks (or for the rest of your life) of exploring aban­doned island forts, uncov­ering buried pirate treasure, and con­fronting wicked smug­glers, the instruc­tions will bring back memories. The guide also reminded me of the episode of Blue Peter in which one of the presenters (I forget which) showed millions of children how to make a mini­ature (but fully oper­a­tional) Tracy Island (amaz­ingly, the instruc­tions for that are still avail­able for download from the BBC).