Featured Posts

For a long time, the timeline seemed fairly settled. As the last Ice Age loosened its grip on Europe, humans eventually made their way back into Britain, once the climate warmed enough to support them. Scientists had a rough date for when that happened. It turns out that date was wrong, by about 500 years.…

Somewhere off the coast of California, there’s a worm that glitters. Thousands of feet down off the coast of Western Australia, there’s a sea creature that hunts like a Venus flytrap. Scientists named it after an Elvish word from Lord of the Rings. Both are completely real. Both got officially named in the past year.…

Around 2am on Java’s Ijen volcano, hundreds of tourists start climbing in total darkness, gas masks on, cameras ready. They’re chasing something that only exists after sunset: rivers of electric blue fire flowing down the mountainside like lava. Except it isn’t lava at all. At roughly the same hour, men who’ve climbed this same slope…

At its peak, somewhere around 50,000 people lived inside Kowloon Walled City, packed into 2.6 hectares of Hong Kong, roughly the footprint of two rugby fields. That works out to something close to 1.9 million people per square kilometer. Tokyo, one of the densest cities on Earth today, holds around 6,300 people per square kilometer.…

Open a Gothic illuminated manuscript from the late 13th or early 14th century, almost any one, and flip through the margins. Between the psalms and the prayers and the ornate painted initials, you will very likely find a knight in full armor squaring off against a snail. Sometimes he is mounted on a horse. Sometimes…

Andrés Ruzo heard about the Boiling River from his grandfather as a child, wrapped inside an old story about the Spanish conquest of Peru. After the Inca emperor Atahualpa was killed, survivors who staggered out of the Amazon told stories of trees blotting out the sun, warriors with poisoned arrows, spiders that ate birds, and…

There is an island in the Arabian Sea between Yemen and Somalia where a third of all plant life exists nowhere else on Earth. Not a third of a specific genus. A third of every plant species on the island. Over 300 species found in one place and nowhere else in the world. The reptile…

There is a lake in British Columbia’s Similkameen Valley that, for most of the year, looks like any other body of water. Then summer arrives, temperatures climb into the high desert heat, and the water starts to evaporate. What it leaves behind is one of the strangest surfaces in North America: hundreds of shallow circular…

Toronto has a secret: it’s one of the most wonderfully weird major cities in North America, and almost nobody knows it. On the surface, Toronto seems more mainstream. It’s clean. It’s multicultural. It’s got excellent food and professional sports teams and financial institutions. It’s the kind of city that gets praised for being “world-class” and…

Late at night, somewhere in a marsh or bog, a flickering light appears. It is the right height to be a lantern. It moves in a way that suggests purpose. You follow it. The path you were on disappears behind you. The light keeps moving. Eventually you realize the ground beneath your feet is not…

Most people think they know the Jamestown story. It’s a story that has grown, evolved, and been told through the generations as a piece of America’s first history. Pocahontas saves Captain John Smith. English colonists struggle and survive. End of story. But the real story is messier, more human, and infinitely more interesting than Hollywood…

The Yucatan Peninsula has no surface rivers. No lakes to speak of either. A vast limestone shelf sits just below the ground. Over millions of years, rainwater has dissolved passages through it. This process has created one of the largest underground river systems on Earth. In places, the ceiling of these underground passages collapses, and…

Most people who visit Paris know there are catacombs. You queue at the entrance on the Place Denfert-Rochereau, descend about 65 feet underground, walk through roughly a mile of tunnels neatly lined with the bones of six million Parisians, and come back up feeling appropriately unsettled. It is a genuinely memorable experience. It is also,…

Let me start with the thing that I think is most important to know before explaining anything else: the famous circular stone covered in concentric rings that everyone calls the Aztec Calendar is probably not a calendar. Archaeologists think it is more likely a sacrificial altar, a solar monument legitimizing royal power, or some combination…

There is a region of northern Peru called the Amazonas, high in the Andes where the mountains meet the Amazon basin and the cloud forest hangs over everything. Somewhere around 800 CE, a civilization we now call the Chachapoya built a society there that lasted for roughly 700 years. They built a walled city larger…

Ikaria is a small Greek island in the eastern Aegean Sea, about 19 miles southwest of Samos. Roughly 8,000 people live there. The terrain is mountainous, the roads are winding and occasionally alarming, and the island is home to one of the highest concentrations of people over 100 years old anywhere on Earth. Researchers started…

When you fly into Pisa and drive north up the Tuscan coast toward the Ligurian border, you start noticing white peaks in the mountains above the highway. It is not snow. It’s marble. The entire upper range of the Apuan Alps above the town of Carrara is marble. Remarkably, it has been coming down those…

Above a window on the second tier of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City, a small wooden ladder leans against the stone facade. The ladder has five or six rungs, cut from Lebanon cedar. It has been photographed, sketched, and painted continuously since at least 1728. In fact, it is visible…

There is a forest on the border between Poland and Belarus that has been there for 12,000 years. It predates both countries and the entire concept of the nation-state. It is the last remaining fragment of the vast primeval lowland forest that once covered most of Europe. Ancient trees up to 600 years old stand…

AlUla is one of those places where the more you read, the more surreal it gets. In the desert of northwestern Saudi Arabia, in a narrow valley carved by an ancient river, there is a region with 30,000 documented archaeological sites, over 110 monumental rock-cut tombs built by the same civilization that made Petra, a…

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world. It covered about 26,300 square miles. It had a thriving fishing industry, a fleet, canneries, beach towns. The rivers flowing into it had been doing so for thousands of years. By 2007, roughly 90 percent of it was gone. Not from a…

Near the summit of a 7,000-foot mountain in southeastern Turkey, a collection of giant stone heads sits on the ground staring at the horizon. These heads once belonged to statues 26 to 33 feet tall. Earthquakes knocked them off over the centuries. Nobody has put them back. They have been lying there like that for…

There are places that photographs cannot prepare you for, and the hanging coffins of Sagada are one of them. Not because the images are inadequate, but because knowing what you are looking at changes the experience of looking at it. You are not seeing a landmark. You are seeing a community’s relationship with death, preserved…

Every city with a castle has a founding legend. Most of them involve a king or a warrior or a divine sign. Kraków’s involves a cobbler’s apprentice, a lamb stuffed with sulfur, and a dragon that drank itself to death from the Vistula River. I have a soft spot for founding legends where the hero…

Okay so via ferrata is a thing I keep trying to explain to people and failing. This is because the explanation sounds either terrifying or boring depending on the person, and it is actually neither. Via ferrata translates from Italian as “iron road.” It describes a climbing route where fixed steel cables, iron rungs, ladders,…