Place of the Week: Lake Vostok

Once more into the breach - and this time the breach is a watery one: a very, very cold lake; a lake the size of Lake Ontario which has never been seen by human eyes; and the largest geographic feature on the planet discovered since the 19th century. I'm talking about the place of the week: Lake Vostok.



Area: 15,690 Sq. km.
Population: either 'none' or 'very interesting,' but probably nothing bigger than microbes
Volume: 5,400 cu. km.
Maximum depth: 1,000 m
Rank among world's largest lakes (area): 15
Rank among world's largest lakes (volume): 7

Forty million years ago, Antarctica was a rather balmier place than it is today. It was still attached to South America and Australia, a tectonic configuration that diverted warm oceanic currents toward the south pole, keeping the continent warm and ice-free, even lush. But South America and Australia wouldn't stand for this; they sailed off towards the equator, stranding Antarctica in a ring of cold ocean (the jerks). It wasn't long before a crown of ice began to bloom at the south pole; it would continue to grow until it smothered nearly the entire landmass, crowding out whatever flora and fauna had once made the place home, and even depressing the continent itself; much of Antarctica - the ground way below all that ice - has been dunked below sea level by the incredible weight pressing down on it.

Among the features of the Antarctic landscape which were rolled over by the advancing ice was a lake - one of the largest in the world, in fact: 250 km long and 50 km wide. But rather than gouging out the lakebed or freezing it to the bottom, the glaciers built on top of the lake. By 500,000 to as many as 25 million years ago, the lake was completely sealed off from the external environment, entombed in utter darkness. But it's still a liquid body of water; the water temperature is -3C, but the intense pressure from the weight of the ice keeps it from freezing.

The lake wasn't discovered until the 1990s, when some Russians happened to be drilling the world's deepest ice core directly above the lake. They came within a hundred yards of piercing the lake's surface before their colleagues persuaded them to quit the effort. (The drilling hole was filled with a slurry of chemicals to keep it from re-freezing: to have pierced the surface would have been to pollute the world's most uncontaminated environment.)

The environment of Lake Vostok is utterly unique, and it raises an intriguing question: is anything alive down there? If anything is, it would represent a genetic cul-de-sac cut off from the rest of life on Earth for perhaps millions of years, evolving in an environment that for all intents and purposes is an alien world. And indeed, life down there would have to have evolved: another effect of the extreme pressure in Lake Vostok is a level of oxygen which would be lethal to anything living on the surface. But life is stubborn. Once it insinuates itself into an environment it tends to stick around, and living stuff has been found in lots of weird places, including in the microscopic crevasses between snow crystals at the south pole; and indeed, nearly 12,000 feet below the surface of the ice directly above Lake Vostok. As Damn Interesting says:

It is not unreasonable to suggest that cold-tolerant creatures could thrive in the waters of Lake Vostok, overcoming the oxygen saturation with extraordinary natural antioxidants. But millions of years of evolutionary isolation in an extreme environment may have created some truly bizarre organisms. This notion is supported by the ice samples drawn from the ice just above Lake Vostok, where some unusual and unidentifiable microbial fossils have been found. But the possibility that they are merely contaminates has not yet been completely ruled out.

It would be interesting to take a peek down there, though hard to do without contaminating the most pristine body of water on Earth - and contamination in this case might mean the introduction of a few microbes which could wreak havoc with whatever ecosystem might exist down there. The Jet Propulsion Lab has worked on plans for a "cryobot" - a probe that would melt its way down to the lake like an atomic gopher; it would then swim around and see if it could find anything lively. And if by chance it did, then our conception of the sorts of places that life might call home will, once again, have expanded.

Take note, Europa.

Place of the Week: The Ryugyong Hotel

The Place of the Week heads out on yet another ill-advised voyage. This time we're traveling to the Hermit Kingdom: North Korea, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average. Oh, wait - wait, no. I'm thinking of something else. North Korea is actually an internationally isolated, broken society suffering from decades of Communist oppression. And into it we journey, with the Place of the Week: the Ryugyong Hotel!



Status: hotel/metaphor
Area (floor): 360,000 sq m
Population: none unto eternity, in all likelihood
Stories: 105
Height: 330 m
Rank among world's tallest buildings: 24
Remarkably inapt meaning of name: "Capital of Willows"

Snuggly nestled into the bosom of North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, the Ryugyong Hotel was a classic example of Cold War oneupsmanship. After a company from South Korea built the Westin Stamford Hotel, then the world's largest hotel, in Singapore, their rival sibling to the north was inspired to do them one better. The government commissioned a project to build the new world's tallest hotel as a groundbreaking effort to attract foreign investment, and to establish a towering symbol of the nation's glory.

Construction on the pyramid-shaped scheme began in 1987, and continued apace for the next five years. Wikipedia describes the building thus:

The reinforced concrete structure consists of three wings, the face of each wing measuring 100 m (328 ft) long and 18 m (59 ft) wide, which converge at a common point to form a pinnacle. At the top is a 40 m (131 ft) wide circular structure which contains eight floors intended to rotate, topped by a further six static floors. A construction crane is perched at the top, and has assumed the role of a permanent fixture. The hotel is surrounded by a number of pavilions, gardens, and terraces. Its walls slope at a steep 75 degree angle.

By 1992, the government had spent three-quarters of a billion dollars on the thing, or about 2% of North Korea's GDP. Such was the regime's pride in the edifice that it was bedecking the nation's postage stamps before it was even halfway built.

And then the project began to fail. Unsurprisingly, given the enormous relative scale of the project, funding increasingly became an issue. There were electrical problems. The elevators never quite worked, and a famine in 1990 disrupted the government's plans. There are evidently serious structural problems with the building as well, as the low-quality concrete of which it is built has proved unable to support it's enormous scale. The official line is that the project ran out of money - itself a significant concession to reality for a government that is loathe to reveal any sort of weakness. In 1992, construction was finally brought to a halt. The shell of the building has loomed over Pyongyang ever since, without windows or lights, a preposterous icon of the state and a metaphor for the hollowness of the ambitions of the North Korean regime. In recent years, the government has been airbrushing the building out of official photos.

Work, of a sort, re-commenced on the building in 2008, as an Egyptian firm was seen to be touching up the top floors of the hotel. A North Korean official has said that the building will be renovated by 2012, in time for the 100th anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth. A spokesman for the Egyptian firm, Orascom, has indicated a relatively modest goal of "redo[ing] the facade to make it more attractive." Retouching the facade: at this late date, that's about all that the government can do.

(For more Abandoned Wonders of Asia, check out this fantastic list from Web Urbanist.)

Place of the Week: Nauru

The possibly misguided continuation of the Place of the Week series takes us this time to an erstwhile paradise in the South Pacific: the Micronesian microstate of Nauru.



Status: Independent Republic
Area: 21 sq. km.
Population: 13,770
Unemployment rate: 90%
Rank, in GDP, among the world's nations in the early 1980s: 2
Rank today, according to the CIA World Factbook: 141

The tragic story of the island nation of Nauru begins in the digestive tracts of countless generations of sea birds. Those were the production facilities of what would become one of the world's most valuable commodities: bird shit. Or at least, it would become very valuable after being deposited in copious quantities over millions of years and reacting with the uplifted coral that formed the structure of the island to become phosphate, from whence comes phospohorus, which has many industrial and agricultural uses, including as a key component of fertilizer.

Turns out that the combination of Nauru's geology and its ecology allowed the island's phosphate deposits to become some of the largest and highest-quality deposits in the world. Mining began in the early 20th Century, when Nauru was a colony of Germany. The island would go through periods as a possession of Australia, Japan, and the UN before becoming the world's smallest independent nation in 1968 - and all the while, the mining continued.

It was an absolute bonanza. The small population of the island gained enormous wealth from its phosphate exports. By the early 1980s, the country had the second-highest per capita income in the world, after the United Arab Emirates. And, like the UAE today, the country was not ashamed to spend the wealth it derived from its natural resources. People chartered planes to go on international shopping trips around the Pacific Rim. The country imported fancy sports cars, even though the entire nation can be circumnavigated by bicycle in an hour and a half and the highest speed limit on the island is 25 mph. The nouveau riche Nauruans were living the good life and profiting from a natural bounty that seemed to be a limitless gift from God.

Unfortunately, the island's good fortune did not extend to its investments of that wealth, to the extent that investments were even made:

"We just didn't know how to handle it all," a barefoot islander told me as he played his guitar beneath a tree.

"Hardly anyone thought of investing the money. Dollar notes were even used as toilet paper," his friend told me. "It's true," he insisted seeing my look of disbelief. "It was like every day was party day."

The world's most dubious investors - from the nefarious to the clueless - saw in Nauru a likely target for their financial schemes. One advisor to the Republic of Nauru convinced the government to invest in Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love, a West End production that would go down as one of the most spectacular flops in the history of the London stage. The country also made various real estate investments around the world that would be gradually vaporized by corruption and mismanagement. And when the nation finally took a break from its decades-long party to look around itself, it made a discovery: the phosphate - the source of all the good times - was nearly gone, and so was the money.


The country has tried other means to keep its financially foundering fortunes afloat. It went the route of other island nations by trying to make it as a tax haven and money laundering center, though pressure from the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering quickly scotched that plan. And in 2001, a Norwegian boat carrying a cargo of human refugees, including some from Afghanistan, was diverted from Australia to Nauru; in exchange for keeping the refugees in a detention center on the island, Australia threw Nauru a lifeline of financial aid. Australia decided to close the facility in 2008, and its unclear how the island will deal with the consequent shock to its now refugee detention-based economy.

Meanwhile, mining has left the once pristine nation comprehensively denuded. A thin limn of foliage clings to the edge of the island, but almost the entire interior - 90% of the island - has been rendered a wasteland. The country, having squan- dered its resources and its wealth, is now left without even a healthy natural environment from which to rebuild.

Nauru's tale is the story of a population whistling past the graveyard as it gradually depletes the finite resource on which its economy and its society depends, preferring to live extravagantly without considering what might happen when that resource inevitably disappears.

Feel free to draw your own lessons.

UPDATE: NPR's This American Life had a really good episode a little while back about Nauru. Here's the link.

Place of the Week: Sealand

It's another edition of the possibly inadvisable series, Place of the Week. Today I give you: the littlest and most oxymoronically named (micro-)nation on Earth, Sealand.



Status: ambiguous
Form of government: constitutional monarchy
Founded: 2 September 1967
Area: 0.06 sq. km.
Population: 27
Sex ratio: 4.4 males/female
Per capita GDP, if you take their word for it: $22,200 US

In 1967, Paddy Roy Bates was just another run-of-the-mill Army major-cum-fisherman-cum-pirate radio operator, minding his own business and blithely disregarding British broadcasting law. But the British - sticklers for things like laws (especially British ones) - were none too keen on Bates' activites, and they convicted him on a charge of radio piracy. Now, it's common knowledge that getting tried and convicted in a court of law leaves a man with two clear options: 1) go to jail; or 2) abscond to an abandoned WWII-era naval defense platform in international waters, claim you've founded a new nation and declare yourself royal prince. It takes a certain sort of person to determine that, of these two options, the latter is clearly superior. And Bates was that sort of person.

The HM Fort Roughs was a pontoon base dropped onto a sandbar by the UK military in international waters off the coast of Essex. The unmellifluously-named base continued to serve as perhaps the least exotic outpost of the waning British Empire until 1956, when the Brits evidently just lost interest in it and left. This was all to the good for Bates of course, who, 11 years later, would find in Fort Roughs an inviting sanctuary from his legal troubles, not to mention a likely platform for continuing his pirate radio operations. (And never mind that the place had already been occupied by a rival crew of radio pirates; Bates physically evicted the squatters, apparently with no great effort.)

It isn't clear that Bates knew right away what he had. But after talking to a lawyer, he determined that the UK government's abandonment of the installation in international waters constituted a dereliction of sovereignty. The (perhaps bemused) British military sought to suppress this minor kerfuffle in 1968, sending out a vessel to politely re-enfold Sealand into the apron of its empire. Bates' son Michael fired a warning shot at the craft, and by and by Roy was arrested when next he set foot on English soil. He argued that the court had no authority to bring charges, as he was a sovereign entity in international waters and, charmingly, he won his case.

From that point on, Sealand pursued a course of nation-building. A constitution was enacted in 1975; a flag was designed and an anthem was written; postage stamps, currency, and passports were issued. And Sealand chose a motto: E Mare Libertas - from the sea, freedom.

Of course, in international relations, peace is never more than an interregnum between wars, and it wouldn't be long before the tranquillity of the young and absurdly small nation would be tested. In the summer of 1978, Roy and his wife were enticed to Austria by the prospect of a business deal with a group of Dutch and German diamond dealers. The meeting never materialized, however, and meanwhile a group of nefarious Dutchmen were abducting Michael and dropping him off, sans passport and pennies, somewhere in the Netherlands; they were assisted by Alexander G. Achenbach, the turncoat prime minister of Sealand who had been appointed by Roy Bates. Following this disastrous turn of events, it was clear what the Bateses had to do:

The Bates family enlisted armed assistance, including a helicopter pilot who had done some work on James Bond movies, and headed back to Sealand to storm the fortress and take back their country. When they arrived, Michael slid down the rope onto the deck armed with a shotgun, and fired a shot. The intruders quickly surrendered, and were held as prisoners of war until their home countries petitioned for their release.

Achenbach was subsequently held for treason, and wasn't released until a visit by a German diplomat (which visit, Bates argued, constituted de facto recognition by the German government). Achenbach would go on to establish a government-in-exile in Germany, claiming the title "Chairman of the Privy Council."

Times have been fairly quiet since the War of '78. Roy and his wife, Princess Joan, have retired to Spain, though Roy maintains his status as sovereign, along with his son Michael. Plans for an online casino are afoot. Challenges to the sovereignty of Sealand are occasionally levied, such as this one by one 'King Marduk' of Germany. But more than 40 years after its founding, the greatest micronation in the history of the world persists.

For more information, visit the official website of Sealand.

Place of the Week: Shibam, Yemen

Time for another entry in the surprisingly labor-intensive series with the still undetermined future, Place of the Week. This time it's Shibam, Yemen.



Status: town and former capital of the Hadramawt Kingdom
Population: 7,000ish
Age in years: 2,000ish
Number of medieval skyscrapers: about 500

Shibam is a walled city in the Yemeni desert that is famous for its mud brick high-rises. There are hundreds of such towers that are five to eleven stories high which were among the tallest in the history of the world when they were first built in the 16th Century. The architecture, which was orinigally developed as a defense against Bedouin attacks, has had the unintended consequence of making the town look really, really cool.

Of the town's architecture, Wikipedia says:

Shibam is often called "the oldest skyscraper-city in the world" or "Manhattan of the desert", and is the earliest example of urban planning based on the principle of vertical construction. The city has the tallest mud buildings in the world, with some of them being over 100 feet (over 30 meters) high, thus being the first high-rise (which need to be at least 75 feet or 23 meters) apartment buildings and tower blocks (except perhaps for the insulae of ancient Rome). The tallest building in the city is the mudbrick minaret which stands at 175 feet (over 53 metres) tall.

The city itself actually dates back to the 100s CE or so. It was intermittently the capital of the Hadramawt, a loose confederation of sultanates and emirates that extended (and extends today in the form of the Hadramawt Governate) from the southeastern coastal plain of Yemen into the Jol, the broad 4,500 ft. plateau in the Yemeni interior, and slopes down into the essentially uninhabited and liminally vague Empty Quarter. The climate is deserty, with occasionaly strong storms in April and September. Here's a link to the Shibam Urban Development Project, which exists to preserve the cultural heritage and promote sustainable economic development of the place, and has more information about the city.

I believe I would like to visit this place some day.

Place of the Week: Pitcairn Islands

For the second installment of what I'm still not sure whether it may or may not become a regular feature of this blog focusing on some odd or unusual corner of the globe, I give you: The Pitcairn Islands.



Status: Overseas territory of the UK
Area: 47 sq. km.
Population: 48ish
Languages: Pitkern, English
Religion: Seventh Day Adventism
Number of Telephones: 17, on one party line
Size of the labor force, as drolly put in an entry in the CIA World Factbook: 15 able-bodied men

Why did no one ever tell me about the Pitcairns? The story of the Pitcairns is crazy! It's the sort of story that it seems like you ought to just inherit as part of your received knowledge of the world, like the fact that the Egyptians built the Pyramids, or that French Canadians are never to be trusted. But for me, this was not the case! I had no idea about the Pitcairns until just a couple of years ago.

So what's their deal? Their deal is this: the modern Pitcairners are the descendants of an 18th Century mutiny at sea - the mutiny on the Bounty. Now, here's another thing about my ignorance: I had no idea, again until recently, that the mutiny on the Bounty was anything other than a work of fiction. I had always thought it was, you know, The Mutiny on the Bounty. But no, it really happened.


The story, roughly, is this. In 1787, a ship was sent out from England to go fetch some breadfruits from Tahiti. (Yeah, I know - but apparently that's the sort of thing people did in 1787.) After a rather longer-than-anticipated amount of time at sea - about ten months - the crew landed at the South Pacific island and, for reasons that are utterly inexplicable, found the tropical paradise quite to their liking. In particular, they appreciated the local women. (After nearly a year at sea? Again, inexplicable.) Apparently it took them about a fortnight to go native. As the Bounty's Capt. William Bligh observed, "it is therefore now not to be Wondered at ... that a Set of Sailors led by Officers and void of connections ... should be governed by such powerful inducement ... to fix themselves in the midst of plenty in the finest Island in the World where they need not labour, and where the alurements of disipation are more than equal to anything that can be conceived." In other words: they liked it there, because it was freakin Tahiti.

But so after five months they left to take their breadfruits back to England; however, apparently the prospect of returning to Spithead, the port from which they'd originally set out, didn't appeal to a large contingent of the newly tattooed and Tahitian-betrothed crew, for this is when they mutinied. After some travails involving assorted cannibals and Royal Navy courts martialers, the mutineers and a number of the Tahitian wives and buddies ended up on Pitcairn Island.

As incredible as that story is, what gets me is that they're still there. Their descendants at least - almost everyone who lives on Pitcairn today descends from those original crew. (Granted, this was after a bit of a genetic bottleneck; after some growing pangs involving racial violence, murder, the deaths of all the Tahitian men and a number of the English, and a number of accidental deaths (which increased after the local re-invention of alcohol), the male population had been whittled down to a sole survivor, along with nine women and many children, by 1800.) They didn't come into contact with anyone from the outside world again until 1808, and infrequently thereafter, from what I gather. Later in the 19th Century some missionaries showed up and turned them all into Seventh Day Adventists. But basically, the Pitcairners have just been doing their thing, maintaining their tiny civilization (and perhaps, unfortunately, cultivating a culture of sexual abuse), for the last couple hundred years. It's remarkable.

The locals speak Pitkern, an English creole tongue, which combines elements of Tahitian and 18th Century maritime English. The economy is based on subsistence farming and selling handicrafts to passing ships (which, given the distances to the nearest continents, must be about as remunerative as opening up a magazine stand in the middle of the Rub al Khali). Like 50 or so people live there today.

Seriously. It's important to know that this place exists in the world. Why did no one ever tell me about this?


Life on Pitcairn.

Place of the Week: Kalmykia

For the first installment of what may or may not become a regular weekly feature of this blog focusing on some odd or surprising corner of the world, I present to you: The Republic of Kalmykia.



Status: Semi-autonomous constituent republic of the Russian Federation
Area: 76,150 sq. km.
Population: 292,410
Languages: Kalmyk, Russian
Religions: Buddhism, Christianity
Autocratic Leader's Eccentric Foible: an exorbitant interest in chess

Kalmykia came to my attention when, looking at a map of world religions one day, I noticed a seemingly misplaced smudge of color in a remote corner of Europe signifying the predominance of Buddhism. Turns out it's quite true: Buddhism is the religion of the Kalmyks, who are a branch of the Oirats, a nomadic shepherding people from the Mongolian steppe. The Kalmyks broke off from the Oirats in the 17th Century, migrating to a fertile grasslands region on the northwest coast of the Caspian Sea.

Though there has been some historical tension between the various Oirat peoples and the Mongols, they share many characteristics, including a similar appearance, language, and culture, as well as an adherence to Tibetan Buddhism. As with most ethnic groups that lived in the Soviet Union, the Kalmyks had to put up with state efforts to quash religious practice. Things have mellowed a bit since the fall of the Soviet Union, though, at least on the religious persecution front; in 2005 the Burkhan Bakshin Altan Sume opened as the largest Buddhist temple in Europe.

The republic is led by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. According to the BBC:

A Buddhist millionaire businessman, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov acquired his wealth in the economic free-for-all which followed the collapse of the USSR.

At the age of just over 30, he was elected president in 1993 after promising voters $100 each and a mobile phone for every shepherd. He also pledged to introduce what he called an "economic dictatorship" in the republic.

Soon after his election, Mr Ilyumzhinov introduced presidential rule, concentrating power in his own hands.

He called early elections in 1995 and was re-elected unopposed - this time for a seven-year term. He won re-election in 2002

Ilyumzhinov has been president of FIDE, the International Chess Organization, since 1995. His intention to build an enormous "Chess City" in Kalmykia has engendered protests among the local population, who are among the poorest people in Europe.

According to the BBC, Reporters Without Borders has described the Kalmyk authorities as "among the most repressive towards the media in the entire Russian Federation".