Geographics

About 460 km north of Moscow, in the Vologda province, a small lake rests among a sprawling woodland. The lake is called Novozero and its middle stands an island called Ognenny Ostrov. Despite its name meaning “Fiery Island” or “Fire Island”, it is surrounded by ice most of the year, connected to the mainland only by a narrow bridge.

The Mediterranean is home to many mysteries and wonders. Both natural beauties and human made shipwrecks lay at the bottom of the sea, awaiting to be discovered. As the famous poem [TA1] puts it: “Right here on the ocean floor Such wonderful things surround you What more is you lookin’ for? Under the sea We got the spirit You got to hear it Under the sea”

In 2011, Japan was ravaged by a magnitude 9 earthquake, followed by a massive tsunami. In Fukushima prefecture, TEPCO’s Daiichi Nuclear Reactor exploded and exposed the surrounding area to radiation. Now, this radioactive material is seeping into the Pacific ocean, and it has made the surrounding areas into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Few people outside of Japan know what really happened at Fukushima, or how the consequences of this one disaster could potentially affect the whole world. On today’s Geographics, we bring you the story of Fukushima.

Every city has many layers. Under its grand monuments, museums and Churches, real life goes on. Under its roofs and buildings, the passions, stories and secrets of its inhabitants, move, undetected. In the city we are visiting today, you can peel another layer and look under the surface. You will discover a parallel city, a labyrinth of galleries, chambers, pits and underground lakes, unique in Europe

Life is sweet, if you are not a slave, if you are a Roman Citizen. The Empire extends from Spain to the Black Sea, from Britannia to Egypt. After the year of four emperors, 69 CE, Rome has been under the firm and stable rule of Emperor Vespasian for ten years. The Emperor has just started building the Flavian Amphitheatre, which will be known as Colosseum. For the moment, you are content with your own local gladiatorial shows in an Arena that can sit half the population of your rich and beautiful town.

For the moment, join me in a visit to the Nevada Desert and let’s find out what the fuss is all about. Where exactly is Area 51 and how it looks like? What are the speculations flourished around its existence? And finally: what classified activities have actually been happening, as recently acknowledged by the US Government?

Siberia, Russia, 30th of June 1908. We are in a woodland area surrounding the Tunguska river, not far from modern day Krasnoyarsk. Simply known as Tunguska. One of the most desolate areas of the most desolate region of the Russian Empire.

Seattle, Washington, is known for being the home of two of the biggest tech companies in the United States- Microsoft, and Amazon.com. With all of its modern charm, few people would ever notice that there is an entire hidden underground city beneath the streets. This is known as the “Seattle Underground”, and it still contains shops and buildings that once served as the city’s businesses. So...Why did the city of Seattle build an entire new town on top of the old one, and how did they do it? Find out on today’s Geographics.

Over four billion kilometers away from us lies a distant, frigid world. On its barren surface, nitrogen falls as snow. Vast plains of frozen methane lie in the shadow of ice water mountains. From the surface of this hostile place, the sun appears nothing more than a star, a single pinprick of light among millions. The name mankind gave this silent world? Pluto.

Spanish author and journalist Arturo Perez-Reverte once defined the Vatican City as the smallest, yet more powerful State on Earth. This tiny City State, nested inside Rome, measures only 0.17 square miles, with a population of 840 inhabitants. Yet its ruler, the Pope, holds spiritual, moral and sometimes even political influence over a community of 1.4 Billion Catholics worldwide.

It’s the land at the edge of the world. A howling emptiness of jagged mountains, broken icebergs, and endless snow. It’s a song of ice and, well, more ice. A land that’s the coldest, driest, windiest, and most uninhabitable of anywhere on Earth. Those who went there knew it as the Great White Silence, the Southern Land, the end of the world. But you know it by its far more ancient name: Antarctica.

The Maya were a native people of Mexico and Central America who inhabited the lands comprising modern-day Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas. Their civilization stretched well beyond current-day Mexican borders, southward through Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. The overall time span of the Maya extended from 7000 BCE to 1524 CE. But their civilisation reached its apex of maximum splendor during the so-called ‘Classic Period’, from 250 to 900 CE.

In the heart of central Europe, in the middle of a deep, dark forest, lies a mountain range that changed the world. It’s smaller than the Alps, less dramatic than the Dolomites, and far less romantic than the Carpathians. And yet, its place in modern European history is so vast, so great, that its reputation could dwarf even the Himalayas. Known as the Sudetes, this borderland between the forests of Germany and the hills of the Czech Republic may not be famous. But the region around it is. In 1938, the Sudetenland helped plunge Europe into war.

It’s the city where East meets West. On Ferhadija street in the heart of Sarajevo, the grand Austro-Hungarian architecture of Christian Europe suddenly gives way to the low roofs and timber frames of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. For centuries, this was the multicultural epicenter of Europe, a city where Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians all rubbed shoulders.

It’s been called the last great adventure of the 19th Century. In 1896, prospectors in Yukon Territory fished a thumb sized nugget of gold out Rabbit Creek. The find triggered a human tsunami not seen since the days of the California Gold Rush. Across the US, tens of thousands abandoned their homes to take their chances in the northern wilderness. At a time when a city like Seattle might have a population of only forty thousand, one hundred thousand people converged on Klondike, hoping to strike it rich. Instead, what many of them found was death, disease, and destitution.

Imagine, if you will, a city of eternal night. A place so intensely crowded that sunlight never penetrates its alleyways. Overhead, wires dangle from the ceilings. Neon signs fizz in doorways. All around you, 33,000 people are crammed into self-built apartments barely 10m square, while overhead great airships rumble through sky. Is this a vision from the future? The setting, perhaps, for some dystopian sci-fi novel?

In the annals of world history, there are a handful of prisons whose very names are guaranteed to send a shiver down your spine. Alcatraz is one, Devil’s Island another. But even these can’t hold a candle to the most notorious prison of them all. We’re talking, of course, about the Tower of London.

To many, this marked the beginning of the Cold War. Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ may have been a figure of speech, but across many borders in Europe this division took the form of physical barriers: walls or structures to prevent capitalist infiltration of the ‘paradise on Earth’ that was real socialism. More likely, these barriers were to prevent citizens of Eastern Europe from fleeing repressive regimes and police states.

Originally constructed as a 16th Century City Hall, the Hotel de Ville has stood at the epicenter of the wildest events in history. It was on its doorstep that the French Revolution ignited, in its opulent rooms that Robespierre tried to commit suicide, and in its vast corridors that a radical anarchist sect siezed Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War.

On January 1st, 1892, Anne led her two younger brothers off their boat, still gasping at the sight of the colossal statue raising the torch of Liberty over New York City. Anne was met by a party of serious-looking but smiling officials, who welcomed her with gifts, and even some gold coins! Anne was a teenager from Ireland, and probably thought of herself as being just an ordinary girl, another one of the many Europeans in search of a new life and a brighter future in the New World. But Anne was special. She was the first passenger to disembark at the newly opened Federal immigration station in New York harbor.

Aralsk 7: The USSR’s Anthrax Island

If a Nation’s wealth and power were to be measured in stubbornness, resilience, and inventiveness, rather than GDP, Scotland would be a top-5 Superpower. The people that brought to you televisions, refrigerators, penicillin, and gin & tonic have gone through many a rough patch throughout their history. Very often, hard times were related to their rocky relationship with their Southern neighbours, the English.

​Technically speaking, the Suez Canal is the artificial waterway running north to south across the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. The Canal separates the African continent from Asia, while providing the shortest sea route between Europe and the Indian and western Pacific oceans.

MAJOR CORRECTION: AUTHOR IS M. MORRIS. We listed Arnaldo by mistake. Our personal apology to Morris

Castle Itter: Where America and Germany Fought Side by Side in WWII

The journey to the Express was not a simple one. For upper class travellers to enjoy a luxury, non-stop train ride across seven nations, it would take the dream of a lovesick Belgian engineer, with his rather interesting supporting cast: an American industrialist, the inventor of US tabloid journalism, the Prince of Wales, and one of the most prolific mass murderers of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

The Panama Canal

Porton Down: Britain’s Secret Nerve Gas Lab

Fiume City State: Free Love, Drugs and Proto Fascism

Rovaniemi is the capital of Lapland, in Northern Finland, and it is placed just a smidge over the line of the Arctic Polar Circle. Unsurprisingly, the climate is positively freezing during the winter months. The average temperature recorded in February 2018 was 13 degrees Celsius below zero. In the Fahrenheit world, this is more or less Alaska.