Antarctic Time Capsule

Never before seen: from Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Image Source: Antarctic Heritage Trust New Zealand via Petapixel.

Happy New Year! The blog starts 2014 with a hundred-year-old time capsule. On 10 December 2013, the Antarctic Heritage Trust published photographs from negatives discovered in Captain Scott's expedition base at Cape Evans (images of Scott's hut are here). The found photos were taken on Ernest Shackleton's famous and ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917:

The Trust’s conservation specialists discovered the clumped together cellulose nitrate negatives in a small box as part of the Ross Sea Heritage Restoration Project which has seen more than 10,000 objects conserved at Scott’s Cape Evans hut. The negatives were removed from Antarctica by the Trust earlier this year [2013]. Detailed conservation treatment back in New Zealand separating the negatives has revealed twenty-two images. The photographs are from Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Ross Sea Party, which spent time living in Scott’s hut after being stranded on Ross Island when their ship blew out to sea.

One of the most striking images is of Ross Sea Party member Alexander Stevens, Shackleton’s Chief Scientist, standing on-board the Aurora.

Although many of the images are damaged, the Antarctic Heritage Trust was able to recognise landmarks around McMurdo Sound, although the identity of the photographer remains unknown.

Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition marked the end of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Two ships served on this expedition, the Endurance and the Aurora; they had separate missions.

While the Aurora sailed to the other side of the continent, Endurance became trapped in ice in the Weddell Sea; it broke apart and sank. Shackleton and five of his crew sailed a life boat to South Georgia, climbing a mountain once he landed ("the first-ever confirmed land crossing of the South Georgia interior"). Shackleton found help and saved his whole crew. T. S. Eliot immortalized this incredible story in his 1922 poem, The Waste Land (see my earlier post here).

As the press release mentioned, the found photos below the jump are from the Aurora's leg of the expedition. The whole collection is here.

Holidays

Rock Formations in Göreme Valley, Cappadocia, Turkey (for more photos, go here). Image Source: Daily Mail.

The blog is on vacation until the traditional date for Epiphany, 6 January 2014. Happy New Year!

Image Source: World Mysteries.

Image Source: Toby Melville via Reuters.

Yuletide

Pandora's box. Image Source: Waging Nonviolence.

Merry Christmas! See some of the entries in the festival of lights in the French town of Lyon:

The Festival of Lights in Lyon, France (or Fête des Lumières) kicked off on December 6th [2013] bringing with it dazzling light displays by artists from around the world. “Every year we ask the artists to propose their concepts based on locations,” explained Jean-François Zurawik, General coordinator of the festival to Euronews. “We ask them to use the city as a huge backdrop, and to make proposals for parks, buildings, theaters, town hall, etc,” he said.

By the end of it, between three and four million visitors are expected to have walked around the French city to see the highly impressive light installations, which this year include 80 works by 120 designers ... . They include a forest filled with swarm of red lanterns and a lake sprinkled with lit lotus blossoms, both by Chinese artist Li Ll.

Source for images below: My Modern Met.

Swarm of Red Lanterns in a Forest.

Overflowing Bed of CDs.

Bright Lotus Blossoms Floating Down a Lake.

Surreal Video Projection in a Tunnel.

Surrounding Buildings Projected Onto Magic Square.

 

Bed of Colorful Roses.

 

Jungle of Strings Representing Different Seasons.

Below the jump, see some Millennial animated yule logs ("Re-imagined by artists around the world, this is not your parent's Yule Log"), and for even more interesting ones, go here.

Airlines' Millennial Christmas Marketing

Image Source: Calgary Sun.

The now-departed Spanair (2010), followed by Royal Dutch Airlines KLM (2010) and Canada's Westjet (2013), have eased some of the stress of traveling home for the holidays with Millennial marketing gift-giving campaigns.

These days, corporations' intimate exploitation of social networking often causes concern. However, once in awhile, corporations demonstrate that the ever-widening net of integrated information can be used to bring some holiday cheer. In each case, these airlines surprised passengers at checkpoints and baggage claims with surprise gifts off the latter's wishlists. KLM gleaned the wishes from social networking sites:

All this gift-giving was a part of KLM Surprise, the company’s effort to not only connect with its customers on a personal level, but also an experiment in the power of social sharing. Flight attendants browsed Twitter and Foursquare, looking for people who mentioned that they were taking a KLM flight. Then, using the information the customer provided about him or herself on social media platforms, the flight attendants purchased a suitable gift and presented it to the passenger upon his/her arrival at the airport. According to the photos on the KLM Surprise website, at least 40 KLM customers were given gifts.

40 isn’t a staggering number. But news of these surprises spread like wildfire through mentions, tweets, retweets, and word of mouth. In November, the KLM Twitter feed was viewed more than one million times. Not bad for a company that wasn’t sure it could make social media work for them.

KLM did their homework, and made it a priority to seek out their followers and create relationships with them. They created a website and Twitter feed dedicated to their campaign, joined Foursquare, and posted their video on their YouTube channel and the KLM Facebook Fan page. They attempted to start and join conversations on those platforms, and get a feel for what their customers are like.

Sadly, this clever initiative was not enough to save Spanair from the ravages of the recession. It ceased operations in 2012.

Westjet, in borrowing a page from this book in 2013, modified the original idea by having passengers tell a virtual Santa Claus what they wanted for the holidays when they checked in. This tactic diminished the unsavoury aspect of the company sifting through passengers' social media accounts to determine their private wishlists.

See more reports here, here, here and here; videos of the gift-giving are below the jump.

Welcome the Winter Solstice

Image Source:  Bentobjects via Dark Roasted Blend.

Today (17:11 UTC) marks the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night, and the onset of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. You can see the gradual lengthening of days, second by second, here.  The winter solstice occurred this year in the Southern Hemisphere on June 21.

On this day, Stonehenge is a magnet for tourist groups, neo-pagans, Wiccans and neo-Druids. From Stonehenge Tours:

Stonehenge is carefully aligned on a sight-line that points to the winter solstice sunset (opposed to New Grange, which points to the winter solstice sunrise, and the Goseck circle, which is aligned to both the sunset and sunrise). It is thought that the Winter Solstice was actually more important to the people who constructed Stonehenge than the Summer Solstice. The Winter Solstice was a time when most cattle were slaughtered (so they would not have to be fed during the winter) and the majority of wine and beer was finally fermented.The exact time for the Winter Solstice is December 21st, 17.11pm (UK time).

See 2006 and 2009 videos of the great Neolithic and Bronze Age site below the jump. The earliest possible date for building at Stonehenge dates from around 3100 BCE. And to bring us back to the present, there's also a video for a 2008 Canadian winter tire ad.

Image Source: Mount Washington Observatory via Greetings May All Your Dreams Come True.

Image Source: Out of Ashes.

Lighthouse covered in ice in Cleveland, Ohio, on Lake Erie (16 December 2010). Image Source: National Geographic.

Image Source: Forum Garden. 
 

Snow in Athens (February 2008). Image Source: Kim Trathen / BBC.

Cryptic Messages

Image Source: Live Science.

Live Science reports on a crypt which has been uncovered in the Sudan, in the old Christian Kingdom of Makuria, which reached its golden age from 750 to 1150 CE. The crypt is located in what was the capital city, Old Dongola, once an important centre in medieval Nubia (see a brief history of the region here). The Live Science report is based on a research publication from 2009. The archaeologists from the University of Warsaw who excavated the crypt and environs in 2009 have a Website here; you can see their 2012 excavation of the city's royal palace, here.

From the Kingdom of Aldoia, south of the Kingdom of Makuria, north of Khartoum: "Bishop Marianos (1005-1039) and Virgin with Child, after 1005 [CE]." Image Source: Early African Christianity.

Ruins of a Coptic Christian church in Old Dongola, Sudan. Image Source: SuperStock.

Photos of the Day: Microworlds

Humped, or Creeping, Bladderwort (Utricularia gibba) (click to enlarge), First Place in the Olympus BioScapes Imaging Competition (2013). Image Source: Igor Siwanowicz, HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, VA via NPR.

For today, a glimpse of tiny worlds! Above, see the fantastic First Prize winner of the Olympus BioScapes Imaging Competition. This is a digital microscopic photo, taken by Igor Siwanowicz, of the "[o]pen trap of aquatic carnivorous plant, humped bladderwort (Utricularia gibba). The floating plant digests microinvertebrates that are sucked into its trap a millisecond after they touch its trigger hairs." NPR explains how Siwanowicz took the picture:

Igor Siwanowicz, a neurobiologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus ... magnified the plant 100 times using a laser scanning confocal microscope and used cellulose-binding fluorescent dye Calcofluor White to visualize the cell walls of the plant.

Siwanowicz's personal gallery of microscopic photos is here; the gallery has an e-card function, in case you need to scare (or delight) your friends over the holidays.

The Humped Bladderwort to the naked eye. Image Source:  Go Botany.

Directly below, see more microimages from Igor Siwanowicz.

Two male African mantis Pseudempusa pinnapavonis square off. Image Source: Igor Siwanowicz via HuffPo.

"A Giant Malaysian Shield Mantis cleans its tarsus (the last segment of an arthropodís leg) in Igor's home studio in Munich, Germany." Image Source: Igor Siwanowicz via HuffPo.

Desmids (a type of algae). Image Source: Igor Siwanowicz.

Cross section of a Juncus sp. leaf (a type of rush grass). Image Source: Igor Siwanowicz.
Below the jump, see more winners and honourable mentions from the Olympus BioScapes competition. The images are taken from the Olympus BioScapes 2013 Winners Gallery. All images here are copyrighted by the original photographers and are reproduced under Fair Use for non-commercial discussion and review only.

Photos of the Day: China's Moon Mission

Image Source: Xinhua/Wang Jianmin via Yahoo.

Caption for the above photo: "BEIJING, Dec. 14, 2013 (Xinhua/IANS) -- Photo taken on Dec. 14, 2013 shows a picture of the moon surface taken by the on-board camera of the lunar probe Chang'e-3 on the screen of the Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing, capital of China. China's lunar probe Chang'e-3, with the country's first moon rover onboard, landed on the moon on Saturday night, marking the first time that China has sent a spacecraft to soft land on the surface of an extraterrestrial body."

Here are some photos from AP and Reuters via the Daily Mail and Yahoo of the Chinese lander, Chang'e, and its Jade Rabbit (Yutu) rover on the lunar landscape. The full moon in December, which occurs today, is called the Cold Moon or the Long Nights Moon; its names mark the run up to the solstice.

 The Yutu rover, photographed by the Chang'e lander.

The lander, as photographed on the lunar surface by the Yutu rover.