Not Really a Cliff-Diver

When you describe people as “behaving like lemmings,” most of us know what you mean (unless they're one of my grandchildren, who thought the word was “lemons”).

You're saying that the people are getting overwhelmed by mob mentality and preparing to launch themselves off a (let’s hope metaphorical) cliff because the rest of the crowd is doing likewise. Lemmings regularly commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs, so it's a good metaphor, right?

Well, that's not exactly what lemmings do.

Beware of Humans

There's one field of geology notably unrepresented at the United States Geological Survey: paleontology. This seems like a fairly major omission, and it's all thanks to a series of events known as the Bone Wars.

During the Gilded Age (the last thirty years or so of the 1800s in America), paleontology was an incredibly competitive field. At the time, we collected dinosaur fossils more rapidly than ever before. Two figures stood out above all the rest—Edward Drinker Cope, of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and Othniel Charles Marsh.

Marsh and Cope began as friends when they first met in Berlin (Germany has always been a paleontological treasure trove), but their relationship began to sour quickly. By the early 1870s, things heated up to an absurd degree. A series of mishaps, oddities, and minor snubs, along with the fundamentally incompatible personalities of the two men, irrevocably ruined things between them.

In 1873, the Bone Wars began in earnest. The first shots fired were academic ones: renaming and reclassifying species to mess with the other, publicly pointing out one another's errors, and the like.

If things had stayed like that, it wouldn't have made history the way it did; academic rivalries are, as they say, a dime a dozen. However, the confrontation escalated rapidly from there.

Marsh and Cope began hiring employees away from one another, bribing officials to advantage themselves and hurt the other, stealing fossils from one another's sites, and so on and so forth. They actively tried to destroy one another's reputations, and even turned to destroying fossils rather than letting the other get his hands on them. Financially and professionally, the rivalry eventually ruined both of them, and they never abandoned it.

The two scientists discovered 136 new species during the Bone Wars, including Triceratops and Stegosaurus. (Before then, we had only nine named species of dinosaur in North America.)

Unfortunately, the Bone Wars also did much to damage the reputation of American paleontology. It resulted in the loss of numerous fossils, the USGS losing its paleontology division, and a severe, decades-long blow to the reputation of American paleontology.

Gentrification . . . of a Sort

In the 1960s and 70s, Maoist China constructed a massive series of fallout shelters underneath their cities for fear of nuclear war. Beijing had 10,000 such bunkers, with many more constructed across the nation. Now, however, that the Cold War has ended and fear of nuclear war has receded, those bunkers are seeing new life.

Every night, more than a million inhabitants of Beijing bed down inside these underground bunkers. They're largely migrant workers and poor rural students, and the conditions they live in are often quite harsh. The bunkers have been subdivided into countless micro-apartments, and people are crammed into these spaces like stacked logs.

While laws dictate a minimum size for the micro-apartments, they're often ignored. It's not uncommon to find an entire family living in a room only large enough for a bed. Mold is common, and the lack of sunlight and ventilation certainly isn't healthy.

Despite government efforts to clean up the bunkers, there isn't anywhere else for these people to go. Housing and rental prices in Beijing have skyrocketed to utterly unsupportable levels.

That's Some Celebration

The longest construction project in history lasted almost two thousand years.

The Corinth Canal is a four-mile-long, seventy-foot-wide canal that separates the Peloponnese peninsula from mainland Greece, technically making it an island.

The Corinthian Tyrant Periander first proposed the canal in the seventh century BCE. It swiftly became too expensive, and Periander instead constructed a Diolkos, a stone road designed to use to drag (or portage) ships across the narrow isthmus. (You can still see remnants of the Diolkos alongside the canal.)

The canal idea was next resurrected in the third century BCE by Diadoch Demetrius Poliorcetes, one of the generals who warred over the remnants of Alexander the Great's empire after his death. His surveyors, however, miscalculated and feared that the canal would result in large-scale flooding, so the project was abandoned.

Roman Emperors Julius Caesar and Caligula both considered constructing the canal, but both were assassinated before they could begin. Emperor Nero became the first ruler to actually move forward with the construction of the canal—and, in fact, was the first person to labor on it, digging up the first basket of soil with a pickaxe. Construction officially began in 67 AD, after centuries of false starts.

Almost immediately afterward, of course, Nero got assassinated.

For nearly two thousand years after that, the idea never progressed farther than another proposal. Several conquerors of Greece throughout its history considered the idea, but nothing happened.

Then, in the 1830s, Greece gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire. New proposals immediately started back up, and construction finally started in the 1880s. (That’s a pretty short amount of time, as far as the Corinth Canal goes.)

Finally, on July 25, 1893, Greece completed the Corinth Canal. And, of course, it was too narrow, too windy, and had currents that were too severe for it to be of much use, except to a small number of ships a year.