The Soviet/Russian Gem
A Diamond (Mine) in the Rough
The Great Wall of China isn't visible from space. That's just an urban legend. The Mir diamond mine in Siberia, however, is.
Big Hole in the Ground
The Mir mine is an open pit diamond mine that's almost a mile wide and a third of a mile deep. It was the source for nearly all of the Soviet Union's diamonds. And without it, the USSR probably never would have worked.
Not only did the Mir mine provide much needed cash to the USSR, it also provided diamonds necessary for industrial purposes, and all major nations need such diamonds for their many industries. (Remember: diamonds are necessary for many large drill bits and scouring materials.)
The Mir mine opened in 1957, operating for 44 years until its closure in 2001. Developing the mine was no picnic. It occupies ground that’s frozen seven months of the year, and it turns to slush in the brief summer.
Engineers needed to build the main processing plant on solid ground 12 miles away. Steel got so cold it would shatter, and oil would freeze. Jet engines were used by the miners to thaw the permafrost in the winter.
Still: the quality and quantity of the diamonds in the mine more than warranted these ridiculous efforts.
The mine is actually so large that helicopters can't fly safely over it. Air tends to warm in the bottom of large holes (and the Mir mine certainly counts as large). That warm air rises over the hole. It's less dense than the cold air around it, so the helicopter tends to drop quickly when it enters the air.
A helicopter pilot could probably recover from that just by increasing rotor speed, but the cool air pouring into the hole to replace the rising warm air from all sides creates extremely powerful wind shear, which will slam the helicopter into the side of the mine.
The Mir was truly a diamond in the rough.
McCoy’s Overfishing Blues
Or: My Orange Roughy Lament
Rough Times for Roughy
I go freshwater fishing all the time, but I'm a big seafood fan and still buy a lot of saltwater fish from the store.
(One of my favorite shows is River Monsters. Back in the day, I loved watching Harold Ensley’s “The Sportsman’s Friend, a bit for his calm, cool approach to all things hunting and fishing, though mostly for the awe of seeing him catch awesomely-sized fish…and then unhook and drop them back in the water. Harold may never have been hungry.)
A few years ago, there was this fish I adored, Orange Roughy, that, well, simply stopped showing up in stores. Turns out that this deep-dwelling creature is extremely vulnerable to overfishing. The Orange Roughy can live to an astonishing 149 years yet often don't start reproducing until age 40 and, when they do, lay a relatively small amounts of eggs (for fish).
We had almost wiped out the Orange Roughy before we started realizing how endangered their stocks were getting. These days, thanks to careful conservation, their fisheries have recovered enough that limited fishing has resumed. But it was a close call there for a while.
The scary thing is that this is not an isolated event. We have MASSIVELY overfished our oceans. It's estimated that we put in 17 times as much work for each fish we catch today as fishermen did a century ago.
Even with all of the advanced tech we use today, fishing remains much harder and less rewarding.
That's nowhere near the scariest statistic, though: More than 90% of all large bony fish are gone from our oceans.
Some fisheries, however, are quite sustainable and make excellent seafood choices. These include:
- The Florida Stone Crab. There is little to no bycatch (unwanted animals caught along with the catch, most of which die and are discarded; tiger prawns are the worst offenders for bycatch). Plus, most of the crabs caught actually survive. We just harvest a single claw and let them go.
- Arctic Char. The product of well-managed fisheries, along with some of the few sustainable aquaculture programs that don’t cause massive problems in the regions around them.
- Pacific Cod. While Atlantic Cod fisheries are a mess, Pacific Cod fisheries are in pretty good shape. Avoid Russian and Japanese Cod, though. They're often overfished.
For a fairly thorough listing of environmentally responsible fisheries, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch has an interactive website.
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Quotable
Oh, Mr. Yard Ramp Guy—Heck, Mann:
“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”
— Robert Frost
Nursery Rhymes Revisited
It’s Never Too Late to Have a Scary Childhood
Have a Great Fall!
Most people don't think about the origins of our nursery rhymes, but it turns out that a lot of them have pretty interesting—or even gruesome—histories.
“Mary had a Little Lamb” was based on a true story: In 1816, Mary Sawyer of Sterling, Massachusetts, had her pet lamb follow her to school. Mary had raised the lamb from infancy, when its mother rejected it. It followed her all over and would come when called. Her brother suggested they bring it to school, and so they did. When the teacher caught them, Mary didn't get in trouble. The teacher just laughed and had them take it home at lunch. A poet witnessed the event and, well, the rest is history.
We commonly think that “Ring around the Rosie” is about the Black Death. “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down” suddenly seems a lot darker in that light. Most scholars, however, disagree, though the Black Death explanation is unlikely to vanish any time soon, given how well it captures the imagination.
“Jack and Jill” is thought to come from King Charles I of England's attempt to reform a tax on liquid goods. Parliament rejected the measure, leading King Charles to lower the volume of a pint, leading to smaller half- and quarter-pints, known respectively as “jacks” and “gills.”
“London Bridge is Falling Down” could refer to a Viking attack in 1014 AD that destroyed the bridge, a child sacrifice (probably not, though it's certainly sensational), or just that bridge’s continual state of poor repair through most of history.
There are claims scrambled about that “Humpty Dumpty” refers to a cannon that fell off a city wall, but it's probably just an invented riddle.
We tend to think that “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” refers either to Mary, Queen of Scots or to Queen Mary I of England. Mary I is the more gruesome version. She’s also known as Bloody Mary for her execution of hundreds of Protestants, and the metaphors that we can read into it are pretty grim.
“Pop! Goes the Weasel” is probably just nonsense, though not for the weasel.
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Quotable
Yard Ramp Guy, sir—Impressive stuff here:
“I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.”
— Stephen Wright
Supersized Garbage Collection
Patching the Patch
The Deep Blue Sea
Last time around, I took on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's a floating collection of garbage, about the size of the state of Texas and largely composed of floating bits of plastic. The patch is an alarming thing, and I’ve placed it solidly in my “Cautionary Tales” category, which now has 35 entries since I began blogging.
Lest you think I’m all about doom-and-gloom scenarios, I also discover rays of hope in my reading and research. This is one of them:
A young inventor thinks that he's found a solution to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Boyan Slat, born in 1994, (yes, I did say he was young), spent much of his youth near and in the ocean. Time and again, he encountered plastic in the waters. Eventually, he grew really bothered by how pessimistic people were about developing solutions to ocean plastics. And so, in a fine example of youthful idealism balanced by realism, he decided to do something about it himself.
Boyan’s project, The Ocean Cleanup, is developing a large-scale, passive method of removing floating plastic. Essentially, his invention is a large, floating U-shaped pipe that will gather the plastic bits as it drifts.
To ensure that the device collects enough, it will employ a sea anchor—hanging down in the water, increasing drag via an extremely un-hydrodynamic shape— to slow down, so that the plastic flows faster through the gyre than the pipe. This is designed to ensure the plastic runs into—and not under—the capturing pipe.
Naturally, the project has its critics. Most of the plastic in the ocean is made up of particles too small for the system to gather. Quite a bit of plastic ends up on the seafloor, as well. Both of these criticisms, and quite a few of the others, tend to focus on the idea that this project doesn't do enough or is inefficient.
Those are legitimate criticisms, but they also ignore the fact that at least Boyan Slat and his project are doing something. Something is a lot better than nothing. And nothing is about exactly what we've been doing so far to solve this problem.
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Quotable
Yard Ramp Guy: Quotations are plentiful. Just look:
“Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.”