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Showing posts with label place. Show all posts
Showing posts with label place. Show all posts

The Chapel Inside a Volcano


Santa Margarida is a freato-magmatic volcano located in the Spanish county of Garrotxa, in Catalonia. Some 11,500 years ago, the earth’s crust burst opened and out poured millions of tons of magma, that accumulated in a conical hill more than six hundred meters tall. At the top of this hill a wide circular crater was formed, whose floor today is carpeted with thick grass and shrubs while the flanks of the volcano are covered in evergreen holm oak and mixed deciduous forest. Amidst this, and smack in the middle of the crater today, stands a Romanesque church.
Not much is known about the hermitage of Santa Margarida, after which the volcano was named, except that the building was destroyed during the 1428 Catalonia earthquake, suggesting it was first built at least 600 years ago. The current building is from 1865.
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Exercise Tiger: The Disastrous D-Day Rehearsal That Cost 800 Lives


In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, thousands of Allied soldiers stormed into the beaches of northern France in what became the largest seaborne invasion in history. In the space of a single day, Operation Overlord put over 180,000 troops ashore in Normandy, creating a beachhead that eventually allowed more than 3 million Allied soldiers into German occupied Western Europe, setting the stage for the final phase of the war in Europe.

In the months leading up to D-Day, the Allied powers organized a series of training exercises involving full dress rehearsal and live ammunition in order to give the soldiers a small taste of what they would experience during the actual landings. One such rehearsal took place in a small sleepy Devon village named Slapton.
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American troops landing on Slapton Sands in England during rehearsals for the invasion of Normandy.
Slapton was located on the southwest coast of England where it meets the English Channel. It was chosen because Slapton’s beach looked very similar to the one in Cotentin Peninsula, the westernmost of the five beaches along Normandy where the real assault would take place. This particular beach was code named Utah.
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Makhunik: The Village of Dwarves

Makhunik: The Village of Dwarves
In a remote corner in Iran’s South Khorasan Province, near its border with Afghanistan, is a village that, until about a century ago, was inhabited by people of very short stature. Indication of their dwarfism is found in the local architecture. Of the roughly two hundred stone and clay houses that make up the ancient village, seventy or eighty of them are of exceptionally low height. These adobe dwellings are less than two meters tall with narrow doorways that cannot be entered without stooping. Some of these houses have ceiling as low as 140 cm.
Marriages between close relatives, poor diet and drinking water laced with mercury had left the residents of Makhunik a good half a meter short than the average height of that time.
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The Soccer Stadium Lying On Two Hemispheres


This Friday, two local Brazilian football clubs—Santos FC and Macapá—will face each other at the Estádio Milton Corrêa, a multi-purpose stadium in the city of Macapá, Brazil. When the whistle blows at 5:00 PM local time, each team will defend the goal on their side. But that’s not the only thing they will be defending.
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Estádio Milton Corrêa is the most centrally located stadium anywhere in the world. It straddles right over the equator. In fact, it’s so precisely built that the mid-field line coincides exactly with the equator line, so that each half of the field lies on a different hemisphere. In every soccer game that’s played here, each team isn't just defending its own goal. One side is defending the northern hemisphere, and the other side the southern hemisphere.
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China’s Bicycle Graveyards

China’s Bicycle Graveyards
Over the last few years, the bicycle-sharing phenomenon has taken the world by storm, especially in China, where—according to one report—there are over 70 private bike-sharing companies in operation with a collective pool of 16 million cycles and over 130 million users. These bikes, especially the dockless variety, can be picked up from anywhere on the streets using a smartphone to unlock them first, and then dropped off anywhere without the need to park it at a dock. Regular users say these bikes are godsend because it allows them to avoid congested public transport routes and reduce travel costs, while also reducing pollution and encouraging users to stay fit.
However, the supply has vastly outpaced demand. Many Chinese cities ill-equipped to handle the sudden flood of millions of shared bicycles have been overwhelmed. Illegal parking have led to clogged sidewalks, while damaged and mangled bikes are routine occurrence.
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Peary Land, The Land of Extremities


The northern tip of Greenland, despite being situated a little over 700 km from the north pole, is entirely ice free and has been for the last 8,000 years since the glaciers retreated. It is the most northerly ice-free region in the world. The climate is high arctic with a relatively warm summer of less than two months and long winters. Precipitation levels are so low that this region has been dubbed a ‘polar desert’.
This region, a peninsula, is called Peary Land—named in honor of Robert Peary, who first explored it during his expedition of 1891 to 1892.
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