Geography · Observations · Society · Nature

The Small Aral Sea regains water and fish after construction of the Kok-Aral Dam

I Should Like to Express My Profound Gratitude to the Government of Kazakhstan: the North Aral Sea Is Being Reborn, and Its Volume Has Grown by an Impressive 42%! Not so long ago the Aral was the scene of one of the most destructive ecological catastrophes on the planet, but

Archive · Geography · Books · Society

...yet there are many remote places in Russia, five hundred versts and more without a town, veritable refuges for brigands and all manner of fugitive and passportless people

...yet there are many remote places in Russia, five hundred versts and more without a town, veritable refuges for brigands and all manner of fugitive and passportless people. An example may be seen in the wooded expanse around the river Vetluga, which, stretching seven hundred versts in its course from

NB! · Geography · Science · Nature

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Archaeology · Geography · Observations · Science

Wooden tools about 430,000 years old found on a lake shore in Greece

Wooden tools found on the shore of a lake in Greece are believed by scholars to be the oldest known to date. Their age is estimated at roughly 430,000 years. I remain convinced, all the same, that half a million years is a rather modest figure beside the true

Geography · Science · Society

As recently as 10,000 years ago, Greenland was joined to Eurasia by a land bridge; today that stretch of land is the submerged Lomonosov Ridge, which extends for roughly 1,800 km from the New Siberian Islands to Ellesmere Island in…

For the past several decades this has been one of the key and most contentious themes of the Arctic dialogue. And now, in connection with the discussions about Greenland, the ridge that divides the Eurasian and Amerasian parts of the Arctic Ocean basin is again being talked about. The limits

Geography · Society

Among the possessions of the Danish West Indies that the USA bought from Denmark were 3 large islands and several dozen small ones, including Little Saint James, which Jeffrey Epstein acquired in 1998

Among the political terms of the sale were a US guarantee of Denmark's neutrality and US recognition of Danish sovereignty over Greenland. The islands, now known as the Virgin Islands, cost the USA a mere 25 million dollars. For Denmark these colonial territories, with a population of around

Geography · Science · People · Nature

From June 1937 to February 1938, four Soviet researchers took part in the first expedition in history to the drifting station "North Pole-1"

The station was headed by the geophysicist Ivan Papanin; his team consisted of the meteorologist and geophysicist Yevgeny Fedorov, the radio operator Ernst Krenkel and the hydrobiologist Pyotr Shirshov. The organisation of the whole enterprise was directed by Otto Schmidt, head of the Soviet Arctic Expedition. The members of the

NB! · Archive · Geography · Science · People · Nature

The Meteorologist-Geophysicist Yevgeny Fyodorov Builds a Snow Pavilion for Magnetic Measurements on a Drifting Ice Floe in the Arctic

Geography · Science

This spring, astronomers of the international Event Horizon Telescope project plan to film the first video of a black hole in history, having chosen for the shoot a cosmic object the size of the Solar System with a mass of 6 billion suns

The Event Horizon Telescope is a network of 12 radio telescopes located at different points of the globe, from Antarctica to Spain and Korea. In 2019 the astronomers of this project published the world's first image of the shadow of a black hole

Geography · Observations · Society

The Albanian Prime Minister Declares That the Greeks Are Wrong to Consider Themselves Heirs of Plato and Aristotle

And so we find that hostility towards Greece flourishes not only in Turkey but in Albania too. What is more, the anti-Greek discourse in these countries reaches the point of absurdity: one hears time and again the claim, for instance, that Greece never existed at all and was invented

Geography · Maps · Observations · Society

As for the suggestion that Trump's mania for Greenland stems from his ignorance of the Mercator projection, and that he therefore believes Greenland to be even larger than America, as it appears on ordinary maps, it should be noted that, of course…

In fact, Greenland, which on the map looks commensurate with America, has an area 12 times smaller than that of North America and almost 5 times smaller than that of the United States. The habitable parts of Greenland are the narrow coastal strips free of ice, which make up about

The East · Geography · Maps

A Map of Persia from 1922, a Diagram of the Border with the USSR, and a Map of Present-Day Iran

The shared border between Iran and the USSR ran to 2,500 km of Azerbaijani-Iranian, Armenian-Iranian and Turkmen-Iranian land frontier, together with a maritime boundary across the Caspian Sea