u/2001_Arabian_Nights

High up in the Hindu Kush mountains along the banks of the Kokcha River in Eastern Afghanistan is the little town of Sar-e-Sang, source of the highest quality lapis lazuli anywhere in the world for over 6,000 years.

More valuable than gold for most of its history, lapis lazuli from Sar-e-Sang found its way in to art and artifacts from the very first civilizations to today. Sar-e-Sang lapis is featured prominently in King Tutankhamen’s funeral mask. During the Renaissance ground up Lapis from Sar-e-Sang was used to make extremely expensive ultramarine blue paint that artists charged extra to use and was usually reserved for images of the Virgin Mary.

You can still buy lapis lazuli from the mines in Sar-e-Sang, the highest grades costing $100 - $150 per carat, the lower grades being significantly cheaper.

Not well understood by geologists, the Cameroon Line is a string of mostly dormant volcanoes, with the exception of the active Mount Cameroon, that does not show clear age progression where volcanoes get older in one direction like they do in Hawaii. Stretching from North-East Nigeria out in to the Gulf of Guinea, perforating both continental and oceanic crust, there are several different theories for what caused this unusual feature.

Texas City is most famous for its large number of oil refineries and petrochemical processing plants, and for blowing up every once in a while. But it also has a bit of a secret… one of the better places in the world for high-speed sailing is right there along the breakwater in Texas City.

The breakwater in Texas City helps to keep the waters in Galveston Bay calm. It also runs perpendicular to the afternoon sea-breeze that comes in every afternoon with a very predictable speed and direction. Up close to the breakwater the water is perfectly smooth no matter how hard the wind blows. This makes Galveston Bay, right next to the forest of cracking towers and gas flares heaven for speed-freaks with sails.

First developed in 1917, only 16 years after Spindletop in Texas, Lake Maracaibo is one of the oldest highly productive oil-fields in the world.

The shallow water of the lake is ideal for oil-field development, cut off from ocean waves and weather allowing drilling equipment to be easily moved around by tugboats and then stabilized on jack-up legs, and for production well structures to sit comfortably on the shallow lake-bed.

Thoroughly explored and developed, the Lake Maracaibo area continues to produce oil over 100 years after starting up. The high sulfur-content of the oil extracted from Lake Maracaibo caused it to lose a lot of its profitability, however, after restrictions were imposed in a lot of the world to combat acid-rain in the 1970s.

There’s a lot about this map of geothermal energy potential that strikes me as odd. The high-potential areas being largely in the West makes sense, since that’s where the tectonic activity is the most active, but there are also big dead-zones in areas that I would think to be good.

But it’s the hot-zones that are far away from any plate-boundary that I’m most curious about, especially the big one that covers a lot of East Texas, North Louisiana, and South Arkansas. Why is it there?

It’s hard to tell, but it looks like Hot Springs, Arkansas isn’t even in the area with the highest potential.

So what accounts for the high degree of variability in the temperature at the bottoms of deep holes?

New word for me today… Zimnik, plural Zimniki.

Russian for “ice road”, these are the seasonal highways in Siberia that can only open when the ground is frozen solid and the rivers are covered in thick ice.

Many towns in Siberia are cut off to everything except aircraft for most of the year due to deep mud and fast flowing rivers. But in the winter, when everything freezes, traffic can flow again.

When they’ll get their own reality TV show? I don’t know.

Connecting the Rhine River system with the Danube River system, this canal allows river barges to travel from the North Sea to the Black Sea by crossing through the heart of Europe.

Water-levels permitting.

This is a picture of a typical Saharan dust cloud. Dust from the Sahara gets swept out over the Atlantic and on to South America, Central America, the Southern US, and even up in to Europe sometimes.

The dust is largely beneficial, bringing nutrients to the fishing waters off the West African coast and to the Amazon rainforest. It also brings beautiful sunsets wherever it goes. It can be irritating, however, and people with respiratory problems are usually not big fans.

This is not sand! The Sahara has large areas of coarse sand dunes called ergs, and there are plenty of sand dunes found outside of the ergs, too. But the dust is everywhere! As fine as talcum powder, it doesn’t tend to pile up. Instead, it coats most of the desert, sometimes in fairly deep layers. You can drive on sand, but you can’t drive on deep dust. Hitting a deep dust patch when you’re driving causes your vehicle to sink down right up to the floorboards. The sand-ladders that you bring along to help you get out of being stuck would probably be better called dust-ladders.

The dust in the Sahara is the main obstacle when you’re trying to drive around, but it does have one benefit… it helps you spot your fellow travelers. Vehicles kick up a dust cloud behind them, wafting hundreds of feet up in to the air and leaving a miles-long tail behind them. You can spot other vehicles from very, very far away. The unwritten code of the desert dictates that when you see another vehicle that you steer towards them and meet up so that everybody can check to see that water and fuel supplies are holding out, and sharing if they aren’t. The dust-tails help with that.

One map in a series of maps made by geologist and cartographer Harold Fisk in 1944.

Commissioned by the US Army Corps of Engineers, Mr. Fisk mapped the course of the river as it existed at the time, as well as the many oxbow lakes and other evidence of the course of the river in the past.

Pictured is the suspended railway system in Wuppertal, Germany. It’s an old idea that works, but never really took off.

But what if you added a High-Line style elevated sidewalk and bicycle lanes up on top?

Suspended elevated railways are inferior to Chicago style elevated railways, everything else being equal. But would being able to triple-stack Right-of-Way usage out of one structure make it worth it? You can’t ride a bike under the El.

The Grande Mosquee d’Agadez, the tallest mud-brick building in the world. Built in 1515, with constant maintenance, it looks as good today as the day it was built.

Agadez, Niger.

My grandfather worked in Western India in the 1950s and got gifted this two-masted dhow ship model. It was already old when he got it, but he didn’t know how old. I found a company in Mandvi, India called Sagar Ship Model that appears to still be making similar models, and I assume is where my model was made.

Thought y’all might appreciate it.

Biyombo Falls, above Kisangani on The Congo River, divide the country of Democratic Republic of Congo in to two economic zones, one up-stream that connects to Tanzania, Zambia, and the rest of South-East Africa, and one down-stream that connects to Kinshasa and the soon to be repaired rail connection past the other set of great cataracts on the Congo to The Atlantic Ocean.

Would constructing a canal around Biyombo Falls be worth the trouble?

Pictured - The Kisangani to Kinshasa ferry.

Three week trip, assuming nothing goes wrong, but something always goes wrong.