The first USS Jeannette, a bark-rigged wooden steamship, was originally HMS Pandora, a Philomel-class gun-vessel of the Royal Naval force. The ship was built in 1861 at Pembroke Dockyard and was acquired in 1875 by Sir Allen Young for his arctic voyages in 1875-1876. The vessel was…
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The predicate of the world’s largest fish falls on the whale shark (Rhincodon typus) with an average length of 5.5 to 10 meters yet still can grow more in length. The largest accurately measured whale shark was 18.8 meters. Its weight can also reach …
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The blue and yellow Ukrainian flag was hoisted over the flagship of the Ukrainian research fleet – the former British icebreaker RRS James Clark Ross (JCR). This noteworthy event took place on August 30, 2021 −eleven days after its official…
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What comes to mind when you hear Colombia? Most people must have imagined the legendary drug dealer, Pablo Escobar. It turns out that if you look for the background of this man, there is one very interesting thing. Namely, Malpelo Island…
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Despite its name, Greenland in fact is almost 80 square meters covered with snow. It was Erik Thorvaldsson or better known as Erik the Red — a Viking leader – who coined the name Greenland, according to The Saga of Erik the Red, because he thought that «people would be attracted to go…
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The term «defector» appeared in the Soviet Union during the Cold War and came into use as a sarcastic stigma for people who have left the country of the socialism for the sake of life in capitalism. In those days, this word was akin to anathema, and the relatives of the «defectors» who…
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The indigenous inhabitants of the Black Sea, the bottlenose dolphins, have been settling the area for about 10,000 years ago when neither Russians, nor Ukrainians, nor even more Tatars have ever heard of. According to geneticists, the Black Sea bottlenose dolphins have been living…
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In the north-eastern most region of Russia, they have a saying “God is a long way up there, but Moscow is even further away” that is true in so many respects. Isolated, uncrowded, and strikingly beautiful, the Russian Far East is extraordinarily far from Russia’s major population centers in…
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“The sea is our field” is a popular old saying among a group of northern Russians who became known as Pomors. This saying captures the identity expressed in this far northern extreme of Russian settlement. Russian identity is traditionally linked to cereal agriculture and to steppe landscapes. The term Pomors …
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Through monitoring from Google Earth, Mururoa (or Moruroa), located in French Polynesia in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, about 1,125 km southeast of Tahiti can be seen half blurred. The atoll possessed strange form where it had half of its censored area…
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Stretched out across the Pacific Ocean forming a gorgeous necklace, is a world-famous tropical paradise of the Marshall Islands. Officially the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), this Micronesian located north of the equator between Hawaii and Australia…
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