The USS Nautilus: A Revolution in Sea Travel

The USS Nautilus (SSN-571), sharing its name with Captain Nemo’s fictional submarine in Jules Verne’s classic 1870 science fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, was the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine. It was the first to complete a submerged transit of the North Pole on August 3, 1958. Decommissioned in 1980, it is…

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Eleven Days over Death

Straddling the Arctic Circle, the Great Bear Lake, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, is the largest lake entirely in Canada, the fourth-largest in North America, and the eighth-largest in the world. At just over 12,000 square miles, it is bigger than Belgium. Its maximum depth of 1,463 feet makes it deeper than Lake Superior….

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Our 7-Mile Dive to Bottom – Part 1

The Mariana Trench, located in the western Pacific Ocean, is the deepest oceanic trench on Earth. Measuring about 1,580 miles in length and 43 miles in width, its maximum known depth is 36,037 feet (about 7 miles), located at the southern end of a small valley in its floor known as the Challenger Deep. If…

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Down the Mountain – Part 1

The sport of bobsleigh or bobsled has been part of the Olympic Games since the first Winter Games celebrated in Chamonix, France, in 1924. This article, transcribed by yours truly in Anniversary Gregg, explains some of the features and dangers of the sport, as well as some of the experiences of those who practice it….

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Welcome, Butterflies!

Every fall, thousands of Monarch butterflies flock to Monterey County in California, settling in at forest groves to wait out the winter. Though the butterflies congregate in areas from Big Sur through Monterey, their best-known wintering-over spot is in Pacific Grove. This area, filled with pine and eucalyptus trees, is the preferred Monarch butterfly habitat…

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The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes

In early June 1912, a cataclysmic explosion occurred in a remote area of Alaska, about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage. The explosion was so massive that its effects were felt in places as far away from the explosion as Washington D.C., as high-altitude haze robbed the northern temperate zone of about 10% of the Sun’s…

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