[Image: An entrance to the quarry in Kanne; photo by Nick Catford via Subterranean Britannica]. There is an underground Roman-era quarry in The Netherlands that, when you exit, you will find that you have crossed an invisible international border somewhere down there in the darkness, and that you are...
Landmarks of the Chinese Cryosphere
Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography (and also my wife) spent a large part of this past winter exploring the world of artificial refrigeration in China for The New York Times. The results of that trip are now out in this weekend's New York Times Magazine, called "The Price of Cold," and she's put together...
The Most Indoors
[Image: Inside NYC's old post office, Instagram by BLDGBLOG]. "Suppose we define an indoors number as the number of doorways that one must pass through to get from a given location to the outdoors. What location has the highest number?" What room in the world is the furthest indoo...
Beneath the Forest, Buildings
[Image: Photo by Heiko Prumers, courtesy of LiveScience]. The remains of artificial structures that pre-date the Amazon rainforest have been found beneath the trees in Bolivia and Brazil. The forest actually grew up and around their ruins, we read, gradually consuming these structures altogether as...
Bunker Simulations
[Image: A replica of the Nazis' Atlantic Wall defenses in Scotland; photo via Stirling 2014]. The continent-spanning line of concrete bunkers built by the Nazis during WWII, known as the "Atlantic Wall," was partially recreated in the United Kingdom—in more than one location—to assist with military...
The Museum At The Bottom Of The Sea
[Image: Photo by Martin Siegel/Society of Maritime Archaeology, via Der Spiegel]. In 2012, German archaeologists began posting interpretive signs underwater, marking shipwrecks and even crashed airplanes at the bottom of the Baltic Sea as if they are in a museum, in order to make it clear to potential...
Life on the Subsurface: An Interview with Penelope Boston
A landscape painting above Penny Boston's living room entryway depicts astronauts exploring Mars. Penelope Boston is a speleo-biologist at New Mexico Tech, where she is also Director of Cave and Karst Science. Her work examines subterranean lifeforms, often found very deep within cave systems, including...
Architecture-by-Bee and Other Animal Printheads
[Image: By John Becker]. For thousands of years, animal bodies have been used as living 3D printers—or sentient printheads, we might say—but the range of possible material outputs is set to change quite radically. In fact, bioengineering is rapidly making this idea—that spiders, silkworms, and honeybees,...
