How crop failures in the Soviet Union helped clean up the Great Lakes
In the early 1970s, Russia and the Ukraine had a series of bad harvests, putting the entire USSR at risk of famine. In 1972 the US government agreed to subsidize $300 million in sales of grain.
Soviet cargo ships sailed up the St. Lawrence waterway and into Lake Michigan, where they docked at Port of Indiana, a major transshipment point for Midwestern grain. This trade continued through the 70s and into the 80s.
At the time, the Great Lakes suffered from large algal blooms, owing to the nitrogen in agricultural runoff from the surrounding farmlands.
The Soviet ships, coming from the Black Sea, deposited Zebra mussels into the lakes from their ballast tanks. These small mussels are an invasive species that eat algae. Over time, they cleaned up the entire lake system.
The bottom of the lakes are covered in Zebra mussels to this day. This has had other side effects, but the lakes are a lot clearer than they used to be.
This thread came off a bit more blithe than I intended re zebra mussels—I was really just interested in the connection between distant events—but after reading the sputtering QTs…..no regrets!
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In 1182, Saladin launched a daring attack by land and sea on Beirut.
It was a sharp break from his usual raids into enemy territory and skirmishes with the Crusaders. But at a deeper level, it was part of a consistent strategy that ultimately brought him victory.
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Beirut stands on a broad triangular promontory, which in Saladin’s time was covered with fields and orchards. The medieval city stood on its northern edge and was endowed with one of the finest harbors in the Levant.
Beirut was obviously an attractive target, but this was uncharacteristically bold for Saladin. This was not just a raid: it was an attempt to seize and hold ground in the middle of Crusader territory.
Why was the Hagia Sophia such an achievement? Not least because it was the world’s largest domed basilica for 1000 years.
Domes in turn helped deal with a very ancient problem in the Mediterranean: earthquakes.
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Earthquakes have always been a fact of life in the seismically-active Mediterranean, occasionally collapsing buildings or even entire cities. Three of the Seven Wonders of the World, for instance, were destroyed by earthquakes.
Civilizations adapted: the Mycenaeans used large rough-hewn stones to construct their palaces—so-called Cyclopean architecture—which might have had an anti-earthquake function: gaps dampened the shock waves, and large stones could shift without the entire structure collapsing.
The First Thanksgiving in 1621 celebrated both the Pilgrims’ survival & their friendship with the Wampanoag Indians.
One Mayflower passenger was especially close to the Indians, and was one of only two to have visited the New World before: Stephen Hopkins.
In 1609, Hopkins was on the fateful Sea Venture expedition to the newly-founded Jamestown colony in Virginia to provide supplies and deliver a new governor. They hit a bad storm (possibly a hurricane) en route and were shipwrecked on Bermuda.
All aboard were saved and the island had plenty of food. The governor took charge and set the men to work gathering food, building shelters, and constructing pinnaces to sail to Virginia, where the other ships of the expedition had safely arrived.
Only the Ferrarese came remotely close, able to hold their own in extremely adverse circumstances and maintain their independence. Not least because they invested heavily in defenses and were great artillery innovators:
Elite overproduction is the single most important concept for understanding the most destructive upheavals in society: 3rd-c. Rome, 14th-c. Constantinople, 18th-c. France.
The Venetians understood this implicitly. As silly as their constitutional system was, they realized the biggest threat to their republic came from intra-elite civil war.
A year after the Notre Dame fire, we still don’t know for sure what started it. An investigation has determined a likely cause, but there’s no direct evidence any which way.
Given what we do know, though, we still have to take the possibility of arson very seriously.
A thread.
The Notre Dame fire began around 6:18 on the evening of 15 April 2019, when a fire alarm went off in the cathedral. A Mass being held was briefly evacuated as a security guard was dispatched to check it out.
The guard went to the sacristy, where the fire monitor believed the origin to be, where he found nothing. It wasn’t until 6:43 that they realized their mistake: the alarm was actually coming from the cathedral attic. It took the guard another 5 minutes to climb the 300 steps.