A blog feed for Shoals /shoals Scenes from the coast of the Aral Sea - Deep, regular furrows have been carved into salt-capped clay in Northwestern Uzbekistan, along the border with Kazakhstan. Within my own lifetime, this spot was once deep underwater. The Aral Sea is in fast retreat. This isn’t news, exactly; it’s been underway for half a century, and the locals are well... Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2026/07/01/atlas-miscellaneous-17.html /shoals/2026/07/01/atlas-miscellaneous-17.html Thefts and repossessions - Barenstburg, Svalbard Svalbard is a funny place. Anyone can go there, but almost no one can stay there. The territory is demilitarized, but the polar bear population is curious enough that the human population is required to carry rifles at all times outside of the handful of towns. Officially under... Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2026/06/01/atlas-miscellaneous-16.html /shoals/2026/06/01/atlas-miscellaneous-16.html Muffins and Tacos - Salvador Bahia, Brazil Forte de São Marcelo had its first iteration in 1608 (before any enterprising Europeans had even so much as dipped a canoe paddle in the direction of Vermont), a wooden palisade planted on a coral reef to defend holdings in the still-very-new world. After being yanked back... Fri, 01 May 2026 07:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2026/05/01/atlas-miscellaneous-15.html /shoals/2026/05/01/atlas-miscellaneous-15.html In both senses - Yes, obviously, ICE out as well. Because f&%$ those cowardly, anti-American f&%$s. But today we’re going to be talking about Ice Out, the time-honored tradition in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont of predicting the date and time that Joe’s Pond in West Danville finally thaws. Throwing a dart at the... Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2026/04/01/ice-out.html /shoals/2026/04/01/ice-out.html Unknown unknowns - There is a lot that I’m able to learn from my desk in a now-frosty corner of Northern New England, and that remoteness is part of my delight in scanning the world like this. But sometimes I stumble on locations and features that don’t tie easily to ground-level history, news,... Sun, 01 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0500 /shoals/2026/03/01/atlas-miscellaneous-14.html /shoals/2026/03/01/atlas-miscellaneous-14.html Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo The Ruzizi river drains from Lake Kivu, and - like that large body of water - serves as the borderline between DRC and Rwanda. The Ruzizi I hydropower station straddles that border and sends electricity to the city of Bukavu, currently held by the Rwanda-backed... Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:00:00 -0500 /shoals/2026/02/01/atlas-miscellaneous-13.html /shoals/2026/02/01/atlas-miscellaneous-13.html Seasonal traversals - Portsmouth, UK Though the Christmas tree was first imported to the English-speaking world by the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Charles Dickens tends to get the credit for bottling up and distributing the seasonal vibe that we still use to celebrate the holiday in all corners of the former empire.... Wed, 31 Dec 2025 05:00:00 -0500 /shoals/2025/12/31/atlas-miscellaneous-12.html /shoals/2025/12/31/atlas-miscellaneous-12.html What has been lost and gained - At work, I’m in the middle of the largest update of imagery I’ve ever supervised. Ten million square kilometers of new satellite views, covering most of the world’s most densely-populated areas and a whole bunch of other locations chosen ad-hoc for various reasons. The last update of this scale was... Sun, 30 Nov 2025 04:00:00 -0500 /shoals/2025/11/30/atlas-miscellaneous-11.html /shoals/2025/11/30/atlas-miscellaneous-11.html Additional discussion of baseball is pure coincidence - Aru Co, China In this image captured at the end of 2017, the surface of Aru Co - a lake on the Tibetan plateau - is frozen in ripples that seem to extend onshore, in waves of sand. One year prior to this capture, two alpine glaciers on the West... Sat, 01 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/11/01/atlas-miscellaneous-10.html /shoals/2025/11/01/atlas-miscellaneous-10.html I haven't been able to get the song out of my head for months. - Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is currently dominating the talk of the critics. It’s an obvious Best Picture nominee for the Oscars, it’s a lock, don’t give out the award at all unless it goes to OBAA, etc, etc - It’s a good movie; I saw it on... Mon, 27 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/10/27/minstrel-echoes.html /shoals/2025/10/27/minstrel-echoes.html Cultural exports, petroleum imports, and shellfish reports - Hoofddorp, Netherlands The fact that I find the Dutch language inherently hilarious is not something I’m proud of. I go to great lengths to accept linguistic uniqueness, to understand the cultural forces at work in how people communicate with each other in local contexts. I read up on the origins... Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/10/01/atlas-miscellaneous-9.html /shoals/2025/10/01/atlas-miscellaneous-9.html Decay and rehabilitation - Warsaw, Poland Skra Stadium, built in its current form after WWII, hosted 35,000 spectators for soccer, track and field, and motorcycle races. In 1969, it was the first facility in Poland to be equipped with a rubberized synthetic track surface, called “Tartan” by its manufacturer 3M. Skra stadium in 1984,... Mon, 01 Sep 2025 02:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/09/01/atlas-miscellaneous-8.html /shoals/2025/09/01/atlas-miscellaneous-8.html We’re neck-deep in AI these days, the era of the Large Language Model (LLM). It’s all over the news, but also in many of our day to day tasks, as the digital products threaded through our lives race to catch up. I’m not sure I’ve ever in my lifetime seen... Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/08/11/meaningful-communion.html /shoals/2025/08/11/meaningful-communion.html Leopold's ghost train - Xinjiang, China There is a road in the Taklamakan desert that doesn’t bother to snake its way around dry streambeds or rocky landforms, it plows mostly straight through the dunes. The G580 runs between the cities of Hotan and Aral, and on close inspection, it’s clear that there’s a buffer... Sun, 03 Aug 2025 10:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/08/03/atlas-miscellaneous-7.html /shoals/2025/08/03/atlas-miscellaneous-7.html Earth observation is always political - Kilimanjaro, Tanzania In 1936, Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story called “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. The protagonist seems to me a thinly-veiled version of the author, but in this case steadily reflecting on his life while dying of an infected wound in a Tanzanian hunting camp. He dreams of rescue... Sun, 06 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/07/06/atlas-miscellaneous-6.html /shoals/2025/07/06/atlas-miscellaneous-6.html Indulge me on a brief tangent: My parents are braggarts. About me, specifically. This is standard parent behavior, which I understand better now that I have kids of my own about whom I’m immensely proud. But my point here is that in a childhood of music and hockey, I did... Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/06/04/tibor-toth.html /shoals/2025/06/04/tibor-toth.html Light it up, up, up, light it up, up, up . . . - Shoyna, Russia At 67 degrees North, the village of Shoyna is just inside the Arctic Circle. Once home to a major fishing industry, the population has now dwindled to a few hundred as the stocks were depleted. But the fishing had an impact in its time: dredging the seafloor removed... Sat, 31 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/05/31/atlas-miscellaneous-5.html /shoals/2025/05/31/atlas-miscellaneous-5.html With sincere apologies to William Carlos Williams - Y’all know this poem, surely. This is just to say – William Carlos Williams I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold You might have also eaten the plums of... Wed, 28 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/05/28/plums.html /shoals/2025/05/28/plums.html Last fall I visited the Morgan Museum and Library with my family in New York City. We took in the special exhibition of famed librarian Belle da Costa Greene, and even my children were able to grasp the significance of the original Gutenberg Bible. Something in the collection that we... Fri, 09 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/05/09/beautiful-capital.html /shoals/2025/05/09/beautiful-capital.html Victorian Ghosts in the water - Brighton, UK I didn’t spot this one from above, and I’ve never been to Brighton, but a video from Phil Carr had me convinced I needed to take a look at this privately-owned landmark-monument-amusement combo known as the i360 observation tower. Of course it looms, but what interests me more... Mon, 21 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400 /shoals/2025/04/21/atlas-miscellaneous-4.html /shoals/2025/04/21/atlas-miscellaneous-4.html