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Ryan Adams

Sex or Sleep?

Something surprising is going on in the American bedroom. In droves, people are outfitting their beds with a plush, squishy, and decidedly controversial type of mattress. While these products support the body just-so during sleep, they distress some people during sex. The complaint is lack of "traction," if you get the drift. "It's like trying to do it in quicksand," one owner writes on an Internet message board. New York sex therapist Sari Eckler Cooper couldn't be clearer: "There's a lack of resistance for the knees and feet. And whoever is on the bottom is sinking into the bed."

These are memory-foam mattresses, and they are far and away the fastest-growing segment of the $4.6 billion wholesale market for U.S. mat-tresses. Memory foam's market share has shot up from 14% to nearly 20% in just the past eight years. In other words, mattress shoppers are weighing the risk -- bad sex -- against the promise -- good sleep -- and are voting with their eyelids: They choose to snooze.

It's no secret that people are stressed out and exhausted in these hurried times. Baby boomers, the chief buyers of memory-foam mattresses, have the additional problem of creaky bones. Everyone could use a deep, soothing sleep. But at the possible expense of sex?  (...)

 Memory foam is a dense material that softens in reaction to body heat; it is both denser and more responsive to heat than standard mattress foam. It consists of tiny air-filled cells that compress when pressure and heat are applied. The cells closer to the body release their air, allowing the foam to mold to the body's shape.

The material dates back to 1966, when it was developed for NASA to absorb shock in spacecraft seats. It also has been used in football helmets and padding for the insides of shoes. A North Carolina-based company called Dynamic Systems still manufactures memory foam for automotive and aircraft seating, though the patents on the technology have long since expired.

Memory-foam mattresses arrived on the market in the late 1990s, as work lives went 24/7 and folks began hunting far and wide for help in getting to sleep. Nearly 60% of Americans experience insomnia symptoms or sleep disorders, according to market-research firm Marketdata Enterprises. That, in turn, has created a thriving market for sleep aids, including pills, high-tech pillows, white-noise machines, aromatherapy, and, of course, premium mattresses.

Memory-foam mattresses are being embraced by a growing number of sleep-starved Americans -- who generally don't seem to mind that these plush, squishy beds aren't conducive to lovemaking. Barron's takes a closer look.

Memory-foam mattresses, which can cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars, aren't the most expensive models on the market. A queen-size Tempur-Pedic mattress generally ranges from $3,000 to $7,500, depending on the materials. Mattresses from Sweden's Duxiana, made with multiple layers of more than 1,500 springs, are significantly pricier, at around $10,000, while $15,000 will get you a Relyon mattress, manufactured in the U.K. with hand-made coils. And Hästens, a 160-year-old Swedish manufacturer, makes the Vividus, a $67,000 made-to-order mattress. Hand-stitched, its mattresses are filled with an intricate blend of horsehair (good for ventilation), cotton, wool (for perspiration absorption), and flax (for strength and elasticity).

Memory-foam  is geared more toward the mass affluent, making it the Lexus of bedding, so to speak. Barron's recently visited a Sleepy's store in Manhattan to kick the tires.

by Miriam Gottfried, Barrons |  Read more:
Illustration: Matt Collins for Barron's

JPMorgan’s Debacle, and its Parallels to AIG

Last week, the once-future Treasury secretary and current JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon revealed a $2 billion loss. This previously undisclosed derivative trade should be a wake-up call for those claiming that finance has been “reined in” and no longer presents a threat to the global economy.

As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth.

Finance has become a low-margin, high-leverage business. This is not surprising in an environment in which trading volumes are exceedingly low and interest rates even lower. In any other industry, a slowdown in economic activity sends management scurrying to cut costs, develop new products, become more productive. In short, to innovate. Companies can throw money at new products, marketing campaigns or discounted pricing, but a slowing economy brings down demand. What we have today is a deleveraging economy, and that is even more challenging — limiting the options that CEOs can take to increase their company revenue.

The world of finance refuses to accept that reality. Whenever Wall Street is confronted with a decrease in profits, we see the same response: Increase leverage. We usually don’t hear about it until some market wobble causes the excessive leverage to blow up in someone’s face. This time, the novelty cigar was smoked by Dimon, and the damage was inflicted on his reputation. The losses, we learned, were a “mere” $2 billion, described as manageable.

Consider any major finance disaster of the past 30 years, and what you will invariably see is the result of trying to spin dross into gold. The magic of finance is that this can work for a while. The reality of finance is simple mathematics. Eventually, the probabilities play themselves out and the dice come up snake eyes.

One thing that makes the JPMorgan trade look especially foolish is that it’s nearly the same sort of recklessness that AIG exhibited: selling derivatives against zero reserves. As Doug Kass, who heads the hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management, explained: “Under the knowledge of Dimon, the JPM investment office sold massive amounts of CDS [credit-default swap] premium on large U.S. corporations in 2011. Like AIG, they accumulated a large amount of reported profits in the three-year period ending 2011. In an equally familiar manner, the principals of the London investment office were handsomely rewarded. And so was Dimon.”

Gee, why does that sound so familiar?

So how long did it take after AIG blew itself up selling derivatives until some trader came up short making the same reckless bet? Less than four years.

The parallels to AIG continue to mount, including on the JPMorgan risk management committee. Astonishingly, Ellen Futter, who was a director at AIG, was also on the risk management committee at JPMorgan. It’s unclear what you need to do to get kicked off that committee, but the directorial equivalent of steering the Titanic into the iceberg apparently won’t do it.

Most financial debacles have a few things in common:

by Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Tom Wesselmann, Interior No. 2, 1964, Acrylic and collage, including working fan, clock and fluorescent light. (Source: arttattler.com)
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Danielle Frankenthal
(Source: jcacciolagallery.com)
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How the World's Weather Could Quickly Run Amok

The eminent British scientist James Lovelock, back in the 1970s, formulated his theory of Gaia, which held that the Earth was a kind of super organism. It had a self-regulating quality that would keep everything within that narrow band that made life possible. If things got too warm or too cold—if sunlight varied, or volcanoes caused a fall in temperatures, and so forth—Gaia would eventually compensate. This was a comforting notion. It was also wrong, as Lovelock himself later concluded. "I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilization are in grave danger," he wrote in the Independent in 2006.

The world has warmed since those heady days of Gaia, and scientists have grown gloomier in their assessment of the state of the world's climate. NASA climate scientist James Hanson has warned of a "Venus effect," in which runaway warming turns Earth into an uninhabitable desert, with a surface temperature high enough to melt lead, sometime in the next few centuries. Even Hanson, though, is beginning to look downright optimistic compared to a new crop of climate scientists, who fret that things could head south as quickly as a handful of years, or even months, if we're particularly unlucky. Ironically, some of them are intellectual offspring of Lovelock, the original optimist gone sour.

The true gloomsters are scientists who look at climate through the lens of "dynamical systems," a mathematics that describes things that tend to change suddenly and are difficult to predict. It is the mathematics of the tipping point—the moment at which a "system" that has been changing slowly and predictably will suddenly "flip." The colloquial example is the straw that breaks that camel's back. Or you can also think of it as a ship that is stable until it tips too far in one direction and then capsizes. In this view, Earth's climate is, or could soon be, ready to capsize, causing sudden, perhaps catastrophic, changes. And once it capsizes, it could be next to impossible to right it again.

The idea that climate behaves like a dynamical system addresses some of the key shortcomings of the conventional view of climate change—the view that looks at the planet as a whole, in terms of averages. A dynamical systems approach, by contrast, consider climate as a sum of many different parts, each with its own properties, all of them interdependent in ways that are hard to predict.

One of the most productive scientists in applying dynamical systems theory to climate is Tim Lenton at the University of East Anglia in England. Lenton is a Lovelockian two generations removed— his mentors were mentored by Lovelock. "We are looking quite hard at past data and observational data that can tell us something," says Lenton. "Classical case studies in which you've seen abrupt changes in climate data. For example, in the Greenland ice-core records, you're seeing climate jump. And the end of the Younger Dryas," about fifteen thousand years ago, "you get a striking climate change." So far, he says, nobody has found a big reason for such an abrupt change in these past events—no meteorite or volcano or other event that is an obvious cause—which suggests that perhaps something about the way these climate shifts occur simply makes them sudden.

Lenton is mainly interested in the future. He has tried to look for things that could possibly change suddenly and drastically even though nothing obvious may trigger them. He's come up with a short list of nine tipping points—nine weather systems, regional in scope, that could make a rapid transition from one state to another.

by Fred Guteri, Scientific American |  Read more:

The Ultimate Counterfeiter Isn’t a Crook—He’s an Artist

The majority of counterfeiters, as one federal investigator told me, are meth heads who, after three nights without sleep, suddenly get the bright idea to scan a $20 bill, bleach a bunch of $5 bills, and print the image of the $20 on that same paper. Even the most senile merchant can usually spot these shams.

But with his scrupulous craftsmanship, Kuhl placed himself among a rarefied class of counterfeiters who can produce truly high-quality fakes. They possess sophisticated knowledge about paper and dyes, and they have expertise in printing machinery and banknote security features such as watermarks and color-shifting ink.

With a cigarette in one hand and a money- marking pen in the other, Kuhl began his quest to conquer the dollar by thumbing through thick binders of paper samples. Money-marking pens draw a black line on paper made with starch but not on stock that lacks starch, such as the ultrafine cotton-linen sheets manufactured by Crane & Co. of Dalton, Massachusetts, the sole provider of US dollar substrate. He contacted a dealer in Düsseldorf, hoping to buy some of Crane’s special blend of 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen, but he was told that selling it was forbidden. Eventually Kuhl connected with a dealer in Prague who supplied him with starch-free paper that felt and weighed about the same as the Crane’s.

Kuhl’s intricate production process combined offset printing with silk-screening (see “How to Make $100″). The hardest features to forge with any level of sophistication are on the front of the note: the US Treasury seal, the large “100″ denomination in the bottom-right corner, and the united states of america at the top. Real US currency is printed on massive intaglio presses (intaglio is Italian for engrave). The force with which the presses strike the paper lying over the engraved steel plates creates indentations that fill with ink, giving the bills a delicate 3-D relief and a textured feel. Its absence is a telltale sign of a counterfeit. For Kuhl this was the most critical puzzle piece: how to create that texture convincingly without the benefit of actual engraving. “I had an idea,” he says, “and I was itching to try it.”

His idea was to apply a second layer of ink, creating sufficient relief to mimic intaglio-pressed paper. But looking under a microscope, Kuhl saw that this second coat slumped as it dried, giving the image a blurred appearance. This problem stymied his progress until he read about UV-sensitive clear lacquer, which dries instantly when exposed to ultraviolet light. That, he says, was when everything clicked. “The ink wouldn’t have time to slump,” he says.

He ran a sheet of paper through the silk-screen press again, this time applying the lacquer and then drying it under UV light. “You don’t see the UV varnish—that is the key. You only feel it,” Kuhl says. This invisible coating atop the raised US Treasury seal and large “100″ in the lower-right corner of the bill was his masterstroke. One official told the German news magazine Der Spiegel that Kuhl’s dollars were “shockingly perfect.”

His method may have been ingenious, but it was excruciatingly slow. Working to a soundtrack of the Rolling Stones and Dave Brubeck, he spent the better part of two years wearing white latex hospital gloves and breathing chemical fumes. He couldn’t even open the windows because he worried that neighboring businesses would see or smell something that might cause suspicion. At times he would tell himself, almost as if in a trance: “Ich muss meinen Dollars machen” (I must make my dollars).

by David Wolman, Wired |  Read more:
Photo: Jaap Scheeren

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by Banksy
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Market Values: Land of Promise

Whatever their political party, American leaders have generally subscribed to one of two competing economic philosophies. One is a small-government Jeffersonian perspective that abhors bigness and holds that prosperity flows from competition among independent businessmen, farmers and other producers. The other is a Hamiltonian agenda that believes a large, powerful country needs large, powerful organizations. The most important of those organizations is the federal government, which serves as a crucial partner to private enterprise, building roads and schools, guaranteeing loans and financing scientific research in ways that individual businesses would not.

Today, of course, Republicans are the Jeffersonians and Democrats are the Hamiltonians. But it hasn’t always been so. The Jeffersonian line includes Andrew Jackson, the leaders of the Confederacy, William Jennings Bryan, Louis Brandeis, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The Hamiltonian line includes George Washington, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, both Roosevelts and Dwight Eisenhower.

Michael Lind’s “Land of Promise” uses this divide to offer an ambitious economic history of the United States. The book is rich with details, more than a few of them surprising, and its subject is central to what is arguably the single most important question facing the country today: How can our economy grow more quickly, more sustainably and more equitably than it has been growing, both to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s pre-eminent power and to improve the lives of its citizens?

Lind, a founder of the New America Foundation in Washington and the author of several political histories, acknowl­edges from the beginning that his thesis will make some readers uncomfortable. “In the spirit of philosophical bipartisanship, it would be pleasant to conclude that each of these traditions of political economy has made its own valuable contribution to the success of the American economy and that the vector created by these opposing forces has been more beneficial than the complete victory of either would have been,” he writes.

“But that would not be true,” he continues. “What is good about the American economy is largely the result of the Hamiltonian developmental tradition, and what is bad about it is largely the result of the Jeffersonian producerist school.”

Hamiltonian development built the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the land-grant universities and the Interstate highway system. In the process, the United States became a giant, interconnected market, a place where companies like Standard Oil, General Motors, John Deere and Sears Roebuck could thrive. The government — and the American military in particular — also played the most important role in financing innovation at its early stages. The industries that produced the jet engine, the radio (and, by extension, the television), radar, penicillin, synthetic rubber and semiconductors all stemmed from ­government-financed research or procurement. The Defense Department literally built the Internet.

The United States is like “a gigantic boiler,” Sir Edward Grey, a British foreign secretary during World War I, said, according to Winston Churchill. “Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate.” Lind’s aim is to make Sir Edward’s point in the active voice: the government has often lighted the flame, and big business has often generated the power.

And Lind has a strong case to make. He cleverly notes that Jeffersonians themselves often have a change of heart when they find themselves running the country and responsible for its well-being. As president, Jefferson altered his position on federal support for canals, roads and manufacturers. His successor, James Madison, signed a bill creating a national bank, having previously denounced the idea. The leaders of the Confederacy, after decrying centralized power, realized they needed an economic machine to finance a war and started “a crash program of state-guided industrialization from above that was more Hamiltonian than Hamilton,” Lind writes. Modern Jeffersonians, like Reagan and George W. Bush, have campaigned on spending cuts, only to expand government while in office.

For all its logical rigor, however, the book’s thesis does suffer from one basic flaw. Lind never quite explains how the United States has ended up as the richest large country in the world, with per capita income about 20 percent higher than Sweden’s or Canada’s, almost 30 percent higher than Germany’s and almost 500 percent higher than China’s. If anything, other countries have pursued more Hamiltonian policies in many ways than the United States, without quite the same success.

What, then, can explain American economic exceptionalism? Education plays an important role (and receives only sporadic mention in the book). This country long had the most educated, skilled work force in the world, which, as other economic histories have persuasively shown, helped American workers to be among the best paid.

Beyond education, the United States also has a culture that is arguably different from that of any other power — more individualistic, more risk-taking, more comfortable with the workings of the market. If you were looking for a name for this culture, you might choose Jeffersonian.

by David Leonhardt, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration by Thomas Porostocky

Supreme Court Sides with Idaho Landowners Against EPA

[ed. See also: Jousting with the EPA]

The Supreme Court strengthened the rights of property owners who are confronted by federal environmental regulators, ruling Wednesday that landowners are entitled to a hearing to challenge the government's threats to fine them for alleged Clean Water Act violations.

The 9-0 decision revolved around procedural matters and did not resolve questions about the reach of the act, which has been the subject of different legal interpretations. But it is a victory for an Idaho couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett, who faced fines of up to $75,000 a day if they didn't restore a small wetland the Environmental Protection Agency said they had filled on a Bonner County lot where they planned to build their home.

When the Sacketts, who contended there were no wetlands on the property, sought to challenge the compliance order, they were told by EPA officials and later by a federal judge and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that they had no right to a hearing. Instead, they were told to comply with the order first and then seek a permit to resume building. They weren't entitled to a hearing until the agency had imposed a fine on them, the appeals court said.

Reversing the 9th Circuit, the high court concluded that the Sacketts had a right to sue the government at an early stage. The court did not rule on whether they had violated clean water regulations.

The couple were represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a property rights group. The EPA "can't order property owners to dance like marionettes while denying them any meaningful right to appeal to the courts," said attorney Damien Schiff, who argued the case. The agency "will have to change its enforcement techniques for the better," he said.

The EPA said it was reviewing the decision.

Vermont Law School professor Pat Parenteau said that he doubted the opinion would have much effect on Clean Water Act enforcement because it applied to "an extremely narrow range of cases" and that most people in similar situations complied with the agency orders.

"I think the court was certainly very concerned that EPA was telling people they had to … pay all these fines but also saying, we're not going to tell you when, if ever, you're going to get a day in court," Parenteau said. "I think the court was right to call the EPA on that."

The Sacketts bought a parcel of less than an acre in 2005, intending to build a three-bedroom house. The lot is in a residential area near Priest Lake, and other houses had been constructed between their land and the lake. They obtained a county permit and trucked in dirt and gravel fill. A few months later the EPA informed them that their property contained wetlands and said they had violated clean water regulations.

by Bettina Boxall and David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times |  Read more: 
Photo: Haraz N. Ghanbari/Associated Press via NY Times

linda vachon / tête de caboche
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A Visit, and What Really Happened

His e-mail read: “Here for one night. Giants game tomorrow. Buy you a drink?”

I was so stunned, I lost my breath. I hadn’t seen him in 25 years. I thought I had gotten over the need to get over my first love. But 11 words on a screen and I was a nervous 14-year-old again.

I’d fallen for the burly, curly haired anti-romantic who nicknamed me his “old sea hag” in ninth grade. He was the first to take me to a Dylan concert, to bed, to say “I love you.” Then, in my senior year of college, he knocked me up and deserted me for my roommate.

A decade ago, needing closure, I begged him for a long overdue showdown. He said, “I’d rather take out my own appendix with a bottle of Jack and a dull spoon.” I longed to show him I had turned out smart, attractive and blissfully wed. I pictured him apologizing for the hurtful way he left me.

Now that he was here, I panicked. I had recently turned 50, torn two ligaments in my back, was out of shape. I felt too weak to face my ex. Did he really want to buy me a drink? He didn’t even know I hadn’t smoked or drank in 10 years.

“When?” I e-mailed. “Phone me.”

Brushing my hair, I spied gray roots. My nervous energy coalesced into one inane conundrum: If I used my last Clairol Nice ’n Easy Root Touch-Up and dolled up, he would cancel. There should be a moratorium on how much misery your first love inflicts. After 25 years, heartache disappears.

“If you can’t, no sweat,” he added.

I was already sweating. Going out would require walking, preferably in heels — bad for my damaged spine. If he came over, I wouldn’t risk reinjury and could show off my apartment.

“Stop by at 4,” I e-mailed casually, as if I hadn’t been wanting this tête-à-tête since 1985.

No response. He had chickened out. To recover, I didn’t shower. I wasn’t ruining my day for an ex who would probably bail. I felt rejected all over again.

At 3:15, he e-mailed, “Walking over.”

by Susan Shapiro, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Brian Rea

Ballpoint pen drawings by IL LEE
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Black Box

This evening, the New Yorker Fiction Department (@NYerFiction) will start tweeting Jennifer Egan’s new story “Black Box,” which will appear in its entirety in the Science Fiction Issue, out on Monday. We asked Egan what inspired her to structure her story in paragraphs of a hundred and forty characters or fewer.

Several of my long-standing fictional interests converged in the writing of “Black Box.” One involves fiction that takes the form of lists; stories that appear to be told inadvertently, using a narrator’s notes to him or herself. My working title for this story was “Lessons Learned,” and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from descriptions of the action itself. Another long-term goal of mine has been to take a character from a naturalistic story and travel with her into a different genre. Jon Scieszka first put this idea into my head with his spectacular meta-fictional picture book, “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!,” in which the three pigs move through picture books drawn in radically different styles, transforming visually into the style of each world they enter. I wondered whether I could do something analogous with a character from my novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad”: create a cartoon version of that person, for example—or, in this case, a spy-thriller version. I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote these bulletins by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page. The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now “Black Box.”

Follow @NYerFiction for “Black Box,” which will appear in ten nightly installments, from 8 to 9 P.M. E.T. If you miss it on Twitter, you’ll find each day’s installment collated here on Page-Turner.

First Installment:

1
People rarely look the way you expect them
to, even when you’ve seen pictures.

The first thirty seconds in a person’s
presence are the most important.

If you’re having trouble perceiving and
projecting, focus on projecting.

Necessary ingredients for a successful
projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness.

The goal is to be both irresistible and
invisible.

When you succeed, a certain sharpness
will go out of his eyes.

by Jennifer Egan, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration by Brendan Monroe.

Adventures in Copyright

Google Says it Removes 1 Million Infringing Links  Monthly

Each month, Google removes more than 1 million links to infringing content such as movies, video games, music and software from its search results — with about half of those requests for removal last month coming from Microsoft.

The search and advertising giant revealed the data Thursday as it released sortable analytics on the massive number of copyright takedown requests it receives — adding to its already existing data on the number of times governments ask for users’ personal data.

The Mountain View, California-based company removes links to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA requires search engines to remove links to infringing content at a rights holder’s request or else face liability for copyright infringement itself. Google said it complies with about 97 percent of requests, which are submitted via an online form and usually approved via a Google algorithm.

The disclosure marks the first time a major internet search engine divulged its DMCA compliance numbers. The development comes months after some lawmakers blasted Google’s position against the Stop Online Piracy Act, an anti-piracy measure that would have fundamentally altered the DNS system, a core part of the net’s infrastructure in the name of piracy. (...)

The top rights holders demanding removal of links were Microsoft, at 543,000 last month, the British Recorded Music Industry at 162,000 and NBC at 145,000. The top targeted sites hosting allegedly infringing content were filestube.com at more than 43,000, torrents.eu at more than 23,000, and 4shared.com at more than 22,000.

by David Kravets, Wired |  Read more:

In The Beginning Was the Mudskipper?

In 1893, the Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen set off to find the North Pole. He would not use pack dogs to cross the Arctic Ice. Instead, he locked his fate into the ice itself. He sailed his ship The Fram directly into the congealing autumn Arctic, until it became locked in the frozen sea. Nansen was convinced that the ice itself would drift up to the pole, taking him and his crew along for the ride.

For two and a half years they drifted with the pack. It gradually became clear to Nansen that The Fram had stopped moving north and was now traveling east instead, back towards Europe. He leaped out of the ship and tried to sled up to the pole, only to discover that the ice he was now traveling on was moving south. Only four degrees away from true north, he decided to retreat. He bolted back for Franz Josef Land.

The Fram meanwhile continued to drift east. After several months, it broke free of the ice, and the crew sailed the ship south to the island of Spitzbergen. There on the bare flats they saw a giant balloon.

Its pilot was a young Swedish engineer named Salamon Andrée. Andrée had decided that ships like the Fram could never reach the Pole, and that flight offered the only hope. He had convinced the king of Sweden and Alfred Nobel to pay for a balloon which he had brought by ship to Spitzbergen. And there he mixed tons of sulfuric acid and zinc to create hydrogen gas, which filled his silk canopy for four days. But gales hit the island before he was ready to launch the balloon, and then the Fram arrived with stories of how Nansen was racing on sleds towards the pole. Andrée let the canopy fall back to the ground.

When he got back to Sweden, Andrée discovered that Nansen had actually failed and had returned to Norway. He began to plot a second attempt. He returned to Spitzbergen in 1897 and this time he succeeded in launching his balloon. For a few days Andrée floated north with his crew of two, bobbing up and down with the sudden changes in temperature and moisture of the Arctic atmosphere. But as he crossed over the edge of the polar ice, the voyage took a turn for the worse. The balloon became burdened with rain and snow, until the guidelines dragged across the ice, until the gondola bounced like a ball on the ground, until the balloon came to a rest.

For a week the crew huddled in cramped fog. Andrée decided to pack sledges with food and a collapsible boat, which they dragged over the drifting ice. Hauling them across sloshing leads, they hoped, like Nansen, that they could find refuge in Franz Josef Land. But the ice wandered in the wrong direction under their feet, and after two months of this polar treadmill they reached a little hump of Arctic rock called White Island. In 1930 whalers came to the island and discovered their decrepit boat, their journals, and Andrée’s corpse still sitting in the snow.

But in 1897, no one knew where Andrée had gone. His fellow Swedish scientists searched for him by ship in the following summers, first travelling around Spitzbergen, and then heading to Greenland. As the pack ice opened, they traveled for eight weeks along its eastern edge in their sail- and steam-powered ship. They mapped the tentacled coast, and in one fjord along an elephant-backed mountain they named Celsius Berg, the explorers found bones.

They weren’t the bones of Andrée and his crew. They were the bones of fish that had been resting in the Greenland rocks for over 350 millions years.

Other fossils of these fish had been found elsewhere in late Devonian rocks, but to those who studied that era, Greenland was a revelation. It was as if a new continent suddenly appeared on the map: other Devonian rocks were hid for the most part under a woody, bushy carpet in places like England and Pennsylvania, while the mountains of Greenland were mercilessly bare. Unfortunately the new fossils were also so remote that only some greater pretext–like the search for a famous explorer–could get the paleontologists to this far corner of the Arctic.

by Carl Zimmer, The Loom/Discover Magazine |  Read more:
Image via Wikipedia