Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Hi Stradee, thanks for the link........... I think I'll skip Thors' Day each week from now on......... Wow.
But, the second dwarf did prove that pigs can fly.......!!

Good clicking.

sumac, the storm with it's cold that you are awaiting is here over NE TX now. It began as a cold rain and now is turning into snow. It won't stick until tonight when the temp goes below freezing.

Stay warm...

Great clicks......

Mmmmm, warm it is in the den ----- Yeah, all the animals are inside also.......

We have about 2-3" of snow that will probably stay around for a few days.

Hoping all good clicks and good health for all good Wildclickers!!!!

Freezing cold here but sunny. We only got a small amount but most of it was freezing rain,. Schools are still closed.

2010 ties 2005 as warmest year on record worldwide

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
36 mins ago

WASHINGTON – It's a tie: Government climate experts say last year equaled 2005 as the warmest year on record.
According to the National Climatic Data Center, the average worldwide temperature was 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit (0.62 degree Celsius) above normal last year. That's the same as six years ago.
Climate experts have become increasingly concerned about rising global temperatures over the last century. Most atmospheric scientists attribute the change to gases released into the air by industrial processes and gasoline-burning engines.
In addition, the Global Historical Climatology Network said Wednesday that last year was the wettest on record. Rain and snowfall patterns vary greatly around the world.

anuary 13, 2011

Agency Revokes Permit for Major Coal Mining Project

By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency revoked the permit for one of the nation’s largest mountaintop-removal coal mining projects on Thursday, saying the mine would have done unacceptable damage to rivers, wildlife and communities in West Virginia.

Arch Coal’s proposed Spruce No. 1 Mine in Logan County has been the subject of controversy since the Bush administration approved its construction in 2007, issuing a permit required under the Clean Water Act. Environmentalists and local residents strongly opposed the sprawling project, and the Obama administration moved last year to rescind the permit, prompting lawsuits by West Virginia and the coal company.

The agency’s action on Thursday is certain to provoke an outcry from West Virginia politicians, the coal industry and other businesses that have raised objections to what they consider economically damaging regulatory overreach by the E.P.A.

The coal mining project would have involved dynamiting the tops off mountains over an area of 2,278 acres to get at the rich coal deposits beneath. The resulting rubble, known as spoil, would be dumped into nearby valleys and streams, killing fish, salamanders and other wildlife. The agency said that disposal of the mining material would also pollute the streams and endanger human health and the environment downstream.

The agency said it was using its authority under the Clean Water Act to revoke the permit, an action it has taken only 12 times in the past 40 years. The agency said in a release that it reserved this authority only for “unacceptable cases.”

“The proposed Spruce No. 1 Mine would use destructive and unsustainable mining practices that jeopardize the health of Appalachian communities and clean water on which they depend,” said Peter S. Silva, the agency’s assistant administrator for water. “Coal and coal mining are part of our nation’s energy future, and E.P.A. has worked with companies to design mining operations that adequately protect our nation’s waters. We have a responsibility under the law to protect water quality and safeguard the people who rely on clean water.”

An official of Arch Coal, based in St. Louis, said the company would continue to challenge the federal action in court.

“We remain shocked and dismayed at E.P.A.’s continued onslaught with respect to this validly issued permit,” said Kim Link, the company’s spokeswoman. “Absent court intervention, E.P.A.’s final determination to veto the Spruce permit blocks an additional $250 million investment and 250 well-paying American jobs.”

“Furthermore, we believe this decision will have a chilling effect on future U.S. investment,” she added, “because every business possessing or requiring a permit under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act will fear similar overreaching by the E.P.A. It’s a risk many businesses cannot afford to take.”

She was referring to the provision of federal law under which the permit was originally issued and then revoked.

Anticipating the agency’s decision, a group of regulated industries wrote to the White House this week asking that the mine be allowed to proceed, and seeking clarification on when the administration intended to use its Clean Water Act authority to block industrial and agricultural projects.

Groups including the National Realtors Association, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association wrote to Nancy Sutley, the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, asking that the Spruce Mine permit be approved.

The groups said in their letter that if the agency revoked the coal mining permit, “every similarly valid permit held by any entity — businesses, public works agencies and individual citizens — will be in increased regulatory limbo and potentially subject to the same unilateral, after-the-fact revocation.”

“The implications could be staggering,” they added, “reaching all areas of the U.S. economy including but not limited to the agriculture, home building, mining, transportation and energy sectors.”

An agency official said that though the current design for the Spruce No. 1 project had been rejected, the company was free to submit a new proposal, as long as it addressed the potential environmental harm.

Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, who until recently was the state’s governor, issued a blistering statement opposing the agency’s determination to kill the mining project.

“Today’s E.P.A. decision is not just fundamentally wrong, it is an unprecedented act by the federal government that will cost our state and our nation even more jobs during the worst recession in this country’s history,” Mr. Manchin said. “While the E.P.A. decision hurts West Virginia today, it has negative ramifications for every state in our nation, and I strongly urge every senator and every member Congress to voice their opposition.”

He added, “It goes without saying, such an irresponsible regulatory step is not only a shocking display of overreach, it will have a chilling effect on investments and our economic recovery. I plan to do everything in my power to fight this decision.”

Environmentalists, on the other hand, praised the revocation of the permit. “We breathe a huge sigh of relief today,” said Janet Keating, president of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, in a statement, adding that the move “halts the destruction of Pigeon Roost Hollow,” a wooded valley where much of the mining debris was to be dumped.

Ms. Keating said the decision was a milestone in the debate over mountaintop-removal coal mining. “Spruce No. 1 is the only individual permit to have undergone a full environmental impact statement,” she said. “The science completely validates what we have been saying for more than a decade: These types of mining operations are destroying our streams and forests and nearby residents’ health, and even driving entire communities to extinction.”

Tom Zeller Jr. contributed reporting.

Hi sumac and all -- ice on the dish kept me off line. It's warming up now and will be in the 60's during days and 50's at night in a couple more days. lot's of ice and about 4" of snow here.

Stay warm everyone.

Thanks for the clicking............

34,000-Year-Old Organisms Found Buried Alive!

Andrea Mustain
OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Thu Jan 13, 11:21 am ET

It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something ... alive.
Thankfully this story doesn't end with the destruction of the human race, but with a satisfied scientist finishing his Ph.D.
"It was actually a very big surprise to me," said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.
Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating - or living - nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.
"It's permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules," said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert's advisor at the time.
Lowenstein said new research indicates this process occurs in modern saline lakes, further backing up Schubert's astounding discovery, which was first revealed about a year ago. The new findings, along with details of Schubert's work, are published in the January 2011 edition of GSA Today, the publication of the Geological

Hi Danon, and Stradee (I know you are online - I can see that in the contact box for chat). You need to come visit with us. Anticipating a break in the cold weather, although only a minor one. Still have leaf raking to do and if the snow and ice finish melting today, I can get to it this weekend.

Hi all great clickers - ringing in or not - still great........

Very interesting story about the salt find, sumac.....thanks.....

From today's NYT, the beginning of an article:

January 14, 2011

Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China

By KEITH BRADSHER
BEIJING — Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.

But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

The factory closing in Devens, Mass., which Evergreen announced earlier this week, has set off political recriminations and finger-pointing in Massachusetts. And it comes just as President Hu Jintao of China is scheduled for a state visit next week to Washington, where the agenda is likely to include tensions between the United States and China over trade and energy policy.

The Obama administration has been investigating whether China has violated the free trade rules of the World Trade Organization with its extensive subsidies to the manufacturers of solar panels and other clean energy products.

While a few types of government subsidies are permitted under international trade agreements, they are not supposed to give special advantages to exports — something that China’s critics accuse it of doing. The Chinese government has strongly denied that any of its clean energy policies have violated W.T.O. rules.

Although solar energy still accounts for only a tiny fraction of American power production, declining prices and concerns about global warming give solar power a prominent place in United States plans for a clean energy future — even if critics say the federal government is still not doing enough to foster its adoption......."

Speaking of China - everyone knows a LOT of the things for sale in the USA are made there now. I have a friend who is so far to the right that he refuses to buy anything not labeled 'Made in USA' --- Even after I explained to him that in order for a company to place that label on anything all they have to do is include only TEN PERCENT of the product made in the USA --- NINETY PERCENT of the item may be made anywhere in the world and the company can say it's "Made in the USA"................. An example is our autos that are "Made in the USA" - they ALL have nuts, bolts and other stuff that are METRIC. Those things are made outside the USA. Funny huh???

Oh, and I learned recently that the Chinese have a manufacturing city named USA. How's that for smarts???

Danon - Thanks for some interesting information. I did not know about the 10% rule.

anuary 15, 2011

Melting in Andes Reveals Remains and Wreckage

By SIMON ROMERO
LA PAZ, Bolivia — In the haunts of this city where climbers gather over plates of grilled llama and bottles of Paceña beer to swap tales of mountaineering derring-do, they feign boredom when talk turns to the 19,974-foot-high Huayna Potosí, a jagged Andean peak that looms over La Paz.

“A training climb,” scoffs Julio Choque Alaña, 32, who guides foreigners up the mountains of Bolivia, which boasts peaks higher than the Alps and the Rockies.

But such bravado fades when talk shifts to what climbers are discovering on Huayna Potosí’s glacier: crumpled fuselage, decades-old pieces of wings and propellers, and, in November, the frozen body of Rafael Benjamín Pabón, a 27-year-old pilot whose Douglas DC-6 crashed into the mountain’s north face in 1990.

“When I found the pilot, he was still strapped into his seat, crunched over like he was sleeping, some black hair falling from his skull,” said Eulalio González, 49, the climber who carried Mr. Pabón’s mummified body down the mountain. “There are more ice mummies in the peaks above us,” he said. “Melting glaciers will bring them to us.”

The discovery of Mr. Pabón’s partially preserved remains was one of a growing number of finds pulled from the world’s glaciers and snow fields in recent years as warmer temperatures cause the ice and snow to melt, exposing their long-held secrets. The bodies that have emerged were mummified naturally, with extreme cold and dry air performing the work that resins and oils did for ancient Egyptians and other cultures.

Up and down the spine of the Andes, long plagued by airplane crashes and climbing mishaps, the discoveries are helping to solve decades-old mysteries.

In one such find, in the late ’90s, climbers on Mount Tupungato in Argentina discovered parts the wreckage of the Star Dust, a fabled British aircraft rumored to have disappeared in 1947 with a cargo of gold.

The climbers found no treasure at the crash site of the Avro Lancastrian plane flown by British South American Airways. But they did discover a preserved torso and a hand with pointed, manicured fingernails, an eerie fashion relic of 1940s London that served as testament to the fate of the plane’s passengers and crew.

Scientists say the retreat of the ice is an unexpected boon for those yearning to peer back in time.

“It looks like the warming trend seen in many regions is continuing,” said Gerald Holdsworth, a glaciologist at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary, Alberta. “There are still some large snowbanks left in promising places, and many glaciers of all different shapes, orientations and sizes, so the finds could go on for a long time yet.”

Some discoveries are personal, allowing families closure after years of mourning loved ones who appeared to have vanished. Others have added alluring clues into the history of human migration, diet, health and ethnic origins, said María Victoria Monsalve, a pathologist at the University of British Columbia who studies ice mummies.

She said some of the most valuable discoveries in recent years include three Inca child mummies found on the summit of Mount Llullaillaco in northern Argentina and a 550-year-old iceman discovered by sheep hunters in northern British Columbia.

Younger mummies can also add to the historical record. In 2004, three well-preserved soldiers were found in a scene of high-altitude fighting from World War I in the Italian Alps. And in 2006, a military lab in Hawaii pieced together the story of a World War II airman found on Darwin Glacier in California. Identified as Leo M. Mustonen, he was buried in his hometown, Brainerd, Minn.

Even Mr. Holdsworth, who as a glaciologist is generally more interested in the ice itself, has been closely monitoring the Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska, in part because he says he believes that it holds a plane that crashed near the Yukon border in 1951.

For the family of Rafael Pabón, the pilot found high in the Andes in November, the discovery was a relief of sorts. For two decades, his mother, Yolanda Galindo de Pabón, 69, had been tortured by thoughts of what had happened to him. She said she nurtured a theory that he might be wandering Bolivia’s provinces as a result of an accident. She wondered whether his plane could have been hijacked and flown across the border into Brazil.

The discovery of his body — still clad in the same white shirt and gray pants he wore when he lifted off with a cargo of beef carcasses from Bolivia’s eastern lowlands on Oct. 19, 1990 — at least put an end to the doubts.

“It took me a very long time to acknowledge he might be dead,” Ms. Pabón said. “Now we have a body. I can visit my son at his burial site and grieve like any mother has a right to do.”

The frozen corpse of Mr. Pabón’s co-pilot was discovered on Huayna Potosí in 1997. The cargo plane’s only other crew member, a mechanic named Walter Flores, has not been found.

Climbers here say they expect to find more remains as the country’s glaciers, like Chacaltaya — once said to be the site of the world’s highest ski resort — retreat. They speak with a certain reverence of glaciers guarding plane wrecks stretching back decades, including a Hercules military cargo plane from the 1970s and smaller planes that crashed into mountains after encountering storms and poor visibility.

In at least one case, the mystery is unfolding in chapters, as layers of ice slowly reveal an old tragedy.

In 2006, a climbing team on Mount Illimani, Bolivia’s second-highest peak, rediscovered the wreckage of a Boeing 727 operated by Eastern Air Lines that crashed into the mountain shortly after takeoff on Jan. 1, 1985, killing all 29 people aboard.

No bodies were found at the time of the crash or during the 2006 ascent. But Roberto Gómez, 28, a climber who retrieved part of the Boeing’s fuselage, said it was only a matter of time before they surface as the glacier on Illimani melts. He has already found photographs, children’s clothing and, strangely, what seemed to be crocodile hides from the cargo hold at the crash site.

“The bodies and the black box are still somewhere in the ice,” he said.

On another ascent, he found what he believes are the remains of a dead Austrian climber: a preserved foot still clad in a Salewa hiking boot.

Aware of the fate which has often met those who dare challenge Bolivia’s peaks, some climbing guides here respectfully refer to the mountains as “achachila,” a word from the indigenous Aymara language that roughly translates as “earth spirit” or “uncle.” Before each ascent, they make offerings of coca leaves to the peaks they depend on for their livelihood.

“The uncles guard many secrets,” said Mr. González, who found the body of Mr. Pabón, “just like the graveyards in their shadow.”

Yeah, sumac - people are finding things long hidden in the ice and snow of the northern regions of the world. Alaska, Canada and Greenland being the first ones I've read about. Unfortunately, the reason for the finds is devastating to the earth - global warming.

Thanks for the story and the clicks.

JANUARY 16, 2011, 5:35 PM
Dying for Discovery

By RICHARD CONNIFF
Specimens looks at how species discovery has transformed our lives.

Tags:

Natural History, species

Randall HymanAl Gentry examined leaves during Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program expedition to Ecuador in January 1991.
Almost 20 years ago now, in western Ecuador, I traveled with a team of extraordinary biologists studying a remnant of forest as it was being hacked down around us. Al Gentry, a gangling figure in a grimy T-shirt and jeans frayed from chronic tree climbing, was a botanist whose strategy toward all hazards was to pretend that they didn’t exist. At one point, a tree came crashing down beside him after he lost his footing on a slope. Still on his back, he reached out for an orchid growing on the trunk and said, “Oh, that’s Gongora,” as casually as if he had just spotted an old friend on a city street.
Slide Show One Group’s Sacrifice for Discovery
The story of the naturalists who died in the 1800s gathering specimens for the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden.

The team’s birder, Ted Parker, specialized in identifying bird species by sound alone. He started his work day before dawn, standing in the rain under a faded umbrella, his sneakers sunk to their high-tops in mud, whispering into a microcassette recorder about what he was hearing: “Scarlet-rumped cacique … a fasciated antshrike … two more pairs of Myrmeciza immaculata counter-singing. Dysithamnus puncticeps chorus, male and female …”

Gentry and Parker come to mind just now because I’ve been thinking about how often naturalists have died in the pursuit of new species. A couple of years after that trip, the two of them were back in the same region making an overflight when their pilot became disoriented in the clouds and flew into a mountaintop forest. They lingered there overnight, trapped in the wreckage, and died in the morning. “It was beautiful forest,” a survivor, Parker’s fiancée, later told a reporter, “and they were very happy. Lots of birds.”

Randall HymanTed Parker listened to birds during the 1991 expedition to Ecuador.
In truth, the history of biological discovery is a chronicle of such hazards faced not just willingly, but with a kind of joy. In the 18th and 19th centuries, young naturalists routinely shipped out for destinations that must have seemed almost as remote as the moon is to us now, often traveling not for days, but for months or years. They went of course without G.P.S. devices, or anti-malarial drugs, or any of the other safety measures we now consider routine.

Disease was the unrelenting killer. But death also came by drowning, shipwreck, gun accidents, snakebites, animal attacks, arsenic poisoning, ritual beheading, or almost any other means you care to name. In California on his honeymoon, one birder rigged a safety rope and climbed a tall pine tree to reach a nest. But the rope slipped when he fell and he choked to death as his bride looked on. On expeditions for the Dutch Natural History Commission to what is now Indonesia, 11 naturalists died over a period of 30 years. Click here to see a slide show of this group’s discoveries and sacrifices.

Survival had its own perils: Rumphius, a 17th-century naturalist in the East Indies, was struck blind at 42, lost his wife and daughter to an earthquake, saw his collections destroyed by fire, sent off the first half of his magnum opus on a ship that sank, and finally, after re-doing his work, found that his employer meant to keep it proprietary. (Happily, Rumphius’s “Ambonese Herbal” will be published in English for the first time this spring, only 300 years too late.)

National Natural History Museum, Leiden, The Netherlands Gecko (Platyderma monorchis). Drawing by Pieter van Oort from an expedition in 1828.
No doubt the species seekers undertook such risks partly for the adventure. (“Hunted by a tiger when moth-catching,” one wrote. “Hunt tigers myself.”) They also clearly loved the natural world. “I trembled with excitement as I saw it coming majestically toward me,” Alfred Russel Wallace wrote, of a spectacular butterfly in the East Indies, “& could hardly believe I had really obtained it till I had taken it out my net and gazed upon its gorgeous wings of velvet black & brilliant green, its golden body & crimson breast … I have certainly never seen a more gorgeous insect.” Naturalists were also caught up body and soul in the great intellectual enterprise of collecting, classifying and coming to terms with the diversity of life on Earth.

It would be difficult to overstate how profoundly they changed the world along the way. Many of us are alive today, for instance, because naturalists identified obscure species that later turned out to cause malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and other epidemic diseases. And a month after capturing that butterfly, Wallace pulled together the ideas that had been piling up during his years of field work and, trembling with malarial fever, wrote Darwin the proposal that would become their joint theory of evolution by natural selection.

This brings me to a small proposal: We go to great lengths commemorating soldiers who have died fighting wars for their countries. Why not do the same for the naturalists who still sometimes give up everything in the effort to understand life? (Neither would diminish the sacrifice of the other. In fact, many early naturalists were also soldiers, or, like Darwin aboard H.M.S. Beagle, were embedded with military expeditions.) With that in mind, I constructed a very preliminary Naturalists’ Wall of the Dead for my book, “The Species Seekers,” to at least assemble the names in one place. (A version of it can be viewed here.)

But it also occurs to me that they might prefer to be remembered some other way than on a stone monument, or on paper. So here is another idea: On their first trip as part of Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program, Gentry and Parker helped bring international attention to an Amazonian region of incredible, and unsuspected, diversity. (Parker found 16 parrot species there and projected that it might be home to 11 percent of all bird species on Earth.) As a result in 1995, Bolivia created the Madidi National Park, protecting 4.5 million acres, an area the size of New Jersey, and all the species within it. Peru soon designated the adjacent slope of the Andes as the Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, protecting an additional 802,750 acres.

Like many species seekers, Gentry and Parker did not live to see their discoveries bear fruit. But I am pretty sure that this would be their idea of a fitting memorial.

Honoring the dead is good. We can do it by protecting the living.

Researchers aim to resurrect mammoth in five years

by Shingo Ito
2 hrs 6 mins ago

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time.
The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
"Preparations to realise this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the mass-circulation daily.
Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an elephant's egg cell from which the nuclei have been removed, to create an embryo containing mammoth genes, the report said.
The embryo will then be inserted into an elephant's uterus in the hope that the animal will eventually give birth to a baby mammoth.
The elephant is the closest modern relative of the mammoth, a huge woolly mammal believed to have died out with the last Ice Age.
Some mammoth remains still retain usable tissue samples, making it possible to recover cells for cloning, unlike dinosaurs, which disappeared around 65 million years ago and whose remains exist only as fossils
Researchers hope to achieve their aim within five to six years, the Yomiuri said.
The team, which has invited a Russian mammoth researcher and two US elephant experts to join the project, has established a technique to extract DNA from frozen cells, previously an obstacle to cloning attempts because of the damage cells sustained in the freezing process.
Another Japanese researcher, Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, succeeded in 2008 in cloning a mouse from the cells of another that had been kept in temperatures similar to frozen ground for 16 years.
The scientists extracted a cell nucleus from an organ of a dead mouse and planted it into the egg of another mouse which was alive, leading to the birth of the cloned mouse.
Based on Wakayama's techniques, Iritani's team devised a method to extract the nuclei of mammoth eggs without damaging them.
But a successful cloning will also pose challenges for the team, Iritani warned.
"If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed (the mammoth) and whether to display it to the public," Iritani said.
"After the mammoth is born, we will examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors."
More than 80 percent of all mammoth finds have been dug up in the permafrost of the vast Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia.
Exactly why a majority of the huge creatures that once strode in large herds across Eurasia and North America died out towards the end of the last Ice Age has generated fiery debate.
Some experts hold that mammoths were hunted to extinction by the species that was to become the planet's dominant predator -- humans.
Others argue that climate change was more to blame, leaving a species adapted for frozen climes ill-equipped to cope with a warming world.

Yes I do and here I am

Weathers been sunny and warm past two days...such a nice break from freezing cold and rain. Just a few miles down the mountain the fogs engulfed the town and Sacramento Valley.

Dan, the satellite here fluxuates also, but not enough to bother dsl...not yet. TV though, that's another story. Depending on the service, some of the neighbors tv's reception freeze frame till the signal returns. There was a very heavy and wet snowstorm and all the receivers went out. No, I did not climb on the roof weilding a hair dryer. LOL

Sue, thanks for all your gifting at FB. We all appreciate your help...

Today, if the weather holds, there's plenty of outdoor work waiting. Then again...Spring's just around the corner. Lots of mulch for planting.

Have a good day all and stay warm.

Good to see you Stradee. Don;t be such a stranger. Danon, this is for you because I thought it would interest you.


anuary 16, 2011

Cunning, Care and Sheer Luck Save Rare Map

By MICHAEL WILSON
It was rolled up among other yellowed maps and prints that came off a delivery truck at the Brooklyn Historical Society’s stately office near the East River. Carolyn Hansen, the society’s map cataloguer, began to gently unfurl the canvas.

“You could hear it rip,” said Ms. Hansen, 29, still cringing at the memory. She stopped pulling. But enough of the map, browned with age and dry and crisp as a stale chip, was open to reveal a name: Ratzer.

“We have a Ratzer map,” said James Rossman, chairman of the society, who happened to be in the building that Monday last May. That statement, despite the reverence in its delivery, meant little to the others in the room, but it would soon reverberate in cartography circles and among map scholars.

The name Ratzer is invoked as something of a Da Vinci of New York cartography, and the map was an early edition of his best-known work: a Bernard Ratzer “Plan of the City of New York” in its 1770 state.

There were widely believed to be only three copies of this exact map in existence. One of them belonged to King George III and remains in the British Library in London, where it is displayed occasionally. The other two — one legible, the other tanned and dark with shellac — are at the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side and remain in storage but for two or three times a year, when they are pulled out for students.

Restoring this surprise fourth map, aged beyond its 240 years by its destructive shellac coating, became an immediate priority in Brooklyn. Its transformation from literally untouchable to clearly legible and mounted behind glass, to be unveiled at a private party at the society on Wednesday night, involved science, patience and more than a little bit of kitchen-sink cunning, calling to service, at one delicate point, boiling pots of old books used to distill the color of aged paper.

Not that anyone at the Brooklyn Historical Society knew what it had. The map had been delivered from the society’s warehouse in Connecticut. The society said it had no catalog listing the map or when it had been acquired. It had been shellacked and mounted on linen, with a wooden pole attached at the bottom, presumably to bestow a more artistic air. It had probably hung on a wall somewhere for who knows how long, but in May it was in disastrous shape.

The map had been cut in long strips to allow it to be rolled up for storage. The strips were so brittle they broke when touched. It took a lot of squinting and bending, breath held in, to discover that it was a Ratzer 1770 — its name perhaps an error, as it was most likely completed in 1769.

A British Army officer in America, Lieutenant Ratzer was a surveyor and draftsman, and his map was immediately praised as a step forward from those of his predecessors. For his trouble, his name was misspelled on initial versions of his maps, called the “Ratzen plan.”

The map included a detailed rendering of the island’s slips and shores and streets in Lower Manhattan, the familiar mixing with the long gone. Pearl, Broad, Grand and Prince lay beside Fair and Crown and the “Fresh Water” pond.

“Manhattan, at least the part shown here, was mapped as precisely as any spot on the Earth at the time,” said Robert T. Augustyn, co-author of ”Manhattan in Maps: 1527-1995” (Rizzoli International Publications, 1997). “There was no more beautiful or revealing a map of New York City ever done.”

There are notable buildings: “The Powder House,” “The City Hall,” “The Prison,” “The Theatre.” Mr. Ratzer included detailed topography, with hills and woodlands near Kips Bay and Turtle Bay that have disappeared.

“It’s one of the ways we know about how this place looked before the grid really took hold,” said Matthew A. Knutzen, geospatial librarian in the New York Public Library’s map division.

The bottom of the map contains a striking illustration of the view of Manhattan as seen from Governors Island, with ships, soldiers, waves and smoke. Brooklyn, or “Brookland,” is a patchwork of farms of different shades, bisected by Flatbush Road.

A later version known as the second state, published in 1776 and nearly identical to the first except for a tiny line of text from the publisher, is more common. England’s 1770 state was presented to George III and remained in his expansive collection. “Publishers gave him one as soon as it came off the press,” said Peter Michael Barber, head of the cartographic and topographic materials department at the British Library.

The two 1770 maps at the New-York Historical Society were gifts of its founder, John Pintard, on Jan. 4, 1810, according to its catalog. That would make, barring the existence of other copies unknown to map archivists, this fourth map in Brooklyn the first one discovered in 200 years.

“It’s incredibly significant,” Mr. Knutzen said. “It’s a needle in a haystack.”

The provenance of the Brooklyn map is a little murky. On the back of the linen that Ms. Hansen began unrolling last May, the name Pierrepont was clearly legible, from the prominent Brooklyn family. But there was no indication how or when it came to land in the Connecticut warehouse, the society said.

Fearful of causing more damage, the society called Jonathan P. Derow, a paper conservationist in Park Slope, who came right over. “It was in terrible condition,” Mr. Derow, 44, said. “I suggested it not be rerolled. Every time it was handled, more pieces were broken apart, and the damage was increased.”

It was too brittle to move to his office, so he made a makeshift plastic tent in the society’s office and inserted a humidifier. The hard paper softened, and Mr. Derow, a conservationist since 1991, carried it away in a mode unthinkable at the time of the map’s creation: a Zipcar.

He washed the map for four days in an alkaline bath that removed acid and grime, and he cut away the linen backing. He aligned the pieces, using a strong magnifying glass and tweezers, and let the map dry, only to see tiny gaps appear between strips, the result of the paper’s shrinking. He rewet it and started over, but let the pieces overlap slightly. That worked: the map shrank perfectly in place.

White lines were visible where the map had ripped, the brighter inner fabrics of the paper standing out from the stained surface. Mr. Derow visited Argosy Book Store on the Upper East Side and bought a handful of obscure old books — among them, for example, “The Select Dialogues of Lucian, to Which Is Added, a New Literal Translation in Latin, With Notes in English,” from 1804 — that were printed on cloth paper, like the map, and not wood pulp.

He performed on them a technique that should chill the blood of any author, wondering where his books will be in 200 years: he baked them in his kitchen stove and boiled them in water. He painted the resulting brackish stew onto the white lines, matching them to the rest of the map.

Did he ever, perhaps in a rush, consult the map for a meeting in an unfamiliar part of town? “There’s barely anything about Brooklyn on there,” he said.

He framed the finished product behind plexiglass. The society, which paid a reduced rate of $5,000 for the restoration, plans a public viewing in the future.

There is no hurry. “It will last for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Mr. Derow said.

We had two days of relatively mild weather too. Today was cloudy and 44 and rain is expected tonight and tomorrow. It is early in the year and we are already running a deficit.

Over those days a friend and I raked up all the leaves and transported them to the vegetable garden and spread them out. This was the first year since I have been here that we had any appreciable quantity. Usually the west winds come and take the leaves off the tree and dump them on a neighbor;s property.

Anyway, despite the deficit in the rain bucket the snow we got was enough to get into the soil and freeze, and then thaw. So the ground was all wet and my rototiller labored in the mud and had to be cleaned off all of the time. When Lynn started sinking in a particularly wet corner he decided to quit.

With all those leaves, almost 6', on top of the soil, I despair that it will ever dry out sufficiently to rototill in.