The Online Geography Game
This week we went cold in the heat of the UAE desert. The location is the Gulf and Modern Ice Company in Dubai, UAE.
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Signy Island holds the record for the highest temperature in the Antarctic (defined as all land and ice shelves south of 60S. This record temperature of +19.8C was set on January 30, 1982!
Signy Island is home to a British Antarctic Survey station, opened in 1947 on the site an old whaling station from the 1920s.
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It’s a simple idea – focus the sun’s energy on a small target to generate heat.
In the case of the world’s largest one, the Odeillo Solar Furnace near the commune of Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via in the Pyrenees of southern France, it’s 10,000 mirrors focusing the sun’s energy onto an area roughly the size of a cooking pot, which reaches temperatures above 3,000 degrees Celsius (5,430 degrees Fahrenheit). Two sets of mirrors do this – in a structure built in 1970.
Those focusing in on the right spot before the hint:
After the hint:
What is essentially an amusement park dressed up as a huge ice cream parlor, The Ice Cream Farm in Cheshire, UK has rides, exhibits, and, oh yes, hundreds of flavors of ice cream.
After last week’s pepper experience, we felt a cool down was necessary.
Those who found it before the hint:
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This week’s contest is a different kind of heat — this is the storefront of the PuckerButt Pepper Company owned by Ed Curie, developer of the Carolina Reaper Chili, the record holder for the hottest chili pepper in the world (in excess of 2,000,000 scoville units). Of course, this is a moving target, it seems like every other day, someone is coming up with a new, hotter chili, but Ed seems to be doing a good job of holding the title this time. In fact, if anything does push the reaper off of Guiness’ list, it will be his next cultivar, a pepper he refers to as “Pepper X” with an astounding 3.2 million scoville units.
Those who tracked this down before the hint:
And after the hint
Contest 822 took us north to the Mendenhall Glacier on the outskirts of Juneau, Alaska, a popular tourist spot. It’s one of the few glaciers you can easily reach from a city on a short drive. Of course, first, you’ll have to either get a car to Juneau or rent one there, because there is no road that connects Juneau with the rest of Alaska or Canada.
The glacier’s shink rate is increasing quite rapidly. From 1500 until 2000, the terminus of the glacier had retreated about 2.5 miles. From 2000 to 2021, that rate had increased to about 160 feet per year, but from August 2021 to August 2022, the terminus had moved back 800 feet.
Found while they could before the hint:
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This week the location was the Furnace Creek Visitor Centre in Death Valley, California, USA. It’s one of the hottest places on earth!
On July 10, 1913, the ambient air temperature recorded was 57.6 °C (134 °F). The ground temperature on this site on July 15, 1972 was measured at 93.9 °C (201.0 °F).
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This weeks contest location was the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism in Berlin, Germany.
The momument was built in May of 2008, designed by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. It commemorates not only those persecuted under the Nazi regime, but also those persecuted under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which furthred the criminalization of homosexuality until it was repealed in 1994.
Those finding it before the hint:
After the hint:
In 1972, Harvey Milk opened a camera store because he was tired of developers in the city ruining his film. This camera store was in the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco. From that store, Harvey began to coordinate political activism among the growing gay community in that city. In time, he became such a force in the political landcape of San Francisco and California in general, that he was elected to a seat on the Board of Supervisors for that city. He was a power broker on the board, which did not please another member of that board with more conservative values, Dan White.
On November 27, 1978, Dan White assassinated Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in City Hall.
After the closure of the store, the Human Rights Campaign, an organization with ties to the LGBTQ community, setup a store and information center there for about 16 years. Recently, there have been talks with the US National Parks service to nominate the site as a historical site.
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(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
In the photo above, taken Saturday, Oct. 9, 1999, a cross made of stones rests below the fence in Laramie, Wy.
In that spot a year earlier, two men offered Matthew Shephard a ride home form a bar in Laramie. Instead, they took this young man out to a remote rural area, then robbed him. As if that was not enough, they then beat him, pistol-whipping him until his skull was fractured. They tied him to this fence and left him to die in the freezing weather. Shephard died 6 days later. He was 21 years old.
At the trial of the men accused, it was made clear that the murder of this young man was done for no other reason than he was gay. At the penalty phase of one of the defendants, as the death penalty was being discussed, Matthew’s parents brokered a deal with the prosecution to spare the defendant his life.
In 2007, the “Matthew Shepard and Jams Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act” was introduced and the subsequent legislation became law with President Obama’s signature in 2009.
Those who found this site before the hint:
and after the hint: