Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderHistory fact

In December 1900 the three keepers of the Flannan Isles lighthouse, off Scotland's Outer Hebrides, disappeared. When the relief ship arrived on 26 December, keeper Joseph Moore found the fire cold for days, the clock stopped and the beds empty. James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur were never seen again.

Flannan Isles, December 1900

HistoryNature

The story behind the card

The last log entry was for 13 December; notes for the 14th and the morning of the 15th were still on the slate, and the morning's work had been done. Marshall had gone out in sea boots and oilskins, Ducat in sea boots and an old waterproof. McArthur's coat was still indoors. At the west landing, iron railings had been torn from their footings and a box of mooring ropes washed away. Superintendent Robert Muirhead concluded that the men had gone down to secure the gear and that an unexpectedly large roller swept them off the rock. The untouched dinner of the legend appears in Wilfrid Gibson's 1912 poem, not in the record: Joseph Moore found the kitchen utensils clean, a sign, he said, that the men had left some time after dinner.

Türkçe oku
Aralık 1900'de, İskoçya'nın Dış Hebrid Adaları açıklarındaki Flannan Adaları Feneri'nin üç bekçisi ortadan kayboldu. İkmal gemisi 26 Aralık'ta geldiğinde, nöbeti devralacak bekçi Joseph Moore ocağı günlerdir sönük, saati durmuş, yatakları boş buldu. James Ducat, Thomas Marshall ve Donald McArthur'u bir daha gören olmadı.
Flannan Adaları, Aralık 1900

Fener defterindeki son kayıt 13 Aralık tarihliydi; 14 Aralık'ın ve 15 Aralık sabahının notları ise hâlâ yazı tahtasında duruyordu, sabah işleri de bitirilmişti. Marshall deniz çizmeleri ve muşamba yağmurluğuyla, Ducat da deniz çizmeleri ve eski bir yağmurlukla çıkmıştı. McArthur'un ceketi içeride asılı duruyordu. Batı iskelesinde demir korkuluklar yerinden sökülmüş, halatların durduğu sandık denize gitmişti. Müfettiş Robert Muirhead'in vardığı sonuç şuydu: Bekçiler malzemeyi sağlama almak için iskeleye inmiş, beklenmedik büyüklükte bir dalga üçünü de kayalardan alıp götürmüştü. Efsanedeki el sürülmemiş sofra ise kayıtlarda değil, Wilfrid Gibson'ın 1912 tarihli şiirinde geçer. Joseph Moore mutfak eşyalarını tertemiz bulmuş ve bunu, adamların yemekten bir süre sonra çıktığının işareti saymıştı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Flannan Isles Lighthouse
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderScience

Some Great Basin bristlecone pines in the western United States are more than 4,800 years old, older than Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza.

The oldest known living one, nicknamed Methuselah, grows in the White Mountains of eastern California; counting its growth rings shows it is more than 4,850 years old, and its exact location is kept secret to protect it. The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BCE, a few centuries after Methuselah sprouted. Bristlecones grow extremely slowly on thin, dry dolomite soil, a rock similar to limestone, where few other plants survive, which spares them competition and fire. Their dense, resin-filled wood resists insects, fungi and rot, and dead trees can stand for thousands of years. In 1964 a researcher in Nevada cut down one tree, later called Prometheus, and counted at least 4,862 rings, making it the oldest tree then known.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderScience

About 2.4 billion years ago, oxygen made by microbes began to build up in Earth's air for the first time, poisoning many of the organisms that lived then.

Scientists call this the Great Oxidation Event. The oxygen came from cyanobacteria, microbes that use sunlight to make food and give off oxygen as waste. For a long time the gas was used up as fast as it formed, much of it by iron dissolved in the oceans, which rusted and settled as striped rocks called banded iron formations, today a major source of iron ore. Once that buffer ran out, oxygen collected in the air. Many microbes that lived without oxygen died or retreated to mud and deep water, which is why some call it the 'oxygen catastrophe'. The oxygen also destroyed much of the methane that had kept the planet warm, and may have helped set off the long Huronian ice ages. In the long run it made aerobic respiration possible, which gets far more energy from food and later powered complex life.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Amazonian dark earth, or terra preta, is an unusually fertile black soil made by people. Over generations, charcoal, broken pottery, bones and food waste built up around Indigenous settlements and turned thin rainforest soil rich.

Terra preta is Portuguese for 'black earth'. These soils formed between about 450 BCE and 950 CE at sites across the Amazon Basin, and in places the dark layer reaches one to two metres deep. Ordinary rainforest soil is poor, because heavy rain washes nutrients away, but charcoal barely breaks down and holds nutrients and water in place for centuries. Local farmers still use the soil today. It also changed how archaeologists see the Amazon: not as untouched wilderness, but as a landscape shaped by large, settled communities. Scientists now try to copy the method with 'biochar', charcoal made from farm waste and mixed into poor soils.

MIT / Amazonian dark earth researchRead card
WonderScience

Tree rings can date wood to the year it grew. The science, called dendrochronology, matches ring patterns across living trees, old beams and buried wood to reconstruct past climates, droughts and fires, and to date old buildings.

Each year a tree adds a ring, wide in good years and narrow in dry or cold ones, so a run of rings forms a pattern like a barcode. Overlapping those patterns, from living trees back through old timbers, builds long calendars: in central Europe, a continuous oak and pine record reaches back 12,460 years. The method was founded by the American astronomer A. E. Douglass in the early 1900s. He hoped tree rings would show sunspot cycles affecting climate; that link never held up, but the dating did. In 1929 his tree-ring calendar gave exact dates to ancient Pueblo ruins in the American Southwest, and he later founded the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research / National Park ServiceRead card
WonderHistory

Every year Nova Scotia gives Boston a Christmas tree to thank the city for its help after the Halifax Explosion of 6 December 1917, when a munitions ship blew up in Halifax harbour. Boston sent a relief train with doctors, nurses and supplies that same night.

The French cargo ship Mont-Blanc, loaded with wartime explosives, collided with the Norwegian ship Imo in the harbour's narrows and caught fire. When it blew up, it was the largest explosion people had ever caused, and remained so until the first atomic bombs. Nearly 2,000 people died, about 9,000 were injured, and more than 12,000 buildings were destroyed or badly damaged. A blizzard the next day slowed the Boston train, but it arrived with medical teams and supplies. Halifax sent a tree in thanks in 1918, and in 1971 Nova Scotia revived the gift as a yearly tradition. The tree, usually a tall spruce or fir, becomes Boston's official Christmas tree on Boston Common.

HistoryRead card
Next card in the archiveThe 1904 Olympic marathon in St Louis was run in heat of about 32 °C on dusty roads, with a single well for water. The first man home had ridden 18 km in a car; the real winner, Thomas Hicks, had been dosed with strychnine and brandy by his trainers and was carried over the line.Read next →