Month: July 2019

A true forest is not merely a storehouse full of wood, but, as it were, a factory of wood.

Theodore Roosevelt

From Oddity Central:

The Bridegroom’s Oak, a 500-year-old tree just outside of Eutin, in Germany, has its own postal address and actually receives around 40 letters every day. They are sent by love seekers from all around the world, in the hope that someone will read them and write back.

With so many dating apps and services available nowadays, sending letters to a tree in Germany hardly sounds like the most effective way to find love, but for true romantics, there’s really no comparison. There’s just something undeniably charming about sending a letter and allowing fate to work its magic, so the Bridegroom’s Oak remains very popular even in this digital age.

From Atlas Obscura:

It all began with a strict father. In the early days of the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the daughter of the Dodau forester fell in love with a chocolate manufacturer from Leipzig. Her father opposed the match (apparently he had no sweet tooth), forcing the young lovers to meet in secret. They used a hole in a big oak tree close to the forester’s mansion as their amorous letter box.

From the Guardian, Oak tree diplomacy: Macron to send new sapling to Trump after death of first one

From National Geographic:

At the time of his speech, Finkbeiner was four years into leading a remarkable environmental cause that has since expanded into a global network of children activists working to slow the Earth’s warming by reforesting the planet.

Today, Finkbeiner is 19—and Plant-for-the-Planet, the environmental group he founded, together with the UN’s Billion Tree campaign, has planted more than 14 billion trees in more than 130 nations. The group has also pushed the planting goal upward to one trillion trees—150 for every person on the Earth.

From NASA:

Launched in December 2018 to the International Space Station, the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) was built with lasers that can make three-dimensional maps of Earth’s forests and landforms. In January 2019, those lasers were turned on for the first time, giving scientists a first glimpse of the detailed insights it can provide.

GEDI’s primary mission is to decipher forest structure: how tall the trees are, how densely their branches fit together, how much space lies between treetops and tree trunks, and how the branches are arranged from top to bottom. Knowing such details can foster a better understanding of how trees store carbon and what happens to that carbon when they are cut down or disturbed. Forests also support numerous plant and animal species, so understanding the structure can help biologists better understand habitats and biodiversity.

• Title: Lufkin, Texas. Southland paper mill. Log on the knotting machine. After the bark has been removed, knots are cut out of pulp logs which reduces the pitch content of the pulp
• Date Created/Published: 1943 Apr.
• Medium: 1 negative : safety ; 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches or smaller.

From The Daily Overview:

From National Geographic:

In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala.

Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed.