+
upworthy
Heroes

These 5 bafflingly weird old maps of the Arctic show why it's worth preserving.

The North Pole was once one of the most inaccessible places on Earth.

Robert Peary's 1908 expedition to the Arctic. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.


Ships trying to sail anywhere near it risked getting permanently frozen in its vast, icy prison.

Fridtjof Nansen's ship, stuck in ice. Photo from Fridtjof Nansen/Wikimedia Commons.

Going on an expedition meant being at sea for at least a few months (maybe even years) and battling horrible cold, wind, snow, and ice, not to mention starvation. Not everyone who set out made it home again; whole expeditions sometimes just ... disappeared.

The crossing was so intense that humans actually reached the South Pole first. It really says a lot when Antarctica is the easier of your two options.

The first verified expedition to the North Pole didn't happen until 1926.

Though U.S. Navy engineer Robert Peary claimed to have made it to the pole in 1909, the first verified, undisputed claim to that achievement didn't happen until Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen flew over it in an airship in 1926.

Roald Amundsen. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Amundsen's team had also been the first to reach the South Pole, which I'm pretty sure means he owns the Earth now.

Before Mr. Roald "Fur Coat" Amundsen, however, mapmakers had been trying to guess what the Arctic looked like for centuries.

See the stone thing in the center and the four islands surrounding the North Pole in this map from 1595?

The red, green, and yellow blobs around the edges are Canada, Europe, and Asia, respectively. The blobs in the middle are ... Mordor? Image from Gerardus Mercator/Wikimedia Commons.

Those are there because mapmaker Gerardus Mercator seemed to think there might be some sort of lost world up there.

By the late 1600s, mapmakers had a better idea of what the pole looked like, but Greenland and Canada still seemed to cause some conundrums.

1680 map by Moses Pitt. Original image from Moses Pitt/Toronto Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

Like, I'm pretty sure Greenland and Canada don't actually connect to each other.

Original image from Moses Pitt/Wikimedia Commons.

And this mapmaker in 1720 seems to have admitted ignorance, shrugged his shoulders, and just stopped drawing.

C. G. Zorgdrager's 1720 map of the North Pole. Original image from National Library of Norway/Wikimedia Commons.

Some maps, like this one from 1762, made some ... interesting guesses at what the North Pole looks like.

Jean Javier's 1762 map of North America. Image from Jean Lattre/Wikimedia Commons

Interesting guesses like "Maybe future-Alaska isn't a thing."

Image from Jean Lattre/Wikimedia Commons.

And "What if I put a big ol' sea here in the middle of what will one day be Seattle and British Columbia?"

I'm pretty sure I'd remember if Seattle were in the middle of a giant bay. Image from Jean Lattre/Wikimedia Commons.

Even years later, in 1776, Alaska was still proving troublesome to mapmakers.

1776 map. Image from Zatta/Wikimedia Commons.

I mean REALLY.

?!?!?!!!!! Image from Zatta/Wikimedia Commons.

By the 1880s, at least, we knew more or less what was at the North Pole (nothing but water and ice).

Although this map still has a few blank places at the very top of Greenland and Canada.

Those Aleutian Islands look a little short, too. An 1882 map. Image from the New York Public Library.

Good job, 1880s.

Thanks to those explorers and technology, we now know that the Arctic looks like this:

Image from Uwe Dedering/Wikimedia Commons.

But — would those explorers of a century ago, the ones who spent months and years traversing its icy waters, even recognize the place if they saw it today?

In a recent interview, oceanographer Peter Wadhams told The Independent that the Arctic may be on track to be ice-free for the first time in 100,000 years.

Climate change has been consistently reducing the sea ice around the Arctic Ocean for decades, to the extent that the same passages and channels that once baffled and trapped early explorers are now so ice-free that they're being considered for use as shipping lanes.

In late 2015, the Russian icebreaker Vaygach completed a trip along the north coast of Siberia in just seven and a half days. Image from Dudinka_Apu/Wikimedia Commons.

Our maps may be a lot better now, but that doesn't mean we should abandon the Arctic's air of mystery and adventure.

After all, it's still home to seals that look like something out of a Tim Burton film...

Yup, that's definitely the seal version of Beetlejuice. Image from Michael Cameron/Wikimedia Commons.

...not to mention weird methane that seeps from deep in the seabed and these fire-breathing lakes. So even though we now know where we're going when it comes to the North Pole, there's still plenty up there left to discover.

Last year, 174 countries pledged to help fight climate change at the COP21 climate change conference in Paris. Individual people can help, too, by reducing their energy consumption and not only voting for politicians who don't think climate change is a hoax, but making sure they stick to their agreements after they're in office.

If we can accomplish that, we can keep the Arctic cold — and help preserve for future generations the air of mystery and adventure that those old (admittedly faulty) maps embody.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

Keep ReadingShow less
Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

Keep ReadingShow less
Innovation

A student accidentally created a rechargeable battery that could last 400 years

"This thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going." ⚡️⚡️

There's an old saying that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

Keep ReadingShow less

A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

Keep ReadingShow less