Word: caving
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High up in the stunning Kashmir Valley lies a natural cave called Amarnath, where stalagmites form during the summer months. Devout Hindus believe this cave to be one of the holiest sites of their religion, and that the largest of the ice formations is a Shiva Lingam, the symbol of Lord Shiva. Hindu mythology has it that Shiva - the destroyer in the Hindu Trinity that includes Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver - imparted the secrets of creation to his consort, Parvati, in Amarnath. Each year, during the months of July and August, hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims from...
...change in the future. It's also, as the participants in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project will tell you, incredibly fun. Where else can you snowmobile all day across some of the finest piste in the world, carve 200-year-old ice cores in a polar cave that would make Superman swoon, and relax at night (night being relative, since the sun never sets during the Arctic summer) with copious amounts of Carlsberg beer delivered to you by the U.S. Air Force? They didn't tell us it would be like this back in high school biology...
From there, the ice cores are taken to the "cold room," a hollowed out cave about 6 m below the surface, where drillers will carve the cores in sections, to be bagged, tagged and eventually flown back to the Center for Ice and Science in Copenhagen, where they will be fully analyzed. The work is done underground to make sure the ice stays stable - though we're far above the Arctic Circle, with the open sun the temperature is only -6 degrees or -7 degrees C, though the wind can make it feel worse on the open snow. The sprawling...
...display are implements that belonged to refugees from this conflict - mirrors, pans, house keys and a jewelry box found alongside their skeletons in a cave where they hid. "The last people to touch these items before our colleagues in Israel's museums," says Opper, "were the people awaiting Hadrian's onslaught." These humble objects - perfectly preserved in the desert heat - may be quotidian, yet they offer as resonant an insight into Hadrian's world as the exquisitely refined statues that he commissioned to memorialize the love he had lost...
Radovan Karadzic's last lair wasn't a cave or a safe house; no secret bolt-holes or special security details shielded him. Instead, the former Bosnian Serb leader, one of the world's most wanted men, was hiding in plain view amid the drab, anonymous housing blocks of New Belgrade, a suburb of the Serbian capital. He was nabbed not by NATO, whose forces had spent 12 years in a vain and sometimes desultory search for him, but by the security forces of Serbia - the country whose designs for grandeur he had so ardently tried to further...