Now I Know (22 page)

However, the microbes are there, which is particularly fascinating because by all rights they shouldn’t be. They’re often cited as examples as to why we can’t rule out life on places such as Mars or Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa; if something could survive beneath Taylor Glacier for an epoch, there could be something alive out there too.

Australian-born Rodney Marks died on May 12, 2000, not far from the geographic South Pole. He had been working as an astrophysicist at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, a research facility run by the U.S. government via the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF originally concluded that Marks died due to natural causes. Six months later, and for more than a decade since, that finding has looked increasingly dubious. However, in part because of the quirks of how Antarctica is legally organized, we may never know what happened.

Marks, an accomplished researcher, was at the South Pole working on a telescope. He suffered from Tourette’s syndrome and tended to go on drinking binges in part to mask the symptoms of the condition. (Yes, there are bars in Antarctica. Several, in fact.) He was engaged to be married, and his fiancée, a woman named Sonja Walter, had taken a job at the South Pole to be with him. But on May 11, 2000, he began to feel very ill. He saw the doctor three times in the next day and a half, but it was all for naught, as no reason for his illness could be found.. About thirty-six hours after taking ill, Marks was dead.

In most cases, the police would be called in. But Antarctica isn’t owned by a single country, and although there are international treaties discussing rights and responsibilities to parts of it, many of the jurisdictional claims are unresolved. New Zealand makes a territorial claim on the area around the South Pole in which much of the U.S. presence is located. The United States does not recognize this claim, but it hasn’t objected when New Zealand applied New Zealand law to New Zealanders working for the United States in that area. Similarly, New Zealand has never objected to U.S. authorities investigating crimes committed in the area.

Six months after his death, Marks’s body was shipped to New Zealand for an autopsy (with the blessing of the United States). The coroner determined that Marks died from methanol poisoning and referred the case to the New Zealand police for further investigation. Methanol poisoning occurs, typically, when a person drinks antifreeze or Sterno in hopes of getting an effect similar to that of alcohol (that is, to get drunk), but the New Zealand authorities noted that Marks had access to plenty of alcohol and wouldn’t likely accidentally drink those things. Further, investigators openly doubted that Marks would have committed suicide—after all, he repeatedly sought medical treatment.

As chief investigator Detective Senior Sergeant Grant Wormald told the press, that is as far as the police work got. When New Zealand authorities tried to get information from potential witnesses or from the relevant organizations’ files, no one was willing to speak and denied that New Zealand had jurisdiction over the matter. When the U.S. Department of Justice stepped in to help, the people and organizations involved claimed the United States did not have jurisdiction either. The investigation ground to a halt in 2008, and Marks’s father told the
New Zealand Herald
that it was unlikely that more details would come to light.

To date, the mystery remains unsolved.

Roughly 30 percent of the Earth’s surface is land. And where there is land, there is a nation (or multiple nations) ready to claim it as its own. In fact, some of the world’s strangest disputes have been over pieces of land so small as to inspire bemused disbelief. Outside of Antarctica, almost every square foot of land is claimed by at least one nation.

Except for an 800-square-mile piece of land call Bir Tawil.

Bir Tawil sits between Egypt and Sudan. Neither country wants the land; in fact, each would be happy if the other took it. The area is landlocked and barren. The terrain is dry and mountainous and no one lives there permanently. A century ago, a tribe of nomads used the area as grazing lands, but that has long since changed. “Bir Tawil” translates to “deep water well,” a name given to the area decades ago due to the presence of a well in the region (and literally nothing else), but even that well is long gone.

But Bir Tawil’s general worthlessness is not why neither country wants it. Rather, the nations don’t want it because it would preclude them from claiming the Hala’ib Triangle, which sits to Bir Tawil’s northeast. Much larger and with fertile soil bordering the Red Sea, the triangle is claimed by both Egypt and Sudan.

The dispute over the Hala’ib Triangle dates back to two edicts, one from 1899 and another in 1902. In 1899, the United Kingdom (which controlled the area) drew the northern border of Sudan at the 22nd Parallel, a straight line stretching east to the Red Sea. Under these borders, Egypt would control the Hala’ib Triangle and Bir Tawil (as these regions are called today) would fall to Sudan. But these borders had a small flaw. A group of people living in the triangle were both geographically and culturally closer to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. It made little sense for these people to be Egyptians when they could so easily be Sudanese. To fix this, in 1902, the UK decided to draw a jagged “administrative boundary” which placed the Hala’ib Triangle under the administration of Sudan. However, for some reason, instead of starting this boundary at the 22nd Parallel and moving northeast, the British began the line south of the Parallel. In doing so, it carved out a small divot, now known as Bir Tawil, to be administered by Egypt.

Today, Egypt recognizes the straight-line 1899 border. Sudan claims the jagged 1902 border. As a result, no one wants Bir Tawil, making it the only place, other than Antarctica, unclaimed by any nation.

Cairo, the capital of Egypt, is one of the largest urban areas in the world, with over 6.5 million residents in the city itself and roughly 18 million in the greater metro area. It is like most cosmopolitan cities, except for one interesting difference: garbage.

Cairo’s municipal waste system—which handles about 9,000 tons of garbage a day—is not much of a system at all. It is, at best, an informal undertaking. The city’s municipal garbage needs are driven by a subset of the population known as the Zabbaleen (literally, “garbage people” in Egyptian Arabic), a group of mostly Coptic Christians numbering around 60–70,000 who have been the city’s
de facto
garbage collectors for decades. They live in a half-dozen or so communities in the outskirts of Cairo, collecting trash and refuse from virtually every street corner in the city.

Where the garbage ends up is, perhaps, the real story. The Zabbaleen collect the trash in a village named Manshiyat Naser, a slum, with stores and dwellings, avenues and roads, but without a sewer system, running water, or electricity. The streets of the village are strewn with trash. For this, the village has earned the moniker “Garbage City.”

But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At Manshiyat Naser, the Zabbaleen work their magic with the refuse of others, sorting through tons and tons of it for items that can be reused or recycled—or, in the case of food, fed to pigs. (When the swine flu made its way around the world, the Egyptian government ended that practice.) Families specialize in types of garbage and thereby are able to better pick out treasure from, well, actual trash. The results are apparently spectacular—according to a 2010 documentary about the Zabbaleen and Manshiyat Naser, as much as 80 percent of the garbage can be repurposed. For comparison’s sake, most recycling methods recover only about a quarter of items thrown away.

The Zabbaleen’s future, however, is up in the air. The culling of pigs due to the swine flu scare wreaked havoc on their economy. Combined with Egypt and Cairo’s prerevolutionary desire to become more modern and turn garbage collection into a municipal service, the Zabbaleen’s role in Cairo’s garbage economy may be on the wane.

According to
National Geographic
, about 55 percent of trash generated by Americans ends up in landfills. About a third is recycled and the remaining 12.5 percent or so gets incinerated. Lowering that first number seems like a good idea for many reasons—landfills take up space, create methane gas, and can taint groundwater supplies. Garbage isn’t only a problem for the United States; other countries’ populations also create trash by the barrelful each week.

But Sweden has a totally different garbage problem. They simply don’t have enough of it.

According to a story on NPR, only about 4 percent of Swedish refuse finds its way to the landfill. That’s because, in large part, Sweden incinerates a huge percentage of its trash. In doing so, the country captures a huge amount of energy. Many parts of Sweden use something called “district heating,” a centralized system in which (in this case) garbage is burned to heat water, and that heated water is then piped to residential and commercial buildings to provide heat. By burning garbage, Sweden is able to produce 20 percent of its district heating needs, as well as electricity to about 250,000 homes. Almost everything is used—even medical waste. In fact, Sweden is so good at turning trash into energy that, as Public Radio International reported in the summer of 2012, the country had more need for electricity than trash available. Put bluntly, they needed more garbage.

The good thing about needing garbage? There’s usually a lot available, and others are more than willing to get rid of it. Not only that, but people—governments, in this case—will pay you to take it off their hands. So when Sweden went looking for more garbage, they found that neighboring Norway was not only willing to send some garbage Sweden’s way, but they also provided a bit of extra revenue to the Swedes.

For now. Sweden may have to look elsewhere soon (they already are, with Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, and others in their sights). Many other nations, especially those in Northern Europe, are investing in similar processes and systems—and they’ll need their trash. In April 2013,
The New York Times
reported that Oslo, Norway’s capital, had itself become a net importer of garbage—the city was able to heat “roughly half the city and most of its schools” by burning garbage. However, like Sweden, it ran out of trash and is now importing it from neighboring areas.

As we said, governments often stockpile items (garbage, as noted) for strategic, often economic purposes. The United States has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), for example—a stockpile of oil, worth, as of December 21, 2012, well over $60 billion. The purpose of the SPR is to prevent foreign entities from causing economic harm to the United States by refusing to sell petroleum to America. The SPR was formed after the 1973 oil crisis and now has nearly 700 million barrels of oil. That’s enough to mitigate potential embargoes for months. Given American (and international) reliance on petroleum, the SPR makes a lot of sense.

America isn’t alone here. Most other developed nations also have strategic oil reserves; China, for example, has 100 million barrels under lock and key, with plans for another 375 million to be added. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But the Chinese don’t stop there. They also have a strategic reserve of something else: pork.