The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly called the United Kingdom or UK) is located in the British Isles off the northwest coast of Europe. The UK has the fifth largest (1) economy in the world and attracts tourists year round. There are four constituent parts, or home nations, to the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
The UK became the dominant maritime and industrial power of the 19th century, and contributed tremendously to the development of Western ideas (2) concerning capitalism, democracy, property, literature and science. Many of the world's top universities are located in Great Britain (8). The English language is known as the "global language" and has spread to nations around the world.
The UK offers some of the world's most popular vacation destinations, from historic cities to tranquil ocean views (9). There are numerous country houses, majestic castles, unique structures and ancient monuments that litter that idyllic countryside. The reasons so many people choose the United Kingdom, particularly Great Britain, as their favoured travel destination are quite simply plain to see.
There are many delightful castles in the UK where tourists can stroll through history and learn about royal families of the past. Tourists can also visit many stately homes, which are often packed with antiques and the untouched living arrangements (3) of past generations. There are hundreds of these in Great Britain that are open to the public and dutifully maintained and cared for (10). The Scottish Edinburgh Castle sits on a hill high above the remainder of the city Edinburgh, and offers a view of where some of the bloodiest events of Scottish history took place – battles etched into the history of Scottish and English conflict. Back down in England, Windsor Castle is known to be the largest inhabited stronghold in the world, and it is also the largest castle in England. Although the castle was severely damaged by a fire in 1992, it has been restored to its former grandeur (11). Another notable home packed with history, Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, offers visitors a peek at the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill (4), one of the most famous and revered British Prime Ministers of the 20###sup/sup### century.
Visitors to the UK are able to learn about culture and history by touring one of the country's many museums, with the most popular of these being situated mostly in London (12). The British Museum in London houses the famous Rosetta stone and the Elgin marbles, a collection of classical Greek sculptures. The National Gallery, also placed in London, offers a dazzling collection of Western art, and represents many famous artists, from da Vinci to Picasso! The gallery houses an abundance of Renaissance art pieces. Art lovers can get their fill here while in London. Another great art museum in London is Tate Britain, where some 10,000 works are displayed.
With all the hustle and bustle, glitz and dazzle of the United Kingdom, you might be wondering when you'll find time for a great hike. Don't worry as there are many delightful hiking (5) opportunities right around the corner from many of the major tourist areas. Whether your goal is to get some exercise and stay fit during your trip to the UK or just enjoy the outdoor, you can escape to the rolling hills of the Cotswolds or the crashing waves of the Outer Hebrides. You'll find breathtaking mountains to the north of the English countryside in the Lake District and in the Pennines or magnificent mountain scenery awaits in the remote regions of Yorkshire Dales and Northumberland. If keen and fit enough for a challenging hike, the Peak District offers strenuous climbs (6) to give you a real workout and majestic views over the English countryside. There are thousands of miles of English countryside if you're just starting out with hiking.
The allure of a visit to the United Kingdom is clearly strong, with its rich history and scenic landscapes. The ease of access to bustling shopping and luxurious restaurants close by to hiking and nature strolls remains a strong draw for many tourists. If you visit the UK, remember to sample the traditional British dish of Fish and Chips (7) – preferably wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper.
When the last stranded whale of a group eventually dies, the story does not end there. A team of researchers begins to investigate, collecting skin samples (14) for instance, recording anything that could help them answer the crucial question: why? Theories abound, some more convincing than others. In recent years, navy sonar has been accused of causing certain whales to strand. It is known that noise pollution (15) from offshore industry, shipping and sonar can impair underwater communication, but can it really drive whales onto our beaches?
In 1998, researchers at the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute, a Greek non-profit scientific group, linked whale strandings with low- frequency sonar tests being carried out by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). They recorded the stranding of 12 Cuvier’s beaked whales over 38.2 kilometres of coastline. NATO later admitted it had been testing new sonar technology in the same area at the time as the strandings had occurred. ‘Mass’ whale strandings involve four or more animals. Typically they all wash ashore together, but in mass atypical strandings (such as the one in Greece), the whales don't strand as a group; they are scattered over a larger area. (23)
For humans, hearing a sudden loud noise might prove frightening, but it does not induce mass fatality. For whales, on the other hand, there is a theory on how sonar can kill. The noise can surprise the animal, causing it to swim too quickly to the surface. The result is decompression sickness, a hazard human divers know all too well. If a diver ascends too quickly from a high-pressure underwater environment to a lower-pressure one, gases dissolved in blood and tissue expand and form bubbles. The bubbles block the flow of blood (21) to vital organs, and can ultimately lead to death.
Plausible as this seems, it is still a theory and based on our more comprehensive knowledge of land-based animals. For this reason, some scientists are wary. Whale expert Karen Evans is one such scientist. Another is Rosemary Gales, a leading expert on whale strandings. She says sonar technology cannot always be blamed for mass strandings. "It’s a case-by-case situation. Whales have been stranding for a very long time - pre-sonar.” And when 80% of all Australian whale strandings occur around Tasmania (16), Gales and her team must continue in the search for answers.
When animals beach next to each other at the same time, the most common cause has nothing to do with humans at all. "They're highly social creatures,” says Gales. "When they mass strand - it’s complete panic and chaos. If one of the group strands and sounds the alarm, others will try to swim to its aid (25), and become stuck themselves.”
Activities such as sonar testing can hint at when a stranding may occur, but if conservationists are to reduce the number of strandings, or improve rescue operations, they need information on where strandings are likely to occur as well. With this in mind, Ralph James, physicist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, thinks he may have discovered why whales turn up only on some beaches. In 1986 he went to Augusta, Western Australia, where more than 100 false killer whales had beached. “I found out from chatting to the locals that whales had been stranding there for decades. So I asked myself, what is it about this beach?” From this question that James pondered over 20 years ago, grew the university's Whale Stranding Analysis Project.
Data has since revealed that all mass strandings around Australia occur on gently sloping sandy beaches, some with inclines of less than 0.5%. For whale species that depend on an echolocation system to navigate, this kind of beach spells disaster. Usually, as they swim, they make clicking noises, and the resulting sound waves (18) are reflected in an echo and travel back to them. However, these just fade out on shallow beaches, so the whale doesn’t hear an echo and it crashes onto the shore.
But that is not all. Physics, it appears, can help with the when as well as the where. The ocean is full of bubbles. Larger ones rise quickly to the surface and disappear, whilst smaller ones - called microbubbles (20) - can last for days. It is these that absorb whale 'clicks! "Rough weather generates more bubbles than usual,” James adds. So, during and after a storm, echolocating whales are essentially swimming blind.
Last year was a bad one for strandings in Australia. Can we predict if this - or any other year - will be any better? Some scientists believe we can. They have found trends which could be used to forecast 'bad years’ for strandings in the future. In 2005, a survey by Klaus Vanselow and Klaus Ricklefs of sperm whale (17) strandings in the North Sea even found a correlation between these and the sunspot cycle, and suggested that changes in the Earth’s magnetic field might be involved. But others are sceptical (26). “Their study was interesting ... but the analyses they used were flawed on a number of levels,” says Evans. In the same year, she co-authored a study on Australian strandings that uncovered a completely different trend. “We analysed data from 1920 to 2002 ... and observed a clear periodicity in the number of whales stranded each year that coincides with a major climatic cycle.” To put it more simply, she says, in the years when strong westerly and southerly winds bring cool water rich in nutrients (19) closer to the Australia coast, there is an increase in the number of fish. The whales follow.
So what causes mass strandings? "It's probably many different components,” says James. And he is probably right. But the point is we now know what many of those components are.
A Until the last tick of history's clock, cultural transmission meant oral transmission, and poetry, passed from mouth to ear, was the principal medium of moving information across space and from one generation (37) to the next. Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the classicist Eric Havelock, a ‘massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history and technology which the effective citizen (38) was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment’. The great oral works transmitted a shared cultural heritage, held in common not on bookshelves, but in brains. In India, an entire class of priests was charged with memorizing the Vedas with perfect fidelity. In pre-Islamic Arabia, people known as Rawis were often attached to poets as official memorizers. The Buddha's teachings were passed down in an unbroken chain of oral tradition for four centuries until they were committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century B.C.
B The most famous of the Western tradition's oral works, and the first to have been systematically studied, were Homer's Odyssey and Iliad. These two poems – possibly the first to have been written down in the Greek alphabet – had long been held up as literary archetypes. However, even as they were celebrated as the models to which all literature should aspire (34d), Homer's masterworks had also long been the source of scholarly unease. The earliest modern critics sensed that they were somehow qualitatively different from everything that came after – even a little strange. For one thing, both poems were oddly repetitive in the way they referred to characters (33c). Odysseus was always ’clever Odysseus’. Dawn was always ‘rosy-fingered’. Why would someone write that? Sometimes the epithets seemed completely off-key. Why call the murderer of Agamemnon ‘blameless Aegisthos’? Why refer to ‘swift-footed Achilles’ even when he was sitting down? Or to ‘laughing Aphrodite’ even when she was in tears? In terms of both structure and theme, the Odyssey and Iliad were also oddly formulaic, to the point of predictability (33c). The same narrative units – gathering armies, heroic shields, challenges between rivals – pop up again and again, only with different characters and different circumstances. In the context of such finely spun, deliberate masterpieces, these quirks seemed hard to explain.
C At the heart of the unease about these earliest works of literature were two fundamental questions: first, how could Greek literature have been born out of nothing with two masterpieces? Surely a few less perfect stories must have come before, and yet these two were among the first on record. And second, who exactly was their author? Or was it authors? There were no historical records of Homer, and no trustworthy biography of the man exists beyond a few self-referential hints embedded in the texts themselves.
D Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first modern critics to suggest that Homer might not have been an author in the contemporary sense of a single person who sat down and wrote a story and then published it for others to read. In his 1781 Essay on the Origin of Languages, the Swiss philosopher suggested that the Odyssey and Iliad might have been ‘written only in men's memories. Somewhat later they were laboriously collected in writing’ (36c) – though that was about as far as his enquiry into the matter went.
E In 1795, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf argued for the first time that not only were Homer's works not written down by Homer, but they weren't even by Homer (35b). They were, rather, a loose collection of songs transmitted by generations of Greek bards, and only redacted in their present form at some later date. In 1920, an eighteen-year-old scholar named Milman Parry took up the question of Homeric authorship as his Master's thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. He suggested that the reason Homer's epics seemed unlike other literature was because they were unlike other literature. Parry had discovered what Wood and Wolf had missed: the evidence that the poems had been transmitted orally (36c) was right there in the text itself. All those stylistic quirks, including the formulaic and recurring plot elements and the bizarrely repetitive epithets – ‘clever Odysseus’ and ‘gray-eyed Athena’ – that had always perplexed readers were actually like thumbprints left by a potter: material evidence of how the poems had been crafted. They were mnemonic aids that helped the bards fit the meter and pattern of the line, and remember the essence of the poems.
F The greatest author of antiquity was actually, Parry argued, just ‘one of a long tradition of oral poets that ... composed wholly without the aid of writing’. Parry realised that if you were setting out to create memorable poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad were exactly the kind of poems you'd create. It's said that clichés are the worst sin a writer can commit, but to an oral bard, they were essential. The very reason that clichés so easily seep into our speech and writing – their insidious memorability – is exactly why they played such an important role in oral storytelling. The principles that the oral bards discovered as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling were the same mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century. Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don't, and concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract (39) ones. Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music (40) and rhyme is a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language.