Aogashima Island, Japan.
Aogashima is an active volcano located about 220 miles south of Tokyo in the Pacific Ocean. The island has a population of about 170 people who are living inside the bigger volcano's crater, making it the smallest village in all of Japan. The volcano erupted last time in 1785, killing half of the island's population.
Two American soldiers maneuvering a bomb into its position at an ammo dump, ETO, 1944. During the war the allied forces dropped a staggering total of 3.4 million tons of bombs on the Axis. (Original color photo)
A group of Marines, after landing on the beach at Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, during a struggle to push a landing boat back into deep water after it was beached when the tide went out on November 23, 1943.
The Whistler Tree, located in Portugal’s Alentejo region, is the world’s largest and oldest cork tree. It was planted in 1783.
Cork for different uses is produced from the spongy bark of the cork oak (Quercus suber). The trees are native to the Mediterranean, and live an average of 200 years. It takes 25 years for cork oaks to reach a diameter of 70 cm (27 in), when their bark is stripped for the first time. It regenerates naturally, but next harvest does not happen before 9-18 years. The cork from the first two harvests is of poor quality and does not fit for bottle stoppers. Starting with the third harvest, more than 50 years since its planting, cork oaks produce high quality material. The bark is stripped with an ax, carefully as not to damage the tree itself, and left outdoors for 6 months to stabilize.
The Whistler tree has been harvested more than twenty times in its lifetime The 1991 harvest is the most famous, and the largest on record:
¤ 2,645.55 pounds of bark were pulled from the tree.
¤ that record haul of bark yielded well over 100,000 individual corks.
Just for comparison - if an average cork tree is harvested it will yield around 100 pounds of bark, enough corks for about 4,000 bottles.