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RE: The Australian town where people live underground
On the long road towards central Australia, as you travel 848km (527 miles) north from Adelaide's coastal plains, is a scattering of enigmatic sand-pyramids. Around them, the landscape is utterly desolate – an endless expanse of salmon-pink dust, with the occasional determined shrub. But as you venture further along the highway, more of these mystery constructions emerge – piles of pale earth, haphazardly scattered like long-forgotten monuments. Every now and then, there is a white pipe sticking up from the ground next to one. These are the first signs of Coober Pedy, an opal mining town with a population of around 2,500 people. Many of its little peaks are the waste soil from decades of mining, but they are also evidence of another local specialty – underground living. In this corner of the world, 60% of the population inhabits homes built into the iron-rich sandstone and siltstone rock. In some neighbourhoods, the only signs of habitation are ventilation shafts sticking up, and the excess soil that has been dumped near entrances. In the winter, this troglodyte lifestyle may seem merely eccentric. But on a summer's day, Coober Pedy – loosely translated from an indigenous Australian term that means "white man in a hole" – needs no explanation: it regularly hits 52C (126F), so hot that birds have been known to fall from the sky and electronics must be stored in fridges. This year, the strategy seems more prescient than ever. In July, the city of Chongquing, in southwest China, resorted to opening up air raid shelters built during WW2 – amid large-scale bombing from Japan – to shelter citizens from a very different threat: a 10-day streak of weather above 35C (95F). Others have been retreating to underground "cave hotpot" restaurants, which are popular in the city. As the blistering three-month heatwave continues in the US – with temperatures even cacti can't handle – and wildfires incinerate swathes of southern Europe, what could we learn from Coober Pedy's residents? A long history Coober Pedy is not the world's first, or even its largest, subterranean settlement. People have been retreating underground to cope with challenging climates for thousands of years, from the human ancestors who dropped their tools in a South African cave two million years ago, to the Neanderthals who created inexplicable piles of stalagmites in a French grotto during an ice age 176,000 years ago. Even chimpanzees have been observed cooling down in caverns, to help them cope with the extreme daytime heat in southeastern Senegal.
On the long road towards central Australia, as you travel 848km (527 miles) north from Adelaide's coastal plains, is a scattering of enigmatic sand-pyramids. Around them, the landscape is utterly desolate – an endless expanse of salmon-pink dust, with the occasional determined shrub. But as you venture further along the highway, more of these mystery constructions emerge – piles of pale earth, haphazardly scattered like long-forgotten monuments. Every now and then, there is a white pipe sticking up from the ground next to one. These are the first signs of Coober Pedy, an opal mining town with a population of around 2,500 people. Many of its little peaks are the waste soil from decades of mining, but they are also evidence of another local specialty – underground living. In this corner of the world, 60% of the population inhabits homes built into the iron-rich sandstone and siltstone rock. In some neighbourhoods, the only signs of habitation are ventilation shafts sticking up, and the excess soil that has been dumped near entrances. In the winter, this troglodyte lifestyle may seem merely eccentric. But on a summer's day, Coober Pedy – loosely translated from an indigenous Australian term that means "white man in a hole" – needs no explanation: it regularly hits 52C (126F), so hot that birds have been known to fall from the sky and electronics must be stored in fridges. This year, the strategy seems more prescient than ever. In July, the city of Chongquing, in southwest China, resorted to opening up air raid shelters built during WW2 – amid large-scale bombing from Japan – to shelter citizens from a very different threat: a 10-day streak of weather above 35C (95F). Others have been retreating to underground "cave hotpot" restaurants, which are popular in the city. As the blistering three-month heatwave continues in the US – with temperatures even cacti can't handle – and wildfires incinerate swathes of southern Europe, what could we learn from Coober Pedy's residents? A long history Coober Pedy is not the world's first, or even its largest, subterranean settlement. People have been retreating underground to cope with challenging climates for thousands of years, from the human ancestors who dropped their tools in a South African cave two million years ago, to the Neanderthals who created inexplicable piles of stalagmites in a French grotto during an ice age 176,000 years ago. Even chimpanzees have been observed cooling down in caverns, to help them cope with the extreme daytime heat in southeastern Senegal.
