(Bloomberg) — Standing high on top of a windswept dune in the West Texas plains, Greg Edwards stares out into a vast ocean of sand. It stretches in every direction, interrupted only by an occasional strip of asphalt or clusters of silos that rise high into the sky.

Edwards runs a frack-sand mine. And those silos mark the presence of his rivals, who suddenly seem to be popping up everywhere. As he turns 360 degrees under the blistering midday sun, he calls out their names one by one: “Badger … Atlas … High Roller … Alpine … Black Mountain … Covia.”

Twelve months ago, none of them existed — not even the mine owned by Edwards’s employer, Hi-Crush Partners. It was the first of its kind here in West Texas. Day one was July 31, 2017. Ten others immediately followed. And another 10 or so are now hustling to get started.

Together, they will mine and ship some 22 million tons of sand this year to shale drillers all around them in the Permian Basin, the hottest oil patch on Earth. It is a staggering sum of sand, equal to almost a quarter of total U.S. supply. And within a couple years, industry experts say, the figure could climb to over 50 million tons.

David Cutbirth, the long-time mayor of the nearby town of Monahans, is dumbfounded by it all. Until the miners arrived, these dunes were a quasi-barren wasteland — good only for weekend adventurers zipping around on buggies. And the price of sand was, well, zero. Today, it fetches $80 a ton, making this year’s haul alone worth about $2 billion.

“I’m in awe everyday,” Cutbirth says. “This stuff is worth something?”

There is perhaps no industry that better captures the money-multiplying effect of the Permian boom than the out-of-nowhere emergence of West Texas as a rival to the original capital of U.S. frack-sand mining in northwestern Wisconsin. With such explosive growth, of course, comes the risk of over-expansion. The local miners are unmoved by such talk — Hi-Crush CFO Laura Fulton actually laughed at the notion — but to the more dispassionate set of analysts and investors who watch the industry from afar, it is a major risk even if the oil market continues to go strong.

“The fear on Wall Street today is, ‘Oh my gosh, things look great today, but we can’t assume this is gonna last,”’ said Joseph Triepke, a former Jefferies Group analyst who now runs an industry research firm called Infill Thinking. “Look at all this capacity.”

Marble vs. Jelly Bean

This concern is clearly visible in the stock market. Shares of Hi-Crush are down more than 10 percent since mid-May. So too are those of U.S. Silica Holdings and Emerge Energy Services. And Covia Holdings, a new company formed in a merger of two sand powerhouses, has slumped 27 percent since it began trading last month.

All of these miners, with the exception of Emerge, now have operations in West Texas. And they all have quarries back in Wisconsin too. That state had quickly emerged as the epicenter of the sand market when fracking took off a decade ago. Large, rugged and round as marbles, the granules found there are ideally shaped to prop open crevices in shale rock so that the oil can seep out freely.

The West Texas sand isn’t nearly as big or as sturdy. And it’s oddly shaped too — more like a jelly bean than a marble.

So for years, it was ignored. (No one was even interested in it for use in other industries, like cement or microchips.) But then, in the summer of 2014, the price of oil plunged. Suddenly, cost-cutting was all the rage. And there was no cheaper place to pump shale oil than in the Permian.

As drillers piled into the region, they began to wonder if they really needed to have sand shipped some 1,300 miles by rail from Wisconsin when they had this inferior, but serviceable, stuff lying all around them. Shipping costs from Wisconsin come to about $90 per ton of sand. That’s triple the $25 or so it costs to truck in the Texas sand.

“The business plan is simple,” says Peter Allen, senior project manager at Black Mountain Sand. “We cut out the cost of railing it here.”

Backed by a private-equity firm named Natural Gas Partners, Black Mountain is the biggest outfit in the area. It runs two mines nestled up against a desolate strip of highway that stretches into unincorporated parts of Texas along the border with New Mexico. They’re called Vest and El Dorado. Both are just months old. And both are already cranking out sand at a pace equal to 5 million tons a year.

It takes an army of trucks to haul that much sand to well sites. And they need to get in and out of the mines efficiently. Allen’s target is eight minutes or less. An automated system that knows which sand to feed each truck speeds the process along. Still, they come in so fast that the line can back up quickly. On a recent afternoon, it was several deep. Sergio Pando, a load-out operator, says that’s nothing. On a really hectic day, it can swell to 100.

‘Gold Rush’

Like most everyone else here, Pando was lured to the sand mines by the prospect of big pay. Even unskilled newbies can pull down $19 an hour, almost triple the state’s $7.25-per-hour minimum wage. A student at Texas Tech University, Pando took off the spring semester to start working at Black Mountain. Six months into the job, he’s making $28 an hour.

“You have this flood of people and resources and capital going into this small,condensed area,” says Allen, who himself was recruited away from Rio Tinto’s U.S. mining operation. “It’s like a gold rush.”

This gold rush metaphor comes up again and again in conversations here. Or gold mine. That one is popular too. Fulton, the Hi-Crush CFO, says it’s apt for the situation because, just like the speculators of old, people are trying to snap up land now before the actual mining companies arrive.

“They’re trying to just find something, quickly flip it and make some quick cash,” Fulton says. “They really don’t have the intention of staying and working in the sand industry.”

But as Edwards, the mine manager, stood atop that sand dune later that day and took in the sight of all of those rival silos dotting the horizon, he was struck by something very different. And while he didn’t betray any concern when he said it, there’s a cautionary, almost foreboding, note to the observation: “We knew there were people talking about it. We didn’t know how many would go through with it.”

With Beyoncé’s appearance on the cover of the September issue of Vogue, the magazine highlights three facets of the superstar’s character for particular focus: “Her Life, Her Body, Her Heritage.” The words she shares are deeply personal, and that last component also offers a window into a complicated and misunderstood dynamic that affects all of American history. While opening up about her family’s long history of dysfunctional marital relationships, she hints at an antebellum relationship that defies that trend: “I researched my ancestry recently,” she stated, “and learned that I come from a slave owner who fell in love with and married a slave.”

She doesn’t elaborate on how she made the discovery or what is known about those individuals, but fans will know that Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is a native of Houston whose maternal and paternal forbears hailed from Louisiana and Alabama, respectively. Her characterization of her heritage stands out because those states, like others across the South, had stringent laws and penalties against interracial marriage. In fact, throughout the colonial and antebellum eras, interracial marriage would have been the exception — even though interracial sex was the rule.

Within the context of America’s slave society, such relations as that described by the star — and the larger system of cohabitation and concubinage, or involuntary monogamous sexual relations, in which they existed — have been the subject of much study by historians. After much debate, the consensus amongst scholars of American slavery is that sex within the master-slave relationship brings into question issues of power, agency and choice that problematize notions of love and romance even in cases where there appears to be mutual consent. As Joshua Rothman, in his book Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line In Virginia, 1787-1861, observed about history’s most famous such relationship, that between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, “Whatever reciprocal caring there may have ever been between them, fundamentally their lives together would always be founded more on a deal and a wary trust than on romance.”

Indeed. In a 2013 article in the Journal of African American History entitled “What’s Love Got to Do With It: Concubinage and Enslaved Women and Girls in the Antebellum South,” historian Brenda E. Stevenson highlighted the complexity of interracial sexual liaisons in American slave society with regard to consent. Slaveowners propositioned enslaved girls in their early teens who at that age were “naïve, vulnerable, and certainly frightened.” Promises of material gain and freedom for the enslaved woman and her family were enticements often used to gain sexual loyalties. As Stevenson observed, “Some concubinage relationships obviously developed overtime and could mimic a marriage in some significant ways such as emotional attachment; financial support; better food, clothing, and furnishings; and sometimes freedom for the woman and her children.”

Annette Gordon-Reed noted in her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family the unusual case of Mary Hemings, Sally’s oldest sister, whom Jefferson leased to local businessman Thomas Bell. Not long after Mary began working for Bell, the two developed a sexual relationship, which resulted in two children. Jefferson later, at her request, sold Mary and the children to Bell, though her four older children remained the property of Jefferson. She took Bell’s last name and remained with him until his death in 1800. “Bell and Hemings, who adopted the last name of her master/lover,” Gordon-Reed wrote, “lived as husband and wife for the rest of Bell’s life.”

In most cases, however, young girls were forced into concubinage, not marriage.

That more common story is told by the historian Tiya Miles in her book The Ties that Bind: the Story of a Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. Shoe Boots was a Cherokee warrior who had married, according to Cherokee custom, a young white female who was captured during an Indian raid in Kentucky in 1792. Also during this time Shoe Boots purchased a young enslaved girl named Doll in South Carolina; she was placed under the supervision of his white wife as a domestic servant. When his wife and children abandoned him after an arranged family visit to Kentucky in 1804, Shoe Boots took 16-year-old Doll as his concubine. In a letter he dictated to the Cherokee Council two decades later, Shoe Boots described what happened as “I debased myself and took one of my black women” in response to being upset at losing his white wife. One can only imagine the years of physical and psychological trauma Doll endured to console her master’s grief.

And, while much attention has focused on sexual relations between slaveowners and enslaved women, enslaved men could also be coerced or sexually exploited.

In her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs told the chilling story of a male slave named Luke who was kept chained at his bedridden master’s bedside so that he would be constantly available to tend to his physical needs, which included sexual favors. In veiled language so as not to offend the sensibilities of 19th-century polite society, Jacobs reported that most days Luke was only allowed to wear a shirt so that he could be easily flogged if he committed an infraction such as resisting his master’s sexual advances. And in a 2011 Journal of the History of Sexuality article, the scholar Thomas Foster contended that enslaved black men regularly were sexually exploited by both white men and white women, which “took a variety of forms, including outright physical penetrative assault, forced reproduction, sexual coercion and manipulation, and psychic abuse.” In one example provided by Foster, a man named Lewis Bourne filed for divorce in 1824 due to his wife’s longtime sexual liaison and continued pursuit of a male slave named Edmond from their community. Foster contended that such pursuits “could enable white women to enact radical fantasies of domination over white men” while at the same time subjecting the black enslaved male to her control.

Foster also contended that such pursuits were not uncommon, as demonstrated by testimonies from The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission established by the secretary of war in 1863, which took depositions from abolitionists and slaves regarding the realities of slave life. Such depositions included stories of sexual liaisons between enslaved men and their mistresses. Abolitionist Robert Hinton stated, “I have never found yet a bright looking colored man who has not told me of instances where he has been compelled, either by his mistress, or by white women of the same class, to have connection with them.” Foster further concurs with scholars who argue that rape can serve as a metaphor for both enslaved women and men as, “The vulnerability of all enslaved black persons to nearly every conceivable violation produced a collective ‘rape’ subjectivity.”

For certain, interracial sexual liaisons between the slave-owning class and the enslaved is a well-established reality of American history. But caution must be used when describing relationships that appear consensual using the language of love and romance. We cannot know what was in the hearts of Beyoncé’s ancestors, or any person who does not leave a record of their emotions, but we can know about the society in which they lived. Complex dynamics of power are at work when we talk about sex within slavery, and the enslaved negotiated those forces on a daily basis in order to survive.

Historians explain how the past informs the present

Arica L. Coleman is a scholar of U.S. history and the author of That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia and a former chair of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories at the Organization of American Historians.

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It’s the rare person who can call advanced astrophysics and deep space exploration a side hustle. That’s especially so when that person’s main job has been playing lead guitar for one of rock’s most legendary bands. But rare people do exist, and Brian May—that’s Dr. Brian May to you—is one of them. May is best know as part of the foursome that was Queen—whose story is being told in the recently released biopic Bohemian Rhapsody—and as the composer of multiple Queen hits, including “We Will Rock You.”

As the movie reveals, however, May was studying astrophysics at Imperial College in London before detouring into music. A scant 33 years later, he returned to the classroom and completed his doctoral thesis. In that capacity, he became part of the NASA team responsible for New Horizons, the spacecraft that in 2015 reconnoitered Pluto and then, this just past New Year’s Eve, flew by Ultima Thule, a 22-mile long bowling pin-shaped object 4 billion miles from Earth—more distant than any object a human spacecraft has ever explored.

May’s formal part of the mission involves data analysis and stereoscopic imagery. His less formal—but equally compelling—part involved composing a song, straightforwardly called New Horizons, that captures the thrill and the lure of distant exploration. With the spacecraft’s flyby having been successfully completed, May spoke to TIME about his dual careers in such different fields.

TIME: Today’s a busy day for you; it’s not often you send a spacecraft 4 billion miles away. How did you connect with the New Horizons team in the first place?

Brian May: I was introduced to [Project Scientist] Alan [Stern] through friends somewhere in the beginning of 2015. And he invited me to come over and be present at the flyby of Pluto. So I was able to be there and put the first two images together to make the first stereo portrait of Pluto up close. That was a big thrill for me. Then he called me about 6 months ago and said, “is there any chance you can make music for the new flyby?” And I kind of very nervously said “okay, let me think about it.” There’s not a lot of things that rhyme with Ultima Thule. But I went away and thought about it. And what hit me was how inspiring the whole project was from the point of view of the human spirit of adventure. So that’s really what I wrote this song about, as a tribute to the New Horizons team.

TIME: What was it that took you away from astrophysics in the first place—and what brought you back?

May: When I was about to finish my thesis it was just the beginnings of Queen and I had to make that choice. And my choice was made on the assumption that I wasn’t very good at physics and I might be quite good at music. The thesis I had been working on was on zodiacal dust—the dust clouds in the solar system. When I began, it was a hot topic, but in that 30 years it kind of lapsed. What happened very luckily for me, however, people began discovering dust clouds around other suns, in other solar systems. And suddenly my subject became very in-demand again. I started talking about astronomy again to people who said, “why don’t you still do it?” I put everything, and I mean everything, on hold for a year. And they put me in a little office in Imperial College and I got down to it.

TIME: What was it like going from a band of four to a team of more than 100, especially as something of newcomer?

May: I get to hang out with real astronomers, which is great, but I still have that kind of, what do they call it, impostor syndrome. I’m in this plenary meeting with all the New Horizons people, these teams coming together and I keep thinking to myself, “should I really be here? Am I really worthy of being with these guys?” So the music helps. Now I have a reason I can hold my head up and say I played a part in this.

TIME: And yet music and physics aren’t that far apart, are they? Isn’t there an internal order, a mathematics to both of them?

May: You know more and more I find they’re very interlinked. And almost all the people that I’m sitting here with in Maryland, the top level astronomers and navigators and engineers, they all have a similar kind of interest in music. And many of them are musicians. You go back to 1851 Prince Albert’s Exhibition, The Crystal Palace in Kensington Gardens, you know that was The Exhibition of the Works of Man. They didn’t see a distinction between art and science. Someone here was just telling me that when he’s hiring his students he looks for scientists who have music in them because they make the best observers.

TIME: Your legacy was already going to be about music, and now it will include science too. How do you think those two will be weighed over time?

May: I guess We Will Rock You will be on my tombstone, that’s probably unavoidable. Or else Who Wants to Live Forever? I don’t know. The music is my center and I think music is what gave me the gift of everything else. If I hadn’t kind of been able to interact at the top level as a musician then I never would have met the likes of people like Alan Stern. These people are the very pinnacle of their game and they talk to me because they know me because of the music.

TIME: The two Voyager spacecraft carry a sampling of Earthly music along with them, including Bach, Mozart and Chuck Berry. If you could include one more song that isn’t one of yours and one more song that is, what would they be?

May: I would send Imagine, John Lennon’s Imagine. And of my own stuff I would send the new song, New Horizons. It actually did get beamed out to 4 billion miles away, which made me very proud. It’s probably the furthest that music has been consciously sent from this planet.

The eighth amendment to Ireland’s constitution, which faces repeal in a national referendum on May 25, gives a mother and her unborn child an “equal right to life” and prevents any relaxation of the country’s near-total ban on abortion. This means that Ireland’s law on abortion is among the strictest in Europe and the world, though it does make some allowances for “risk of loss of life of pregnant woman.”

Though Friday’s contentious referendum could be a major milestone in the history of abortion in Ireland, this is far from the first time the majority-Catholic country has confronted the issue. The last 40 years have seen many twists and turns in both public attitudes and the law.

Here are the key moments to know:

1983: The Eighth Amendment Referendum

While deliberately terminating a pregnancy has been a criminal offense in Ireland since 1861, the modern debate can be traced back to the 1970s, a time when regulations about abortion were changing in many places.

The U.K. had legalized abortion up to 28 weeks in 1967, and the U.S. Supreme Court had essentially legalized abortion in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. Alarmed by the trend, conservative politicians and the Catholic Church wanted to preempt any attempt to loosen the Irish ban. They launched an active campaign to introduce a constitutional amendment to that purpose, which culminated in a referendum in 1983. At that time, about 67% voted in favor of the eighth amendment — the very amendment up for repeal this week. “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn,” the amendment reads, “and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

1992: The X Case

Some groups continued to protest the ban in the years following the referendum, but it was not until 1992’s X Case that the abortion issue exploded back into the spotlight. A 14-year-old girl, known in the media only as X, was raped and, realizing she was pregnant, decided to travel to the U.K. to have an abortion. Her family told police about the plan, to find out if they could do a DNA test after the abortion to prove the paternity of the girl’s rapist. Instead, Ireland’s Attorney General blocked her from traveling abroad via an injunction. The girl became suicidal and her case quickly made it to the country’s Supreme Court, which lifted the injunction and ruled that abortions could take place where there was a real risk to the life of the mother, including from suicide.

Since then, several attempts to remove suicide as grounds for abortion – including a referendum in 2002 – have failed. But the Supreme Court’s ruling did not make it into legislation for another 20 years.

The X case did lead to some change, though. Two referendums in November 1992 made it legal to travel abroad to seek abortions and to share information about foreign abortion services within Ireland. Some 170,000 women are estimated to have traveled out of Ireland for an abortion since 1980.

2012: Savita Praveen Halappanavar

The death of Savita Praveen Halappanavar in October 2012 once again brought global media attention to the country’s strict laws on abortion.

Halappanavar, 31, was admitted to a hospital in Galway while having a miscarriage. She repeatedly asked staff to terminate her pregnancy but they refused, telling her that Ireland was “a Catholic country.” She died at the hospital, from severe sepsis, five days after she had started miscarrying. The case angered many who had previously been apathetic about abortion law and reinvigorated the abortion-rights movement in Ireland.

2013: Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act

The attention surrounding the Halappanavar case, as well as a 2010 ruling by the European Court of Human rights that Ireland was violating Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to enact the ruling from the 1992 X Case, spurred legislators to act. In 2013, they introduced the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, allowing abortions in circumstances where there was a risk to the life of the mother.

Since then, the United Nations Human Rights Commission has criticized Ireland’s abortion laws as “cruel and inhumane.” Prime Minister Leo Varadkar announced the referendum on repealing the eighth amendment a few months after entering office in 2017.

Polls suggest the result will be close. If the eighth amendment is repealed, Varadkar’s government will likely legalize abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.

In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg published Wednesday, the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim urged the Facebook CEO to remove harassment and conspiracy theories from the platform, accusing him of “providing a safe haven for hate.”

Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa — whose 6-year-old son Noah was killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012 — published the letter in The Guardian.

“Our son Noah no longer has a voice, nor will he ever get to live out his life. His absence is felt every day,” they wrote. “But we are unable to properly grieve for our baby or move on with our lives because you, arguably the most powerful man on the planet, have deemed that the attacks on us are immaterial, that providing assistance in removing threats is too cumbersome, and that our lives are less important than providing a safe haven for hate.”

The letter details the family’s experience facing harassment and death threats from conspiracy theorists who deny that the Sandy Hook shooting ever happened and who have dismissed the victims and their families as “crisis actors.”

“These claims and calls to action spread across Facebook like wildfire and, despite our pleas, were protected by Facebook,” the parents wrote.

The letter referenced Zuckerberg’s comments in an interview last week in which he defended the company’s decision not to remove sites that spread conspiracy theories — including Holocaust and Sandy Hook denials — from the platform because it is committed to “giving people a voice.” Zuckerberg later said he did not intend to defend Holocaust deniers.

“Facebook plays a mammoth role in exposing the world’s masses to information,” Pozner and De La Rosa wrote. “That level of power comes with the tremendous responsibility of ensuring that your platform is not used to harm others or contribute to the proliferation of hate. Yet it appears that under the guise of free speech, you are prepared to give license to people who make it their purpose to do just that.”

Read the full letter here.

This story originally appeared in the TIME special edition Beautiful Phenomena available now at retail outlets and through the TIME shop and through Amazon

The moon was not placed in space for our entertainment. In fact, it was placed there by accident, most astronomers believe, as the product of a nearly mortal blow the Earth sustained more than 4 billion years ago, when our planet was sideswiped by a Mars-size planetesimal speeding through local space. That collision produced a massive debris cloud that eventually coalesced into our moon. The sun didn’t pop into being for our enjoyment either; it spun down out of a cloud of primordial dust and gas, just as Earth itself did. Not much glamour or drama in all of that.

Yet now and then, the debris ball that is the moon passes in front of the dust ball that is the sun and produces the glorious phenomenon we know as a solar eclipse. Even for scientists, there can be a temptation to see the eclipse as something intended to thrill, a sky show put on for the only species in the solar system able to appreciate it.

Consider that the sun is about 400 times the diameter of the moon, which would make it awfully hard for the lunar disk to fit so perfectly over the solar one—except that the sun is also about 400 times more distant, meaning that the two bodies appear to be the same size in the earthly sky. Consider the way the moon’s ragged mountains, which are impossible to see from as far away as Earth, form a sawtooth pattern at the lunar edges through which the last of the sun’s light streams in the moments before a total eclipse is complete, creating the brilliant burst of light astronomers call the diamond ring effect.

And consider too the rarity of the eclipse. At some point on the planet a total solar eclipse will occur every 18 months, but at any particular spot—the spot where you live, say—it will happen just once every 350 years or so. When an eclipse does occur, totality never exceeds a mere seven minutes, 30 seconds—and it’s usually much shorter. Then the show’s over for another three and a half centuries. Frequency cheapens the currency of any spectacle; by that measure, a total solar eclipse is priceless.

Even to modern humans, long since past the fear that the disappearance of the sun in the middle of the day is a curse or a blight or the work of a winged dragon eating the solar fires to replenish its own, there is something deeply unsettling about the sight of an eclipse. The sky darkens, which it does every day, but to a shade of blue and then black and blue that occurs at no other time. The dimming of the light means a cooling of temperatures, and a portentous lick of wind may come up as the eclipse reaches totality. Crickets and night birds, knowing light and dark far better than they know fear or superstition, begin to chirp and sing at the wrong time of day.

The sense that all of this is off, all of this is wrong, is something that our rational brains, which are still operating on neurological software that was written when we humans were on the savannas, can’t shake. There is a reason the Lydians and the Medes ended their war in 585 B.C., when a total eclipse darkened the sky and convinced the combatants that it was a sign of disapproval over the ongoing fighting. There is a reason the English saw an unhappy cause and effect between the eclipse of Aug. 2, 1133, and the death of King Henry I, even though Henry died more than two years later. That the loss of a king could be foretold by the loss of the very light in the sky made a certain kind of 12th century sense.

Eclipse Equations

For all of that, though—for all of the loveliness and spookiness and historical impact of a solar eclipse—there is a cold, reductionist science behind it. The moon’s brief passage between the Earth and the sun is simply the inevitable result of the wheels-within-wheels design of our solar system. The brevity of the phenomenon derives from the fact that the wheel on which the moon rides circles the Earth at a zippy 2,288 miles per hour. No sooner has the moon approached and obscured the sun than it is gliding on past it.

Of course, if the moon circles the Earth once every 27.32 days, an eclipse ought to occur on that same near-monthly schedule too. But the celestial mechanics are more complicated than that. The moon’s orbital plane is inclined relative to the Earth’s equator by anywhere from 18.28 to 28.58 degrees, meaning that some of the times it crosses the path of the sun, it actually appears to sail above it, while at other times it crosses below it. It is only when the moon passes the sun at the same time it crosses the Earth’s own orbital plane that an eclipse occurs.

Even when the alignment is correct and the planes intersect, the eclipse that occurs may not be total. That’s because the moon’s orbit around the Earth is an ellipse, not a circle. The moon’s average distance is almost 239,000 miles, but its perigee, or closest approach to Earth, is about 225,000 miles, and its apogee is about 252,000. A moon at apogee appears smaller than a moon at perigee, and if an eclipse takes place during one of those high-flying periods, the 400-400 balance between the size of the sun and moon and the distance separating them is thrown off. That results in what’s known as an annular eclipse—with the moon gliding in front of the sun but never completely obscuring it, permitting a lot of solar glare that spoils the effect. As many as 73% of the moon’s transits of the sun occur when the moon is too distant from Earth to allow a true total eclipse to occur.

If everything does line up perfectly—if a total solar eclipse is going to make landfall—it’s best to arrive at wherever it will be visible as early as you can, because seating will be limited. An astronaut in orbit looking down on Earth during a total eclipse would see the entire event as nothing more than a circular shadow on the ground, measuring from 70 to 155 miles across, cruising from west to east at high speed. To see the phenomenon, you have to be within that footprint as it passes by. A total eclipse that crosses the continental U.S. makes the entire coast-to-coast transit in just an hour and 32 minutes. The partial eclipse that precedes it and follows it adds more viewing time overall, but the best portion of the experience is short-lived.

Privileged Glimpses

Still, a lot can happen in those brief intervals. During the total eclipse of Aug. 18, 1868, French astronomer Jules Janssen studied the prominences—the flames and flares that dance around the edges of the sun’s blacked-out disk. Looking through a spectroscopic prism, he saw the signature of helium, thus discovering the second-lightest element in the universe before it had been found on Earth.

Much more significantly, on May 29, 1919, British astronomer Arthur Eddington used a total eclipse to prove one of the premises of Einstein’s general theory of relativity—that gravity will bend light by a specific, predictable amount. Months before the event, Eddington measured the precise position of the Hyades star cluster. Then, on May 29, when the sun was blacked out and the stars popped into view, he measured it again—and it was different by a factor perfectly consistent with the bending Einstein had predicted in his famed 1915 theory.

“REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE. New Theory of the Universe: Newtonian Ideas Overthrown,” wrote the Times of London, breathlessly but mostly accurately, the morning after the discovery was announced. Newton did survive—but his work was forever altered by a later scientist who saw much farther, much deeper into the universe.

That, in some ways, illustrates one more gift of the solar eclipse: that it allows for two different kinds of vision—the aesthetic and the insightful, the glimpse of beauty and the glimpse of the workings of the cosmos itself.

Part of the terror and charm of eclipses used to be that they came utterly unexpectedly. “On the day of the new moon, in the month of Hiyar, the Sun was put to shame and went down in the daytime, with Mars in attendance,” wrote a surely surprised observer in a Mesopotamian account of the eclipse of May 3, 1374 B.C. Now, however, our ability to reverse-engineer the turning of the cosmic wheels means we can pinpoint the precise date of past eclipses, and it also means we can run the wheels forward and predict all of the ones that are still to come.

There is a loss in that—in the elimination of some of the wonder at the universe’s seeming caprice. But there’s a great gain too: an eclipse we know is coming is an eclipse we can be ready to watch. And to watch it is to be changed forever—and for better.

This story originally appeared in the TIME special edition Beautiful Phenomena available now at retail outlets and through the TIME shop and through Amazon

John O’Neill fulfilled his boyhood dream as he marshaled an 800-man army to the war front in the final hours of May 1866. The Celtic blood of the Irish-born soldiers coursed just a little quicker as they embarked on an expedition they hoped would ultimately result in the eviction of the British from their homeland after 700 years of foreign occupation. “The governing passion of my life apart from my duty to my God is to be at the head of an Irish Army battling against England for Ireland’s rights,” O’Neill declared. “For this I live, and for this if necessary I am willing to die.”

What’s remarkable is that O’Neill’s men did not march off to battle over the sod of Ireland, but through the cobbled streets of Buffalo, N.Y.

The Irish-American army boarded barges and crossed the Niagara River to undertake one of the most outlandish missions in military history — to kidnap the British colony of Canada, hold it hostage and ransom it for Ireland’s independence. In fact, the self-proclaimed Irish Republican Army attacked Canada not just once, but five times between 1866 and 1871 in what are collectively known as the Fenian Raids.

This little-known coda to the Civil War was one more spasm of violence — in addition to the 1863 draft riots and the 1870 and 1871 Orange Riots between Irish Catholics and Protestants that killed scores of New Yorkers — indicative of the difficulty that confronted the Irish in assimilating into American culture. It took more than a generation — decades, in fact — for the Irish Catholic refugees who arrived in the United States after the Great Hunger struck Ireland in 1845 to blend into the American melting pot.

In the centuries that followed the 1171 invasion by King Henry II’s English forces, Ireland’s colonial rulers had attempted to extinguish the island’s religion, culture and language. When the potato crop failed in the 1840s and 1850s, causing one million people to die, some Irish were convinced that the British were trying to exterminate them as well. One million people fled the island to North America in one of the largest migrations in human history. Disease and death tore through the holds of the aptly nicknamed “coffin ships” that bore them across the Atlantic. Some emigrants reported that death was so common on the ocean passage that sharks stalked their ships, awaiting their next meals as corpses were tossed overboard.

Those who flooded the United States in unprecedented numbers after the Great Hunger were unlike any newcomers the country had seen before. They were not immigrants in search of political or religious freedom, but refugees fleeing a humanitarian disaster. They hungered for food, not the American dream. They practiced an alien religion, Catholicism, and an estimated 25% spoke Irish instead of English. They were desperately poor and sickly, uneducated and unskilled.

Upon their arrival, the Irish faced the blistering scorn of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant “Know-Nothings.” The more threatened the Irish felt, the more they turned inward, like a snake coiling itself for protection. They had been able to survive seven centuries of British colonization by refusing to be acculturated, so why should they behave any differently in the United States?

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The Irish clung together in church parishes and organizations such as the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish republican organization founded in 1858, that used the United States as a safe haven to plot a revolution in Ireland. While the Fenians could have simply devoted money to the cause of Ireland’s liberation, some like John O’Neill arrived in America so “radicalized” by their experiences that they instead offered their blood.

Like many of the Irish who fled to the United States, O’Neill witnessed unspeakable horrors during the Great Hunger before coming to America as a teenager. He spent his childhood at his grandfather’s knee listening to the heroic tales of 17th-century ancestors who had the bravery to stand up and fight their occupiers rather than assimilate into their culture. He joined tens of thousands of Irishmen who fought on both sides of the Civil War and saw their service in the bloody crucibles of Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg as training for the real fight they wanted to wage — one to liberate Ireland.

Drawn by a plan to strike the British Empire at its closest point, Canada, rather than an ocean away, O’Neill joined the Fenian Brotherhood, which established its own Irish government in exile and had its own constitution, senate, president and capitol building, dubbed the “Fenian White House,” in the heart of New York City’s Union Square.

Even after living nearly 20 years in the United States and taking a Confederate bullet in defense of the Union during the Civil War, O’Neill considered himself an Irish-American in that order — Irish first, American second. With his soul permanently scorched with hatred of the British, the 32-year-old O’Neill led the Irish Republican Army across the international border south of Niagara Falls and announced their claim to Canada by hoisting an Irish flag to replace the Union Jack flying over historic Fort Erie. Using surplus weapons and ammunition that had been purchased from the U.S. government and smuggled into Buffalo, O’Neill’s men emerged victorious at the Battle of Ridgeway. It marked the first triumph by an Irish army over forces of the British Empire since 1745.

With his supply lines cut by the American government, O’Neill was forced to retreat back to the United States, but not before vowing to return to Canada soon. He would prove to be a man of his word. However, O’Neill’s subsequent attacks in 1870 and 1871 failed.

Still, he refused to heed the call of those urging Irish-Americans to break out of their insularity and integrate into American culture. Instead, he sought to remove his brethren altogether to isolated colonies on the Great Plains. “We could build up a young Ireland on the virgin prairies of Nebraska and there rear a monument more lasting than granite or marble to the Irish race in America,” wrote O’Neill, who died at the age of 43 after transplanting several colonies in Nebraska. He was buried under the prairie sod — 4,000 miles from his beloved homeland — underneath a marker with the inscription: “God Save Ireland.”

Christopher Klein is the author of When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom, available from Doubleday. More at www.christopherklein.com.

(Bloomberg) — A ship carrying U.S. soybeans is steaming toward northern China in a race to beat a 25 percent tariff.

Peak Pegasus is expected to arrive in Dalian on Friday, the same day that China is scheduled to impose tariffs on imports from the U.S., according to shipping data compiled by Bloomberg and a person familiar with the matter. If it arrives as scheduled, it should be able to clear customs before the tariffs are imposed, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak to the media. Ship-tracking data currently shows it arriving at about 5 p.m. local time.

China plans to impose tariffs on $34 billion of American imports — including soybeans — from July 6 in retaliation against a raft of duties set to be imposed by the U.S. on the same day. Neither country specified a time when they announced the tariffs and China has said it won’t impose the taxes before the U.S. Beijing is 12 hours ahead of Washington.

Soybeans have been a key battleground in escalating trade tensions between the two countries as China is the world’s biggest importer and America’s largest customer in trade worth $14 billion last year. The Asian country is expected to cancel or re-sell U.S. soybeans due to the additional duties and purchased 19 cargoes from Brazil last week. China typically imports from Brazil at this time of year before switching to the U.S., spurring concerns about a deficit in the fourth quarter.

Soybeans on the Chicago Board of Trade tumbled 14 percent last month due to the escalating trade tensions. The oilseed, the most exposed of all assets to a trade war, is now a buy, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. In China, soybean meal futures rose 4 percent on concerns about a possible shortage looming. China imports soybeans to process into soybean meal for its livestock industry.

As dawn washes over Bondi Beach, you can see the surfers beyond the break, gently rising and falling on their boards. They gather like this when the surf forecast tells them a big swell is rolling in, carrying energy from a ferocious Antarctic storm thousands of kilometres away.

From Bondi to Bundoran, Pipeline to Mavericks, surfers around the world depend on the surf forecast to catch the perfect wave. Its inventor, Walter Munk, is 100 today – yet few surfers know his name, despite the debt of gratitude they owe him.

Walter Munk: the father of surf forecasting.Holger Motzkau/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

‘Einstein of the ocean’

Munk might be under-appreciated in surfing circles, but he’s a big deal in ocean science. He has been described as the “greatest living oceanographer” and the “Einstein of the ocean”.

His list of accolades is astounding. There is a unit of measurement named after him: the “Munk unit”. There’s a species of ray called Mobula munkiana. There’s even a Walter Munk Award for outstanding contributions to oceanography, which of course he has won.

Munk has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of ocean circulation, geology and climate change. But perhaps his most influential work is the science of wave prediction, which he developed while still a doctoral student in California.

Wartime expertise

After graduating from Caltech in 1938, Munk began a PhD with renowned Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup in the sleepy seaside town of La Jolla. Distressed by Germany’s annexation of his native Austria, Munk became a US citizen and joined the war effort, first as an army private and later with the US Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory.

While observing Allied troops training for an amphibious invasion of Northwest Africa, Munk noticed that waves were pummelling the landing craft as they approached the beach. He immediately called Sverdrup, and together they developed techniques for predicting ocean waves and surf conditions for amphibious warfare.

Their methods were so successful that the Allied forces used these to predict wave conditions for the D-Day landings at Normandy. Based on those predictions, General Eisenhower delayed the operation, the largest naval invasion in history, until June 6, 1944. Undoubtedly, Munk’s research saved thousands of Allied lives and helped bring about the end of World War II.

Waves across the Pacific

Thus began a lifelong fascination with ocean waves. In 1963 Munk, then a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, led a team of scientist studying how swells generated by Antarctic storms travel more than 16,000km across the Pacific Ocean.

The team set up stations to measure the waves as they travelled in a great circle from New Zealand to Alaska. Munk and his family spent more than a month in American Samoa for the experiment, monitoring pressure sensors mounted on the ocean floor and recording data on paper tape punched with holes.

The experiment yielded a surprising discovery. The waves showed very little decay in energy on their journey across the Pacific. The biggest change was a shift in the observed period of the wave – that is, the time between passing crests. Munk’s team found that the period increased as the waves moved northwards.

This happens because ocean waves are dispersive, meaning that the speed of the wave depends on the period. Long-period waves move more rapidly, so they run to the front of the pack, while shorter-period waves lag behind. The phenomenon is well known to surfers, who experience this dispersive ordering as a gradual shortening of the time between sets of waves.

Order from ‘lovely confusion’

In a 1967 documentary that Munk made with his wife Judith about the experiment in the Pacific, he describes how an orderly ocean swell can emerge from the chaos of an Antarctic storm. Using the analogy of tossing a handful of pebbles into a pond, Munk describes how the water surface is initially broken up in “lovely confusion”. But eventually a steady procession of ripples can be seen spreading outwards from the point of impact – regular and predictable.

Munk’s Pacific documentary.

Munk’s pioneering work on ocean swells, together with his wartime research on wave prediction, gave birth to the science of surf forecasting. In 2007 his contribution to surfing was formally recognised by the Groundswell Society, a surfing advocacy group. Munk later recalled:

After more than eight decades of ocean science, Munk shows no signs of slowing down. He is still hard at work, researching and speaking at international conferences. As the worldwide oceanographic community prepares to celebrate his centenary, Munk’s enthusiasm for discovery has not dimmed.

In an interview this month, Munk revealed what keeps him going. “More enthusiasm than knowledge. That’s been the key of my career — to get excited before I understand it.”

Hang loose, Walter.

This article originally appeared on TheConversation.com

This post is in partnership with History Today. The article below was originally published at History Today.

In popular culture and public memory, the full reach of the campaign that led to the Representation of the People Act in 1918 is not often remembered as the backbone to the success of the women’s suffrage movement. The concept of a united national campaign for women’s suffrage, spreading as far as the Northern Isles, is in danger of being lost.

The locations of the two new statues of Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Garrett Fawcett — in Manchester and London respectively — are telling. There is no doubting the significance of these two cities to the history of women’s suffrage, but each part of the United Kingdom and Ireland had prominent and active ties to the campaign that worked in unity. This was acknowledged by the leaders as they traveled around the nation on rallies and demonstrations, promoting their cause and rallying campaigners. The 1913 Suffrage Annual and Women’s Who’s Who reveals a wealth of societies in every corner of every county of every country, demonstrating how popular the campaign was.

Leading suffrage campaigners invested in these local branches, understanding their importance to the campaign in their areas. In her 2006 book Rebel Girls, Jill Liddington documents the tour undertaken by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) across the Yorkshire countryside and smaller market towns, such as Huddersfield, and shows how these locations were given much attention by the WSPU. Emmeline Pankhurst herself opened the branch at a meeting in St. George’s Square, Huddersfield, which played an important role, as Liddington discovered, for the WSPU: the secretary and founder of the branch, Edith Key, used her house as a safe house for those escaping the Cat and Mouse Act, including Adela Pankhurst, daughter of Emmeline.

One of the most fascinating examples of how far the movement reached can be found at Shetland Museum and Archives. A minute book documented the activity of the Shetland Women’s Suffrage Society (SWSS) from 1909 to 1919. The society was formed in the house of Christina Jamieson, who went on to become secretary in Lerwick, the islands’ capital. The SWSS was affiliated to the NUWSS and devoted its time to addressing public meetings, handing out leaflets and contributing to the local press in support of suffrage. The lack of militant activity proved to work in the favor of Shetland’s suffragists. Shetland was generally supportive of women’s suffrage and seemed to respect the quiet yet efficient actions of the Society. In 1912 a male reader wrote to the Shetland News: “The local suffragists have been doing a lot of quiet, but very effective work … they have in many unobtrusive ways brought their views before others and have succeeded in securing many supporters.” They would continue to reject militancy for the length of their campaign.

The minute book offers insight into the mass of activity the group undertook. This includes public meetings and demonstrations, sending members to London to represent the society and producing a wealth of letters and articles to the Shetland Times and to the MP at the time, the Liberal Cathcart Watson.

The SWSS had a small audience and was small in numbers, but it still made an impact on the national campaign. In 1911, the Shetland Times featured an article written by Jamieson, reporting on the activity of the society and the impact the vote would have on the local women of Shetland. She wrote:

The SWSS highlighted the reason these regional societies were so important to the wider national campaign, whatever society they were affiliated to. Gaining the vote did not have the same meaning for every campaigner, every franchise or even every branch. What Jamieson demonstrates here is something that we rarely see: the diversity in the need to vote and the idea that not every society was voting merely for the sense of equality, but to change their lives and improve the lives of those around them. For the seamen’s wives, this meant voting in lieu of their husbands; being able to change their quality of life without reliance on their husbands, fathers or brothers.

The campaign is often tied to Britain’s big cities and to big names. But if suffrage had not flourished in every corner of the United Kingdom and if efforts had not been made to engage members in not only Ireland, Scotland and Wales but in more remote parts of England, too, the campaigns carried out by the different societies would not have succeeded as they did.

The cities have been the focus of this year’s commemorations, but we must also look to regional museums and archives and investigate the names of the women who may not have been arrested, or have stood on a platform with a Pankhurst. They, too, are part of the campaign’s success.

Helen Antrobus is programme officer at the People’s History Museum, Manchester.