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Summit of Mount Berlin

Mount Berlin is a glacier-covered volcano in Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica. It is a roughly 20-kilometre-wide (12 mi) mountain with parasitic vents. It consists of two coalesced volcanoes: Berlin proper with the 2-kilometre-wide (1.2 mi) Berlin Crater, and Merrem Peak 3.5 kilometres (2.2 mi) away with a 2.5-by-1-kilometre-wide (1.6 mi × 0.6 mi) crater. Mount Berlin has a volume of 200 cubic kilometres (50 cu mi) and rises 3,478 metres (11,411 ft) above sea level from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is part of the Marie Byrd Land Volcanic Province. Trachyte is the dominant volcanic rock, occurring as solidified lava flows and pyroclastic rocks. The volcano was active from the Pliocene into the Holocene. Tephra layers from all over Antarctica have been linked to Mount Berlin, the major regional source of such tephras. The tephra was formed by explosive eruptions that generated high eruption columns. Currently, fumarolic activity occurs that forms ice towers from frozen steam. (Full article...)

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On this day

February 6: Sámi National Day (1917); Waitangi Day in New Zealand (1840)

News reel of the Munich air disaster

1788 – Massachusetts became the sixth state to ratify the constitution of the United States.
1819 – British official Stamford Raffles signed a treaty with Sultan Hussein Shah of Johor, establishing Singapore as a trading post for the East India Company.
1919 – More than 65,000 workers in Seattle began a five-day general strike to gain higher wages after two years of U.S. World War I wage controls.
1958 – The aircraft carrying the Manchester United football team crashed while attempting to take off from Munich-Riem Airport in West Germany, killing 8 players and 23 people in total (news reel featured).

Joseph Priestley (d. 1804)
Barbara W. Tuchman (d. 1989)
Jack Kirby (d. 1994)
Gary Moore (d. 2011)

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Today's featured picture

Magna Lykseth-Skogman (6 February 1874 – 13 November 1949) was a Norwegian-born Swedish operatic soprano. After making her debut at the Royal Swedish Opera (Kungliga Operan) in 1901 as Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana, she was engaged there until 1918 and became the company's prima donna. Lykseth performed leading roles in a wide range of operas but is remembered in particular for her Wagnerian interpretations, creating Brünnhilde in the Swedish premieres of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, as well as Isolde in Tristan und Isolde in 1909. Considered to be one of the most outstanding Swedish opera singers of her generation, she was awarded the Litteris et Artibus, a Swedish royal medal for the arts, in 1907 and became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 1912. This 1909 photograph shows Lykseth in costume as Isolde with the Kungliga Operan.

Photograph credit: Atelier Jaeger; restored by Adam Cuerden

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