In 1750 the Appalachian Mountains were a formidable barrier between the British colonies in the east and French territory in the west, passable only on foot or horseback. It took more than a century to break the mountain barrier and open the west to settlement. In 1751 a private Virginia company pioneered a road from Maryland to Ohio, challenging the French and Indians for the Ohio country. Several wars stalled the road, which did not start in earnest until after Ohio became a state in 1803. The stone-paved Cumberland Road--from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia--was complete by 1818 and over the next 30 years was traversed by Conestoga wagons and stagecoaches. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad--the first general purpose railroad in the world--started in Baltimore in the 1820s and reached Wheeling by 1852, uniting east and west.

Explore western Canada’s rich railway history, travelling from the grand railway hotels and rustic stations to the creative engineering that created spiral bridges and soaring trestles. Relive this time through a trip on one of the many steam trains, visit a railway museum, or walk the trails where trains used to rumble.

For ages 12+. Teenagers sent to international summer camp in Tibet have disappeared. Of two brothers, Peter and Michael, it is Michael who feels the deep mystical attraction of the high Himalayan mountains, the deserted, secret lamasery. Peter is sceptical, but Michael founds a secret order to perfect disciplines of mind and body to enable teens to change the world, even improve human nature itself. Desperate parents launch an expedition to find their missing children.

Periglacial and paraglacial environments, located outside ice sheet margins but responding to similar climate forcings, are key to identifying climate change effects upon the Earth system. These environments are relicts of cold Earth processes and so are most sensitive to global warming. Changes in the distribution and thickness of permafrost in continental interiors have implications for ecosystem and landscape stability. Periglacial Alpine environments are experiencing increased rockfall and mass movement, leading to rock glacier instability and sediment release to downstream rivers. In turn, these landscape effects impact on natural hazards and human activities in these sensitive and geologically transient environments.