Borderline madness?
QUESTION Is it true Tijuana International Airport straddles the Mexico/U.S. border? How does this work? Are there other institutions that cross the border? For decades, San Diegans debated alternatives to the city’s landlocked downtown airport and looked for solutions.
The solution they eventually arrived at was Cross Border Xpress or CBX, the world’s first cross- border passenger terminal. It consists of a terminal on the U.S. side of the border and a bridge to connect Tijuana Airport with that terminal. opened on December 9, 2015, it costs $18 for adults to cross.
This building serves as a check-in and processing facility for departing passengers only, with no gates or arrival facilities, but with its own parking and customs offices, linking passengers to gates at Terminal 1 via a 390 ft purple bridge across the border.
The structural scheme is intended to allow greater access to flights out of Tijuana Airport for both domestic and international air carriers. P. Smith, Durham. FollowIng the Secure Fence Act of 2006, the U.S. government authorised 700 miles of security fence to be built on the U.S.- Mexico border, 315 miles of it in Texas.
President Bush said the fence would make the border safer and was ‘an important step toward immigration reform’. It included deliberate gaps to shepherd would-be immigrants into controllable areas.
Because of a treaty with Mexico prohibiting building on the rio grande floodplain, the government built its border fence more than a mile north of the river, trapping tens of thousands of acres of Texas land in Cameron and Hidalgo counties on the wrong side. This has created a no-man’s land for the 200-odd Texans living there.
The most celebrated victim of this fence was Fort Brown Memorial golf Course in Brownsville, Texas, a 6,000-yard course on 165 heavily wooded acres of sable palms, ash and cottonwoods. Homeland Security eventually built its border fence on the levee, leaving a gap at the entrance to the course, which was now entirely on the Mexican side of the fence.
The city had originally built the course for the area’s Mexican-U.S. golfers, who weren’t allowed to play at Brownsville’s private country club.
The tee on the 16th hole famously sported the sign ‘Do not hit golf balls into Mexico. Violators will be prosecuted.’ The fence became too much of an obstacle and the course was closed in 2015.
Also worthy of note is the city of Mexicali ( MEXIco plus CAlIfornia), the northernmost city in latin America. The border divides it with a much smaller town on the U.S. side called Calexico.
Rob Coles, Nantwich, Cheshire. QUESTION The islands most threatened by rising sea levels are composed of coral and must have been formed under water. Is it known when they were formed and whether it happened because of the seabed rising or the water falling? THErE are two different origins of reef islands: uplift and accretion. In the first, part or all of a reef system may be lifted above sea level by tectonic forces.
This is rare. The Henderson island, part of the Pitcairn group in the Pacific, and the Aldabra Islands in the western Indian ocean are the world’s last two raised coral atolls whose ecosystems remain relatively unaffected by human contact.
The rare geology has led to remarkable diversity. For instance on Henderson Island, ten of its 51 flowering plants, all four of its land birds — the Henderson fruit dove, lorikeet, reed warbler and the flightless crake — and about a third of the identified insects and gastropods are endemic, a remarkable diversity given the island’s size, just over 14 square miles.
The Aldabra Atoll is home to 152,000 giant tortoises, the world’s largest population.
Both islands are difficult to age as they uplifted several times, but the oldest limestone on Henderson is about 500,000 years old, whereas the oldest on Aldabra is just 125,000 years old, though the corals that make them up are far older. Clearly, recent high sea levels partly explain the rarity of these formations.
Coral islands created by accretion have developed from rubbly reef rock broken off from the reef by storms and waves and mixed with finer reef detritus.
Exceptional weather conditions such as cyclonic storms may create reef-top shoals in a single event. other material accumulates by more regular methods such as currents and wave action.
Beaches develop around the shoal, and wind may heap up the lighter, finer material into dunes. rainwater can now reach all this material, which, being almost entirely of calcium carbonate, is readily dissolved by it, and the dissolved lime is redeposited around the loose material, cementing it together.
The newly formed land is soon colonised by plants and animals, which also contribute their own remains to the island, helping soil to develop. Many reef islands in the central and southern Pacific and the Maldives Islands in the Indian ocean are thought to have originated in this way.
Colin Smith, Cambridge. QUESTION I’m trying to recall an hilarious book I read in my youth. Similar in nature to George Grossmith’s Diary Of A Nobody, it was the diary of a man who thought himself a proper Christian gentleman, but was in fact a hypocritical, prudish middle-class snob. What might it have been? FUrTHEr to the earlier answer, the Journal of Edwin Carp, ‘edited’ by richard Haydn, ‘embellished’ by ronald Searle and published by Hamish Hamilton in 1954 at 12/6d, deserves a mention.
The eponymous diarist is a gentleman of private means (aged 42 when he put pen to paper in 1936), still living with his deaf mother, but engaged (for nine years now) to the widowed lady of his choice, Mrs Maude Phelps. ‘when I kissed Maude goodnight, our pince nez met and made a slight tinkling sound’.
The journal records a series of mishaps caused by the author’s naivety, snobbishness, lack of humour and general gormlessness, but ends in triumph when he and his betrothed finally marry and set off for their honeymoon in Budleigh Salterton.
The fact that both were called Carp appears to be an odd coincidence (the previous answer described Henry Howarth Bashford’s book Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself). richard Haydn, an actor by profession, invented the character Edwin Carp when acting in revues in this country, but moved to the U.S. in 1935, spending 30 years acting in dotty character roles in Hollywood movies.
John Battersby, Windermere, Cumbria.