dig dug (13. 624)

Neatorama contributor Miss Cellania directs us to Randall Munroe’s latest xkcd webcomic (previously) comparing the depth of the Earth’s holes, manmade and naturally occurring. Chocked full of information, one will want to peruse the full-sized version and there’s even a dedicated wikia, Explain xkcd, that fully annotates and dissects the joke, though not to its detriment and sends one further down the rabbit hole with superlative mines, wells, tunnels and caves, including several record-setting above ground holes. We had no idea that the Kola Superdeep Borehole goes further underground than the Mariana Trench, and learned about the Glomar Challenger oceanic bore that extends two kilometres into the floor of the Pacific and the catastrophic Retsor Salt Mine, which collapsed in 1995 due to groundwater seepage, causing sink locals and draining regional aquifers. This company town, a small hamlet in upstate New York, was established and ran by the mining operator William Forester, Jr, who creatively (see also) reversed the spelling of his last name for the geographic anadrome, generally done to satisfy postal regulations.  Other places named with anagrams and ananyms include El Jobean, Florida after its civil engineer and property developer Joel Bean, Nada, Kentucky after the Dana lumber company that operated the town’s sawmill, Rednaxela Terrace in Hong Kong, transcribing ‘Alexander’ right to left, Orestod and Dotsero, Colorado, two towns on the terminuses of a short railroad line—the later itself derived from dot-zero, a important junction between Denver and Salt Lake City, Tesnus, Texas—sunset backwards and again after a train logo, and Tensed, Idaho, attempted namesake of nineteenth Flemish Jesuit missionary Pieter-Jan De Smet to the Native American peoples of Iowa territory, who as a friend and confidant of Sitting Bull persuaded the Sioux chief to negotiate with the US government and accede to the Treaty of Fort Laramie—a very bad deal for the Lakota, Dakota and Arapaho nations, the US almost immediately violating the terms and annexing their lands—the residents of the Coeur d’Alene reservation wanting to honour the priest (affectionately known as De Grote Zwartrok, the Great Black Skirt) but upon learning that the neighbouring community of De Smet had beat them to it, tried to reverse it but botched up the spelling during the registration process. I wonder if any other traditions have employed anadromes in their toponymy. Do write in and let us know, especially if they involve holes.