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OSAKA, Japan — Here we go! After months of pandemic delays, Nintendo’s first ever theme park, featuring a “Mario Kart” ride in a real-life Bowser’s Castle, opened in Japan on Thursday to delighted fans.

The attraction, whose bright, block-like surroundings are straight out of the classic “Super Mario” games, is part of the existing Universal Studios Japan (USJ) amusement park in the western city of Osaka.

“We perfectly recreated the world of the game.... You’ll find life-sized piranha plants and Bowser, and you’ll see what it is like to be Mario,” said Ayumu Yamamoto, USJ’s marketing communication manager.

“It took almost a year longer than we had expected to open this place, and we are really glad,” he told reporters at a preview on Wednesday.

The new zone called “Super Nintendo World” had originally been expected to draw big crowds last year ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which was also postponed by the coronavirus.

But its launch was pushed back to February, and then delayed again as Japan’s government declared a state of emergency in early 2021 to curb spiking cases.

Music from the popular Mario games plays throughout the park and a smartphone-linked wristband allows visitors to collect virtual coins by punching blocks, just like the Italian plumber.

Augmented reality goggles attached to a plastic red visor are used in the “Mario Kart” ride, one of the park’s main draws that promises to bring the racing game to life.

The ride follows a track around the foreboding castle of Mario’s enemy Bowser, an evil turtle, but each seat has a steering wheel and players can collect and shoot items at opponents.

The zone also boasts a ride based on the cute green dinosaur Yoshi, a Peach’s castle, Mario-themed restaurants and lifesize characters from the Mushroom Kingdom.

Fans told AFP they were thrilled about the much-anticipated opening of the park, which cost more than 60 billion yen ($550 million), according to USJ.

“I’ve been playing Mario since I was a boy. I didn’t expect that I could enter the world of Mario, so I’m very excited,” said Hiroki Kono, a 19-year-old university student in Osaka.

‘Waited for this day’

Office worker Rei Higashimoto, 25, was also delighted about the launch. “I have an annual pass, so I knew this Mario world was being created, and I have waited from one year ago for this day to come,” she said.

Similar areas are planned at Universal Studios parks in Orlando and Hollywood.

The first “Super Mario Bros” game came out in 1985 for Nintendo’s NES console.

The platform game, in which Mario runs and jumps past obstacles to collect coins and save Princess Peach from the evil Koopa turtles, was based on the “Mario Bros” arcade game released earlier.

Since then, Mario has appeared in myriad formats including games featuring racing, football and golf.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of “Super Mario Bros”, took a tour of the park in a promotional video released in December.

“At last, it’s complete! It makes a big impression, seeing the park in real life,” said Miyamoto, describing himself as Mario’s “Dad” as he popped out of a giant green pipe. 

“There are smaller activities like the coin block, as well as bigger ones... If you manage to get three keys from various activities, you can take on the final activity — a battle with Bowser Jr.”

“I’m very excited for all of you to experience the park on your own,” he added.

REYKJAVIK — A volcano erupted just 40 kilometres from Iceland’s capital Reykjavik on Friday, turning the sky crimson and forcing the establishment of a no-fly zone in the area. 

Known as the land of fire and ice, Iceland is Europe’s biggest and most active volcanic region, home to a third of the lava that has flowed on Earth since the Middle Ages, according to Visit Iceland.

The vast North Atlantic island borders the Arctic Circle where it straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a crack on the ocean floor separating the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.

The shifting of these plates is in part responsible for Iceland’s intense volcanic activity.

Thirty-two volcanic systems are currently considered active in the country.

Here are the main eruptions in Iceland’s history:

2014-2015

The awakening of Bardarbunga, a volcano located under the Vatnajokull glacier — Europe’s largest ice cap — in the heart of southern Iceland’s uninhabited highlands, was the most recent eruption before Friday’s.

The volcano erupted for five months, both under the ice and breaching the surface in a fissure at the Holuhraun lava field, creating Iceland’s biggest basalt lava flow in more than 230 years but causing no injuries or damages.

2011

The Grimsvotn volcano, also located under the Vatnajokull glacier, is Iceland’s most active volcano. Its latest eruption was in May 2011, its ninth since 1902. Over one week, it spouted a cloud of ash 25 kilometres into the sky, causing the cancellation of more than 900 flights, primarily in the UK, Scandinavia and Germany.

2010

In April 2010, enormous plumes of ash billowed into the sky for several weeks during the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, causing the biggest air traffic disruption in peacetime until the COVID-19 pandemic. Some 100,000 flights were cancelled, leaving more than 10 million travellers stranded.

1973

In one of the most dramatic eruptions in the country’s recent history, the island of Heimaey in the Westman Islands awoke one January morning to an eruption in a fissure just 150 metres from the town centre. The eruption of the Eldfell volcano occurred not only in a populated area — one of the country’s then most important fishing zones — but it also surprised locals at dawn. A third of homes in the area were destroyed and the 5,300 residents were evacuated. One person died.

1918

Considered one of Iceland’s most dangerous volcanoes, Katla’s last eruption added five kilometres of land mass to the country’s southern coast. Located under the Myrdalsjokull glacier, when Katla erupts it ejects large quantities of tephra, or solidified magma rock fragments which are disseminated in the air and carried by the powerful glacier flooding caused by melting ice. Averaging two eruptions per century, Katla has not erupted violently for more than 100 years and experts say it is overdue.

1875

Virtually unknown at the time, Askja, Iceland’s second-biggest volcano system, erupted in three distinct phases. Two of the three ash clouds rose more than 20 kilometres into the sky. The toxic fallout across Iceland, which in some places reached a thickness of 20 centimetres, killed livestock, contaminated the soil and sparked a wave of emigration to North America. Isolated in a plateau and far from civilisation, Askja is today a popular tourist attraction and its lava fields were used to train astronauts for the 1965 and 1967 Apollo missions.

1783

The eruption of the Laki volcanic fissure in the south of the island is considered by some experts to be the most devastating in Iceland’s history, causing its biggest environmental and socio-economic catastrophe: 50 to 80 per cent of Iceland’s livestock was killed, leading to a famine that left a quarter of Iceland’s population dead.

The volume of lava, nearly 15 cubic kilometres, is the second-biggest recorded on Earth in the past millennium. 

The meteorological impact of Laki’s eruptions had repercussions for several years in the Northern Hemisphere, causing a drop in global temperatures and crop failures in Europe as millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide were released. Some experts have suggested that the consequences of the eruption may have played a part in triggering the French Revolution, though the issue is still a matter of debate.

The volcano’s 130 still-smoking craters were placed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2019, along with the entire Vatnajokull national park to which it belongs.

1934

The eruption of Eldgja — which means “canyon of fire” in Icelandic — is the biggest basalt lava eruption the world has ever seen. Part of the same volcanic system as the mighty Katla volcano, the Eldgja fissure is 75 kilometres long, stretching to the western edge of Vatnajokull. The eruption led to two large lava fields covering 780 square kilometres.

By Marlowe Hood

Agence France-Presse

PARIS — The ice sheet atop Greenland — which holds enough frozen water to swamp coastal cities worldwide — has melted to the ground at least once in the last million years despite CO2 levels far lower than today, stunned scientists have reported.

The surprise discovery of plant fossils in soil samples extracted in the 1960s by US army engineers from beneath 2 kilometres of ice is smoking-gun proof that Greenland — three times the size of Texas — was covered with lichen, moss and perhaps trees in the not-so-distant past.

It is also a red flag for the accelerating impact of climate change.

“Our findings tell us the Greenland ice sheet is vulnerable,” Paul Bierman, a geologist at the University of Vermont and lead author of a study this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy, told AFP.

Until the late 1990s, Greenland’s ice sheet was roughly in balance, gaining as much mass through snowfall as it lost in summer from crumbling glaciers and melt-off.

But over the last two decades, the gathering pace of global warming has upended that balance.

In 2019, Greenland cast off more than half-a-trillion tonnes of ice and meltwater, accounting for 40 per cent of total sea level rise that year.

If the ice sheet were to vanish altogether, it would lift global oceans by nearly 7 metres. 

Even a rise of two metres would redraw the world’s coastlines and render land occupied today by hundreds of millions of people uninhabitable.

600 nuclear missiles

“This is not a 20-generation problem,” Bierman said. “This is a problem for the next 50 years.”

The physical evidence of sun-drenched landscapes on Greenland within the last million years would not exist but for a Cold War scheme to hide hundreds of nuclear missiles under a mountain of ice about 120 kilometres inland from the island’s northwest coast.

In constructing Camp Century — presented to the world as a polar science station — US government scientists drilled a 1.4 kilometre ice core, including a few plugs of frozen dirt at the end. 

The soil samples wound up in a freezer in Denmark, where they were rediscovered in 2017 and sent to the University of Vermont.

Bierman recalls the shock of realising what they contained.

“I looked into the bin of water in which we’d washed the sediment and did a double-take,” he said. “Floating on the surface was something black and small.”

Bierman handed the unidentified object to his colleague and co-author Andrew Christ.

“He looked down the barrel of the microscope and screamed. It was a twig from under a mile of ice — amazing!”

Tipping point

Samples were examined by four teams of researchers in the US and Europe, and dated by measuring variations in atoms, radioactivity and luminescence.

The results suggest the ice sheet disappeared about one million years ago, and very possibly again about 600,000 years later. 

Most disconcerting, perhaps, are the conditions under which the ice sheet melted.

The main driver of global warming today is the accumulation in the atmosphere of CO2, which has risen since the mid-19th century from about 285 parts per million (ppm) to about 415ppm today.

It has long been assumed that it would probably take even higher concentrations to push Greenland’s ice sheet past the “tipping point” of irreversible melting.

The new findings suggest otherwise.

“CO2 ranged naturally over the last million years from about 180ppm to 290ppm,” barely above the pre-industrial mark against which global warming is currently measured.

The UN’s climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, has forecast sea level rise from all sources of just under a metre by century’s end.

By Maggy Donaldson and Laurent Banguet
Agence France-Presse

NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES — Women won every major Grammy at Sunday’s history making gala, a joyful night for music’s biggest stars after a devastating year for the industry, with Beyonce, Megan Thee Stallion and Taylor Swift triumphing at the socially distanced event anchored by electrifying performances.

It was a monumental night for Beyonce, who broke the record for most career wins by a female artist with 28.

Swift became the first woman to win the coveted Album of the Year prize three times, this year for “folklore”, the first of her twin quarantine releases.

And rap sensation Megan Thee Stallion charmed while accepting her three awards including Best New Artist — and disarmed viewers with a performance that set the Los Angeles stage ablaze.

Megan and Queen Bey earned two awards together, for their remix of the rapper’s smash hit “Savage”.

The Houston rapper teased with that track along with her single “Body”, before serving up a thirst trap of a duet with none other than Cardi B, both of them in metallic gear that left little to the imagination.

The audacious duo performed “WAP”, a gyrating, thigh-baring celebration of female sexuality that ended atop an enormous bed.

The night featured a host of impressive performances featuring Dua Lipa, DaBaby, Swift, Bad Bunny and Record of the Year winner Billie Eilish, among others — a line-up that kicked off with chest-baring Harry Styles, who won his first ever award.

The ceremony, which fell nearly a year to the day after COVID-19 grounded tours and forced performance venues to close, stood as a concerted effort by the music world to try to move past a crushing 2020 by celebrating its biggest stars.

And there is perhaps no one bigger than Queen Bey, whose Best R&B Performance award for her summer track “Black Parade,” an homage to Black power and heritage, sent her into the Grammy record books.

It was not even clear initially that Beyonce would attend the event, when she did not Zoom in to accept her first trophy of the day, which she shared with her daughter Blue Ivy, for best music video for “Brown Skin Girl”.

But she set social media alight when she was spotted in the audience and then took the stage in a figure-hugging black leather mini wrap-dress alongside Megan Thee Stallion to accept their prize for Best Rap Song.

“As an artist, I believe it’s my job and all of our jobs to reflect the times. And it’s been such a difficult time,” Beyonce said, with her husband Jay-Z looking on, as she received her history-making award.

“So I wanted to uplift, encourage, celebrate all of the beautiful Black queens and kings that continue to inspire me and inspire the whole world.”

Eilish strikes again, honours Megan

But it was Billie Eilish who took Record of the Year — a category in which Beyonce had two nominations, one with Megan Thee Stallion — a moment that brought to mind Beyonce’s controversial losses to Adele in 2017.

In accepting her second straight Record of the Year prize, the 19-year-old Eilish nodded to Megan, who she said had an “untoppable” year and deserved to win.

“You deserve it, honestly, genuinely, this goes to her — can we just cheer for Megan Thee Stallion,” she told the small audience of mainly nominees and performers.

The soulful 23-year-old R&B performer H.E.R. pulled an upset in scooping the Grammy for Song of the Year for her justice-minded song “I Can’t Breathe”, which tackles Black pain and police brutality.

“I didn’t imagine that my fear and that my pain would turn into impact,” the musician said in accepting her trophy.

And Swift snagged Album of the Year — while losing all of the other five awards she was up for.

She thanked her fans, saying: “You guys met us in this imaginary world that we created, and we can’t tell you how honoured we are.”

It was a less shiny night than predicted for British star Dua Lipa, who was shut out of the major categories but won Best Pop Vocal Album, for her sparkly disco ball of a record released just as the pandemic took hold.

“I felt really jaded at the end of my last album, where I felt like I only had to make sad music to feel like it mattered,” she said.

“And I’m just so grateful and so honoured because happiness is something we all deserve and need in our lives.”

Brittany Howard — known for fronting the band Alabama Shakes — won Best Rock Song, as Fiona Apple scored two awards for her album “Fetch The Bolt Cutters”, which many critics hailed as a masterpiece.

Though most of the rock fields were unprecedentedly dominated by women, The Strokes won for Best Rock Album for “The New Abnormal”, their first Grammy ever.

Rap legend Nas also won for the first time after 14 nominations, with his “King’s Disease” winning Best Rap Album.

And Nigerian superstar Burna Boy scored his first trophy for Best Global Music Album, ecstatically accepting the prize which he said “is a big win for my generation of Africans all over the world”.

But it wouldn’t be the Grammys without controversy.

The Weeknd has pledged to stop submitting music for awards consideration after he surprisingly received no nominations, despite a big year commercially.

By Philippe Grelard and Eric Randolph
Agence France-Presse

PARIS — “NFT” is quickly becoming the acronym of 2021, offering a new way to sell digital art online, and music stars including Kings of Leon and Grimes have been quick to jump on the bandwagon.

For many, it remains a baffling concept, but a NFT (“non-fungible token” — pronounced “nifty”) essentially offers collectors proof that they “own” a digital artwork by logging that ownership on the blockchain, the online database that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. 

In no time, it has taken the art world by storm. Just last week, a collage by digital artist Beeple was sold at auction for $69.3 million, reportedly the third highest-ever sale for a living artist in any medium.

Many see an opportunity to monetise digital art of all kinds, offering wealthy collectors the bragging rights to ultimate ownership, even if the work can be endlessly copied. For investors, it’s also a new commodity to be traded.

In the music world — an industry which has seen its value shredded by digitisation over the past 20 years — NFTs offer hope of a valuable new revenue stream. 

Earlier this month, US rockers Kings of Leon raised more than $2 million by auctioning off NFT versions of their new album “When you see yourself”, according to Rolling Stone magazine, of which a quarter went to a solidarity fund for live event workers. 

Their NFTs offered more than just the abstract notion of owning something rare. They came with tangible benefits: access to photos by band member Matthew Followill, collector’s editions of the vinyl, and at the top end, a lifetime “golden ticket” to front-row seats at their live shows. 

Gold rush

Josh Katz, CEO of YellowHeart, the NFT auction platform used by Kings of Leon, claimed it was “ushering in the new music era”.

“Through the use of NFTs and blockchain technology, we’ll begin to see the industry start to move toward a more decentralised model that fosters symbiotic relationships between music lovers and artists,” he told AFP. 

“Artists will monetise their content again and fans will have transparency when buying both content and concert tickets.” 

Several stars are already tapping the opportunity. 

Mike Shinoda, of US rap-metal group Linkin Park, recently sold an NFT version of a single which came with an animated visual created by artist Cain Caser. 

Canadian singer Grimes, who has always had a strongly visual component to match the futuristic, dystopian vibes of her music, recently sold an audiovisual collection as NFTs for some $6 million. 

Not everyone is entirely convinced, however. 

“If this technology is put to the service of artists, that’s great. But if we aren’t very careful, they risk being stripped of their copyright,” said Emily Gonneau, French author of a book on music in the digital age. 

“Anyone can sample anything off the Internet and claim to be the creator of an NFT... Then we’re on a gold rush where anything is possible,” she said.

‘Democratised’

Indeed, several digital artists, including one who goes by the name Weird Undead, have already found their work being ripped off and sold on NFT platforms, according to online magazine Decrypt. 

The anonymous, decentralised nature of the blockchain makes it hard to counter these copyright infringements. 

But the flipside, argues blockchain investment consultant Eloisa Marchesoni, is that NFTs make it much easier to verify items issued by the real artists, since each artwork, concert ticket or collectible has its own digital signature logged on the blockchain that cannot be falsified. 

The best opportunity for artists, she said, is the ability to sell add-ons that boost their income. 

“You can grant access to a whole variety of perks,” she told AFP.

“Let’s say you buy a rare shoe from an artist. The NFT guarantees its authenticity, but also grants you access to a contest where you can win some special experience with the artist.” 

“It’s no different from the traditional art market: People with spare time and capital looking for that sense of exclusivity,” Marchesoni added.

“But now it’s being democratised — anyone can easily go online and buy an NFT.”