Mikaela Shiffrin is a champion American alpine skier. Shiffrin won the slalom gold medal at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, making her the youngest slalom champion in Olympic history. In 2018, she won the giant slalom gold medal at the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. She has also won the slalom world championship several times.
Credit: © Stefan Holm, Shutterstock

March is Women’s History Month, an annual observance of women’s achievements and contributions to society. This month, Behind the Headlines will feature woman pioneers in a variety of areas.

On Saturday, March 11, 2023, American Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin won her 87th World Cup race in Slovenia. Shiffrin broke Swedish skier Ingemar Stenmark’s record for most career World Cup victories. Her record-breaking victory occurred 12 years after her first World Cup win at 15. She completed the course hundredths of a second faster than her opponents, securing her place as one of the greatest skiers of all time.

Shiffrin was born on March 13, 1995, in Vail, Colorado. She began skiing at the age of 3. Her family moved to New Hampshire when she was 8. Shiffrin graduated in 2013 from Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, a high school for young skiers. In 2011, she made her World Cup debut at the age of 15, winning the bronze medal at Lienz, Austria. Later that year, at the age of 16, she won the slalom title at the United States National Championships in Winter Park, Colorado. She thus became the youngest skier to win that event. Slalom skiing involves racing down a winding course with flags. In 2012, she won her first World Cup race and was named World Cup Rookie of the Year.

Shiffrin won the slalom gold medal at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, making her the youngest slalom champion in Olympic history. In 2018, she won the giant slalom gold medal and the combined silver medal at the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. She also won the slalom World Championship in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019; the super G World Championship in 2019; the combined World Championship in 2021; and the giant slalom World Championship in 2023. Shiffrin has won more world championship titles (7) than any other American skier.

The slalom, giant slalom, and super G are three of the skiing races that make up the Alpine World Cup. The cup is awarded annually to the men and women who have won the most points in a series of five races—the slalom, giant slalom, downhill, super G, and combined. Shiffrin initially concentrated on the slalom and giant slalom. She won the World Cup slalom title in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2023. In 2019 and 2023, she also won the World Cup giant slalom title. In 2016, she began competing in the other three World Cup events. Shiffrin won the World Cup super G title in 2019. She won the overall World Cup title in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023 for earning the most combined points in all the events. In 2022, Shiffrin won her 47th World Cup slalom race, setting the record for most career World Cup victories in a single event.

Armand Duplantis will represent Sweden in the pole vault.
Credit: © Denis Kuvaev, Shutterstock

Armand Duplantis is a Swedish-American pole-vaulter. He chose to represent Sweden at the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. Duplantis has set a number of world records. He became the youngest person to ever pole-vault over 6 meters when he vaulted 6.05 meters (19.84 feet) in 2018 at the age of 18. In 2020, Duplantis broke a long-standing outdoor pole-vaulting world record when he vaulted 6.15 meters (20.17 feet).

Duplantis was born on Nov. 10, 1999, in LaFayette, Louisiana, to an athletic family. His father Greg was a pole-vaulter, and his mother Helena also competed in track and field. Armand started pole-vaulting at the age of three, picking up the sport from his father. Armand’s older brothers, Andreas and Antoine, as well as his younger sister, Johanna, have all been competitive in the field of pole-vaulting. His brother Antoine was drafted as a baseball player for the New York Mets organization.

Armand’s record-breaking career began in middle school. At the age of 10, his vault of 3.86 meters (12.66 feet) broke the world record for his age and also exceeded that for 11- and 12-year-olds. In 2015, Duplantis won the title of International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) World Youth Championship. Duplantis was both a European Champion and U20 (Under 20) Champion in 2018. Duplantis enrolled in Louisiana State University in 2018. In 2019 he was named the Southeastern Conference (SEC) Field Athlete of the Year and Freshman Athlete of the Year for both indoor and outdoor sports. He earned a gold medal as a 2019 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Indoor Track and Field Championships. In June 2019, Duplantis announced via Twitter that he would be going professional, effectively ending his collegiate sports career after one season.

August 27, 2018

It was said that Harald Blåtand, a Danish ruler who lived in the A.D. 900’s, possessed great skill in bringing people together through words and communication. He united the Danes, helped to spread Christianity among them, and became the first king of a united Denmark. He also brought part of Norway under his rule.

Click to view larger image
Scandinavia includes the countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

About 1,000 years later, in the 1990’s, a man who had recently read about Harald in a book on Scandinavian history was part of a group trying to develop a uniform standard for the short-range wireless communication technology that enables computers and other devices to work together. The group needed a name for their project. Since Harald had united people and they were trying to unite technologies, the man suggested temporarily naming it after Harald. The name stuck. The English translation of the old Scandinavian word blåtand, and the name of the modern wireless technology standard, is Bluetooth. The Bluetooth logo combines medieval Scandinavian runes (alphabet letters) for H and B.

The flag of Denmark flies over millions of speakers of Danish, a Scandinavian language. Credit: © Loveshop/Shutterstock

Danish is one of several closely related languages known as Scandinavian languages. Scandinavia is a large geographic region in northern Europe. It includes the countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. These three countries have interwoven histories and cultures. Each of their languages—Danish, Swedish, and two forms of Norwegian—has its own vocabulary and forms of pronunciation. However, the languages are similar enough so that Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes can often communicate without translating into each other’s languages.

The flag of Norway flies over speakers of Norwegian, a Scandinavian language related to Danish and Swedish. Credit: © Loveshop/Shutterstock

The Scandinavian languages make up the north Germanic branch of the large Indo-European language family. Their closest language cousins are the west Germanic languages of that family. The west Germanic languages include Dutch, English, and German. A large Swedish-speaking minority lives in Finland, which lies just east of Sweden, and Sweden has a large Finnish-speaking minority. The Finnish and Swedish cultures have much in common. However, the distinctive Finnish language belongs to the entirely different Uralic family, and it is not considered part of the Scandinavian language group. The Uralic family also includes the languages of the Sami—also known as Lapps—who live in far northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and northeastern Russia.

The flag of Sweden resembles those of its fellow Scandinavian countries Denmark and Norway. The Swedish language is closely related to Danish and Norwegian. Credit: © T. Lesia, Shutterstock

Around 1,000 years ago, Scandinavian languages spread to a number of regions beyond Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. At that time, Scandinavians were the best shipbuilders in Europe. From the late 700’s through the late 1000’s, skilled Scandinavian sailors traveled up and down the rivers of Europe and across the rough waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. Other Europeans called the sailors Norsemen, and later Vikings. Some Vikings were raiders. Some were explorers, traders, or settlers. Norsemen who settled in the British Isles introduced a number of words, including sky and they, into the English language.

During the 800’s, Scandinavians sailing east across the North Atlantic reached and settled the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Modern Faroese and Icelandic are both Scandinavian languages. Of all the modern Scandinavian languages, Icelandic is the closest to the speech of the Viking era. Present-day Icelanders usually can read medieval Icelandic literature and historical records without too much difficulty. Iceland experienced a golden age of literature in the 1100’s and 1200’s. Poets wrote down legends about the ancient northern European gods, such as Odin and Thor. They also wrote heroic sagas about people from Icelandic and Scandinavian history. Snorri Sturluson, a poet and historian who lived from 1179 to 1240, is the most famous medieval Icelandic writer. His Heimskringla (Circle of the World) describes the history of the kings of Norway from their origins until his own day. One of the royal rulers that he wrote about was the Danish king Harald Bluetooth.

August 3, 2018

For many people in the Northern Hemisphere, the summer of 2018 has been touched by fire and obscured by smoke. Summers are typically fire seasons in many areas, but climate change has caused hotter and drier conditions in recent years, and wildfire outbreaks have become more frequent and more destructive. Other causes of increased fire activity include the building of more developments in fire-prone areas, a lack of proper forest management, and, of course, simple human carelessness. In the past weeks, fires have killed more than 100 people and destroyed homes and large swaths of land in Asia, Europe, and North America.

A firefighting helicopter flies over a wildfire in the Greek town of Rafina near Athens on July 23, 2018. The Greek wildfire was the deadliest yet this year, claiming the lives of 92 people. Credit: © Angelos Tzortzinis, AFP/Getty Images

In southeastern Greece, a wildfire erupted July 23, destroying or damaging some 3,500 structures and killing 96 people along the Attica coast. The giant wildfire, just 18 miles (30 kilometers) east of Athens, the Greek capital, burned out of control for several days, gutting seaside resorts and holiday homes. Fanned by high winds, the fast-moving blaze trapped and killed groups of people, including entire families as they huddled between the flames and steep cliffs overlooking the Aegean Sea. The high death toll prompted criticism of the the area’s lack of access roads, warning systems, and other civil protection measures in areas surrounded by forest and at high risk of wildfires.

In far northern Europe, dozens of wildfires have consumed more than 62,000 acres (25,000 hectares) this summer in Sweden, which is experiencing an abnormally lengthy and intense heat wave. Neighboring Finland and Norway are also suffering from unusual heat and wildfire outbreaks, as are Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on the other side of the Baltic Sea. Wildfires also torched drought-stricken areas of Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland.

This week in northern California, firefighters continued to battle the Carr Fire that has killed 8 people, destroyed over 1,500 buildings, and consumed some 125,000 acres (50,000 hectares) of land. The wildfire started on July 23 along Carr Powerhouse Road in Shasta County near the city of Redding. The “mechanical failure of a vehicle” ignited dried grasses and trees, and soon flames were roaring through the forested hills around Whiskeytown Lake west of Redding. The wildfire, aided by hot and dry weather, high winds, an abundance of natural fuel, and steep terrain, has since been chased westward by more than 4,200 firefighters—2 of whom have died fighting the blaze. Reports of  “firenados” (huge, rotating whorls of smoke, flame, and ash) encouraged nearly 40,000 people to obey evacuation orders and leave the fire area (which included parts of nearby Trinity County). Many people will return to find their homes and property in ashes.

The Carr Fire is the largest of 17 wildfires currently burning throughout the state of California. Collectively, wildfires in the western United States have scorched 4.6 million acres (1.86 million hectares) so far this year, a 24 percent increase over the annual average for the past decade. Wildfires have also stricken large areas of western Canada and parts of Mexico this summer.

Wildfires have also consumed vast amounts of territory in Siberia of eastern Russia. Since May, firefighters have been battling immense wildfires in the Amur Oblast region along the Chinese border, where towering pyrocumulus clouds have injected smoke and pollutants high into Earth’s atmosphere. Pyrocumulus clouds are formed by rising heat from wildfires or by plume emissions from fossil fuel-burning industrial plants, and they sharply increase the levels of carbon dioxide and harmful aerosols in the atmosphere.