Geography

Question 1

Kuril Islands

Answer 1

1. Kuril Islands: These are a set of four islands situated between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean near the north of Japan’s northernmost prefecture, Hokkaido.
2. Japan refers to them as Northern territories, Russia calls them the Kuril Islands and South Korea named them as Dokdo islands.
3. These are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire belt and have over 100 volcanoes, of which 35 are said to be active volcanoes along with hot springs.
4. Both Russia and Japan claim sovereignty over them though the islands have been under Russian control since the end of World War II.
5. Tokyo claims that the disputed islands have been part of Japan since the early 19th century.

Question 2

What is the Kuril Islands dispute?

Answer 2

1. According to Tokyo, Japan’s sovereignty over the islands is confirmed by several treaties like the Shimoda Treaty of 1855, the 1875 Treaty for the exchange of Sakhalin for the Kuril Islands (Treaty of St. Petersburg), and the Portsmouth Treaty of 1905 signed after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 which Japan had won.
2. Russia, on the other hand, claims the Yalta Agreement (1945) and the Potsdam Declaration (1945) as proof of its sovereignty and argues that the San Francisco Treaty of 1951 is legal evidence that Japan had acknowledged Russian sovereignty over the islands. Under Article 2 of the treaty, Japan had “renounced all right, title and claim to the Kuril Islands.”

Question 3

Lunar Codex

Answer 3

1. A collection of art gathered from artists will be stranded on the lunar surface as a lasting record of human creativity, even in times of war, pandemics, and economic crises.
2. This programme is spearheaded by Samuel Peralta, a semi-retired physicist and art collector from Canada.
3. The collection of varied digitised art will be sent to the moon as a lasting record of human creativity.
4. Lunar Codex is stored on memory cards or laser etched on NanoFiche, a 21st-century update on film-based microfiche. These will ensure that the art forms reach the lunar surface safely.
5. The collection of art is gathered from 30,000 artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians from 157 countries. The art forms include images, magazines, books, podcasts, movies, and music, which are divided into four capsules.
6. The first such capsule is known as the Orion collection, which has already flown around the moon when it launched on the Orion spacecraft as part of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission last year.
7. In the coming months, a series of lunar landers will take the Lunar Codex capsules to various destinations, in craters at the moon’s South Pole and a lunar plain called Sinus Viscositatis.