Only the most intrepid urban explorers cross the tattered ruins of the old Iron Curtain to endure the excessive bureaucracy, military paranoia and freezing winds of the East to hunt for the ghosts of an empire. Rebecca Litchfield is one who couldn’t resist the haunting allure of the ruins of the Soviet Union.

Two stags fight in a wildlife park in Aurach near Kitzbuehel, in the Austrian province of Tyrol. (Photo by Kerstin Joensson/Associated Press)

In this Thursday, April 11, 2013 photo, North Korean female soldiers stand watch on the river bank of the North Korean town of Sinuiju, opposite to the Chinese border city of Dandong. (Photo by AP Photo)

Li Yuming, a local farmer who is interested in scientific invention, works on his unfinished miniature submarine “Xiaguang V” on the outskirts of Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei province August 24, 2007. “Xiaguang V”, which is 3-metre long, 1.2-metre in height, has a maximum diving depth of 20 metres, and can hold two adults and one child at the same time. The submarine will be used for tour after safety test, local media said. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)

Passengers from the ferry sinking off South Korea's southern coast are rescued by the South Korean Coast guard in the water off the southern coast near Jindo, south of Seoul, on April 16, 2014. Almost 300 people were missing after a ferry sank off South Korea on Wednesday, the coastguard said, in what could be the country's biggest peacetime disaster in nearly 20 years. (Photo by AP Photo)

Buyan, a male Siberian brown bear, is given a shower by a zoo employee in his enclosure at the Royev Ruchey zoo in Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk June 24, 2014. The Siberian city has been experiencing temperatures of around 30 degrees Celsius over the last week. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Cars float up from a car garage in a mixture of storm water and gasoline in lower Manhattan as workers begin the process of pumping out the mess. (Photo by Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT)