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China's 'Ice City' Harbin Draws Record Tourists over New Year Holiday

Children play with snowballs at the Harbin Ice and Snow World, in Harbin, China, 02 January 2024. EPA/WU HAO
Children play with snowballs at the Harbin Ice and Snow World, in Harbin, China, 02 January 2024. EPA/WU HAO
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China's 'Ice City' Harbin Draws Record Tourists over New Year Holiday

Children play with snowballs at the Harbin Ice and Snow World, in Harbin, China, 02 January 2024. EPA/WU HAO
Children play with snowballs at the Harbin Ice and Snow World, in Harbin, China, 02 January 2024. EPA/WU HAO

The "ice city" of Harbin, the snowy capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang province, attracted a record number of visitors over the New Year holiday, many of them drawn by the grand and intricate ice sculptures of its annual Ice and Snow Festival.
The towering ice structures, illuminated in a dazzling array of lights at night, are built from ice blocks harvested from the frozen Songhua River nearby.
This year's festival helped draw 3.05 million visitors to Harbin during the three-day New Year holiday that ended on Monday, generating 5.91 billion yuan ($826 million) in tourism revenue, state media agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
Those numbers exceeded the number of pre-COVID visits in 2019, Reuters said.
Growth in the city's accommodation and catering sectors during the holiday period more than doubled from 2019, local newspaper Harbin Daily reported. The city's tourism department attributed the growth to Harbin's increasing popularity on social media platforms, Xinhua said.
The tourism boom occurred as China's services activity expanded at the fastest pace in five months in December, lifting optimism in the sector to a three-month high.
Harbin's authorities have rolled out activities to attract tourists including live performances and concerts, theme parks and fireworks displays, as well as improving dining, accommodation and shopping services, Xinhua said.
The Ice and Snow Festival park received 163,200 visitors over the New Year holidays, over five times more than a year ago, with almost 40% of those holiday makers visiting on New Year's Eve, Heilongjiang provincial television said in a social media post.
That generated 46.18 million yuan in income, nearly six times higher than a year ago, the provincial TV station said.
Heilongjiang welcomed 6.619 million tourists over the three-day period, nearly triple from a year ago, producing tourism revenue of 6.920 billion yuan, almost five times the year ago figure, the station reported.
The city government announced a special public holiday, the Ice and Snow Holiday, for Friday, to coincide with the festival's official opening.
The surge in domestic winter tourism has benefited local companies in the sector. Shares of ChangBai Mountain Tourism Co, a travel service company based in northeast China, have soared by 26% in Shanghai trading since the last week of December, beating benchmark shares.

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'Dinosaur Highway' Tracks Dating Back 166 Million Years are Discovered in England

In this undated photo provided by the University of Birmingham on Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025, work underway as five extensive trackways that formed part of a "dinosaur highway" are uncovered, at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, England. (University of Birmingham via AP)
In this undated photo provided by the University of Birmingham on Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025, work underway as five extensive trackways that formed part of a "dinosaur highway" are uncovered, at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, England. (University of Birmingham via AP)
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'Dinosaur Highway' Tracks Dating Back 166 Million Years are Discovered in England

In this undated photo provided by the University of Birmingham on Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025, work underway as five extensive trackways that formed part of a "dinosaur highway" are uncovered, at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, England. (University of Birmingham via AP)
In this undated photo provided by the University of Birmingham on Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025, work underway as five extensive trackways that formed part of a "dinosaur highway" are uncovered, at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, England. (University of Birmingham via AP)

A worker digging up clay in a southern England limestone quarry noticed unusual bumps that led to the discovery of a “dinosaur highway” and nearly 200 tracks that date back 166 million years, researchers said Thursday.

The extraordinary find made after a team of more than 100 people excavated the Dewars Farm Quarry, in Oxfordshire, in June expands upon previous paleontology work in the area and offers greater insights into the Middle Jurassic period, researchers at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said.

“These footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited,” said Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontology professor at the University of Birmingham, The AP reported.

Four of the sets of tracks that make up the so-called highway show paths taken by gigantic, long-necked, herbivores called sauropods, thought to be Cetiosaurus, a dinosaur that grew to nearly 60 feet (18 meters) in length. A fifth set belonged to the Megalosaurus, a ferocious 9-meter predator that left a distinctive triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named two centuries ago.

An area where the tracks cross raises questions about possible interactions between the carnivores and herbivores.

“Scientists have known about and been studying Megalosaurus for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth, and yet these recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found," said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Nearly 30 years ago, 40 sets of footprints discovered in a limestone quarry in the area were considered one of the world's most scientifically important dinosaur track sites. But that area is mostly inaccessible now and there's limited photographic evidence because it predated the use of digital cameras and drones to record the findings.

The group that worked at the site this summer took more than 20,000 digital images and used drones to create 3-D models of the prints. The trove of documentation will aid future studies and could shed light on the size of the dinosaurs, how they walked and the speed at which they moved.

“The preservation is so detailed that we can see how the mud was deformed as the dinosaur’s feet squelched in and out," said Duncan Murdock, an earth scientist at the Oxford museum. "Along with other fossils like burrows, shells and plants we can bring to life the muddy lagoon environment the dinosaurs walked through.”

The findings will be shown at a new exhibit at the museum and also broadcast on the BBC's “Digging for Britain” program next week.