Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: International

  • Flipping Lat/Long Directions

    I was looking at the Latitude / Longitude coordinates of my residence a few days ago and I decided to keep the same coordinates but switch between North and South, East and West. An easy way to do this is to drop the coordinates in Google Maps and then change between positives and negatives. So…

  • Border Pirates

    I’d always thought of piracy as a 17th Century anachronism. Then things got weird off the coast of Somalia a few years ago. Even so I considered it a distant condition borne of a failed state two oceans away. Recent reports of North American pirates have simply bewildered me. I never imagined it existed outside…

  • One Percent of Greenland Lives in a Single Building

    [UPDATE: Block P was torn down in 2012] I received the July 2010 print edition of National Geographic in the mail over the weekend. It had an interesting article on Greenland as it struggles with the effects of global warming. Naturally it includes all the usual excellent photography, maps and narrative that one would expect…

  • What Crosses an Airport Runway?

    The world of geo-oddities extends even to airport runways, and I’ve uncovered several curiosities over the past several days. The areas served by airports don’t always confine themselves to neat, tidy spaces. Oftentimes transportation resources represent a cooperative spirit between neighbors as they band together to meet a common need. Sometimes it’s just the opposite,…

  • Shack at the End of the Road

    I strolled vicariously through Street View images leading to the northernmost coverage area of Canada, all the way to the town of Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. I pushed further north and further north at the tap of a trackpad until I could move no further on my laptop. Then I arrived right here at…

  • Canada’s International Border(s)

    So a burning question keeps coming up on the site. “What is Canada’s only international border?” Single-time visitors of Twelve Mile Circle seem acutely interested in Canada’s international borders. My web logs register variations of this Search Engine query probably daily. Sometimes this comes up — I think — as a trick question on trivia…

  • Some Longitudinal Lines

    I have a soft spot for the unintentional readers of Twelve Mile Circle. Search engines send them randomly to my domain like pollen blowing in the wind. They aren’t consciously trying to arrive at my site. In fact they never even knew it existed. Simply, the all-knowing search engines told these mystery readers that I…

  • What’s Up With the Volcano?

    Every geo-blogger on the planet is covering the Eyjafjallajökull eruption. Well I’m not going to do that, or rather, I’m taking an entirely different approach because you know it’s happening and there are others who can cover this event a whole lot more eloquently than I can. By now everyone is aware of the location…

  • A Single Point on the Border

    I encountered a number of interesting situations as I pulled together my recent series of borderlocking articles. One of those revelations pertained to Jeff Davis County(1) in the State of Texas. Examine its layout closely. Clearly it borders on Mexico. However that happens only at a single point along the Rio Grande River at its…

  • Bordersplit

    I have to keep coming up with new words to describe my various geo-oddity fascinations. Today I coined “bordersplit.” It refers to an object cleaved by a boundary line. The way I figure it, if we can use landlocked legitimately then bordersplit should be treated the same way even if it doesn’t exist in a…