Category: International
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Smallest Largest Provincial Island in Canada
You read that right. Perhaps I can rephrase it better: Each Canadian Province or Territory has a largest island. When considering that list, which one is the smallest? Today’s totally trivial topic comes courtesy of the confluence of many competing thoughts that pinged around my mind lately: I’m “-est” fixated (you know, things ending in…
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Caribbean Ferries
Regular readers have gotten used to my unnatural fascination with, and periodic musings about ferries. I’ve been slowly cataloging and mapping ferry systems from around the world using the Google Maps API. The operative word being slowly. I’m finally ready to release the latest compilation. Ferries of the Caribbean (and beyond). Check it out! This…
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Vermont: Another border anomaly. Sort of?
Various small locations in the United States connect to the North American continent but do not physically connect to the rest of the U.S. Two of those spots require people to clear immigration and customs and then enter Canada. Then they do it all over again in reverse to gain access to the small parcel.…
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The Point of Five Nevis Parishes
I’ve been on a border kick lately. You may have noticed that if you’ve been paying attention to the last several of posts. Quite some time ago I described a situation in Florida. There, five counties came together at a single point in the middle of Lake Okeechobee. Now something a little more dramatic: five…
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Neutral Moresnet
All this recent talk on Twelve Mile Circle about strange European borders and condominium arrangements brings me to one of my favorite former anomalies: Neutral Moresnet. This place existed as somewhat of a no-man’s-land lodged firmly between sovereign neighbors from 1816 to 1920. Europe looked different as Napoleon’s empire dissolved. The victors negotiated amongst themselves…
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Condominium (not that kind)
A condominium is a concept in international law that describes a geographic area shared in equal sovereignty by two nations. As a practical matter, it creates a genuinely unusual and often impractical solution. A condominium isn’t distinctly part of any one nation but by agreement it’s within the control of both. So it has no…
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Border Hunting Related Adventures
I’d like to recommend a blog I ran across recently, Hugh’s Border Blog (“Border Hunting Related Adventures”). As regular readers of Twelve Mile Circle already know, borders, boundaries and divisions fascinate me to an unusual degree. That’s true whether they’re artificial or natural. Hugh seems to have the same interest, maybe even more so. He…
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Killiniq Island, Canada
Sometime I come across the most interesting topics while researching other topics, as was the case when I investigated the Labrador Boundary Dispute recently. That thread led me to the unusual significance of Killiniq Island in northeastern Canada. Killiniq Island is very small. It’s only about 13 X 29 kilomteres (8 X 18 miles). It…
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Labrador Boundary Dispute
No internal Canadian boundary extends further than the one between Québec and Newfoundland & Labrador. It extends more than 3,500 kilometres (2,100 miles). Yet, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the government has never officially surveyed or marked it on the ground. It has a history of dispute that continues through today. The southern boundary was…
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Cooch Behar Quadripoint Boundary Cross
UPDATE: India and Bangladesh resolved this situation by exchanging territory and removing the exclaves in 2015. A quadripoint occurs when four borders meet at a single point. For example this happens in the United States at the “Four Corners“. There, the states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado join together. In previous entries I’ve…