Category: Terrain
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That Initial Spark
Recently I got to thinking about what may have sparked my original interest in geo-oddities. I’m not sure what caused me to suddenly ponder this topic but I do have a ready answer. Like many of you, I recall numerous childhood hours spent happily pouring over maps, fascinated by the overlay of abstract lines upon…
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Tunnels, Bridges, Lifts and Inclines
I’d love to spend a few weeks on a narrowboat traveling through the canals and inland waterways of Great Britain. The nation offers literally thousands of miles of publicly-accessible routes with much of it interconnected into a single system, allowing one to experience the countryside at four miles per hour. This article isn’t so much…
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National Mall Flood Plan
The Washington Post featured an interesting map of the 100-year flood plain in the vicinity of the National Mall in Washington, DC, accompanying the article, Flood plan proposed to protect Washington Mall. It discusses a construction project that’s just about underway. When completed, it will keep a large crescent of land dry if the Potomac…
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New Highpoint for the Netherlands
My brief vacation in Vermont over the weekend must have distracted me. Somehow I completely missed the news about the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles on October 10, 2010. So it took an email message from loyal reader Greg to bring its true significance to my attention. Iām not referring to the dissolution of the…
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All Vowel Place Names
I come across various language trivia lists on the Intertubes all the time. They cover a thousand different topics but some of them focus on words of unnatural length composed solely of vowels. It doesn’t take much to entertain me but you already knew that. They’re somewhat amusing but they do tend to stretch towards…
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Islands Below Sea Level
Are there any islands below sea level? The question seemed absurd on its surface when I noticed it lodged in my web logs in the form of a search engine query. However I’ve learned to not be so dismissive. I’ve uncovered increasingly obscure artifacts and encountered surprisingly unusual situations in the years I’ve written Twelve…
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Colorado’s Paradox
It’s a paradox. How does a search engine decide that my website is a good source of information on the naming of the tiny town of Paradox, Colorado? I’d mentioned it only one time in a most innocuous way. I’d been examining a kink in the boundary between Colorado and neighboring Utah. Back then I…
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Kenai Adventure, Part 4
The visit to the Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula is winding down. Unfortunately I will be making my way back home over the next couple of days. Those of you who follow Twelve Mile Circle for its odd geography can rejoice. I’ll return to a regular schedule of useless trivia that only we enjoy. Well, unless something…
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Kenai Adventure, Part 3 – Wildlife
Most people probably drive down to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula for the scenery and the wildlife, and that’s also true for me. Sure, I enjoyed poking around some of the more unusual aspects of Kenai geography but that doesn’t mean I haven’t taken advantage of opportunities to marvel at the natural beauty that attracts every other…
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Kenai Adventure, Part 2
Whittier is a scenic town of perhaps two hundred people on the western side of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. There are dozens of picturesque villages dotting the coastline of the Kenai Peninsula so that’s not why I stopped here on a cold, rainy morning in July. No, I wanted to experience its rich concentration of…