Category: Elevation
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Select African Superlatives
I thought I’d lump another set of somewhat related items together as I continued to cull the enormous backlog of possible Twelve Mile Circle topics. However, they didn’t have much in common except that they all involved continental Africa. Two involved geographical observations and the other two related to geological oddities. All of them piqued…
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Even More Weird Placenames
Twelve Mile Circle has been on a bit of an odd placenames fixation as of late. I found a few more examples. However, they didn’t have enough of a story behind them to justify an entire article on any one of them. So I figured I’d resurrect an earlier series and title this “Even More…
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The Year in Geo-Adventures
The final article of 2015 felt like an appropriate time to reflect upon my personal geographic sightseeing adventures during the past year. I accomplished a lot in 2015, more than typical, and I recalled my travels fondly. Plus I figured that readership always dropped way off during the slow week between Christmas and New Years.…
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Lowest Landlocked Elevation – US States
The analysis of landlocked national lowpoints amused me so much that I decided to extend the exercise. So I switched to individual states within the United States. Once again I found a perfectly matching Wikipedia page so I didn’t have to recreate my own. Behold: a List of U.S. states and territories by elevation. Only…
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Lowest Positive Elevation
My examination of landlocked nations was only partially completed after the Lowest Landlocked Elevation article. Cracks in the earth were forbidding, often hellish places and I wanted to see how the next stack of nations differed, the landlocked places above sea level by the slimmest of margins. In contrast, those lowpoints tended to occur where…
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Lowest Landlocked Elevation
All sorts of interesting facts emerged as I mashed-up Wikipedia’s List of Elevation Extremes by Country with Landlocked Country. I wondered about the lowest elevation of a landlocked nation as I sorted through results in various ways. It turned out that there were several such countries with elevations below sea-level. Anybody could focus on elevation…
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Florida Highlands?
I’ve been to Florida many times and always considered it to be incredibly flat. It’s one of the flattest of all states with a mean elevation of only 100 feet (30 metres). Only Delaware edges it out. It definitely represents the smallest elevation span within its borders, extending from sea level to only 345 ft…
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Columbus Name Symmetry, Part 2
It doesn’t take much to please Twelve Mile Circle and I’d been particularly fascinated by the first name / surname symmetry of Cristóbal, Colón, Panamá. Never one to stop beating that dead horse I considered that Christopher Columbus had lots of other places named for him that remained unexplored. Certainly there must be plenty of…
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More Ancient Rivers
The readers of Twelve Mile Circle seemed to anticipate where this conversation might head when I wrote about the advanced age of the French Broad River recently. I’d actually intended to write a single article about really old rivers. Then I had to split it when it got too wordy. Naturally I’d seen that same…
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Ancient River
The recent Twelve Mile Circle journey to western North Carolina included one of my favorite activities, whitewater rafting. The boys were finally old enough to join us although we still kept it pretty easy on them. So we stuck primarily to a series of Class II and Class III rapids (moderate to intermediate). This made…