Category: Island

  • Ushuaia

    I can find good geo-topics practically anywhere. Often I derive inspiration from anonymous Twelve Mile Circle visitors who sprinkle digital trails behind them as they travel along. Every one of us leaves fingerprints behind whenever we tunnel through the Intertubes. It’s innocuous for the most part. Generally we don’t think much about it as we…

  • Chesapeake Bay Car Ferries

    I’ve noticed queries from various search engines that wonder whether car ferries cross the Chesapeake Bay. Apparently my United States Domestic Ferries page scores high on a related sets of queries but it doesn’t provide this specific answer. That’s because my page deals with the present situation and it doesn’t delve into the historical record.…

  • European Latitude Paradoxes

    There aren’t any great research efforts or revelations today, just some interesting observations about various lines of latitude in western Europe. I spend a lot of time simply looking at maps, at the patterns, and the logical contradictions that aren’t always apparent in our conventional thoughts. These are a few that have made me smile…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Åland Calling

    I suppose I can break my own rules. If I admit to being hypocritical, does that make me a marginally less contemptible hypocrite or at least a more self-aware one? Perhaps not, but that’s what’s going to happen on Twelve Mile Circle today. I’ve said repeatedly that I plan to combine reports of initial national…

  • Mount Pearl Mystery

    Why do I get such a disproportional number of visitors from Mount Pearl? It’s just a random small city in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. So is there something on Twelve Mile Circle that resonates with its 25,000 residents? Or does a small number of amazingly dedicated 12MC fans happen to live there? I am sure…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…