Category: Water
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Turlough
Sometimes odd geography intersects with odd geology. One particularly rare example occurs on the island of Ireland. It’s called a Turlough or Turlach. Described very simply, it’s an ephemeral lake that appears during the wetter months of autumn through springtime and dries-up during the summer. Most of the examples happen west of the River Shannon.…
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Amerika
Readers posted a number excellent comments in response to the recent Right Place — Wrong Side of the Atlantic article. It’s not just England where place names migrated counter-intuitively against the tide away from the Americas, but to other parts of Europe as well. I noticed patterns as I savored the comments including the repetition…
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X to Nowhere
There are many places that have been labeled a “[Name You Favorite Transportation Infrastructure] to Nowhere”. Sometimes they exist to reference an abandoned site. Other times they focus on an improvement that seemed to benefit an unusually small constituency. I’ll mention two rather well-known instances briefly today. Naturally I will ignore the political issues involved…
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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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More Oddities in Washington, DC
It was great to be offered an opportunity to submit a guest post on Google Sightseeing, following in the footsteps of Kyle Kusch of The Basement Geographer. Google Sightseeing is one of my all-time favorite blogs and I read it often. So it was a pleasure working with its principal authors, Alex and James Turnbull.…
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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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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…
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Almost Landlocked
Trivia. Trick questions. Fun Stuff. I love a good, lazy Sunday. Landlocked, double landlocked, borderlocking and boundary crosses have occupied my thoughts at various moments over the years. However, what about places not landlocked, but just barely? We all have our favorite territories that touch the sea by the thinnest of margins. Which ones would…
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Tangier Island on ESPN
ESPN has been airing promotional videos featuring Tangier Island, a small marshy inhabited locale within Virginia’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay. The premise is that Tangier Island is the biggest (per capita) sports town in America. I’ve been getting some pretty impressive website traffic from Google as a result. For First Time Visitors: Welcome to…
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Northernmost Southern Hemispheric Glacier
I discussed the southernmost glaciers in the northern hemisphere in the last installment and found some surprising answers. Today I take the opposite tack and examine the northernmost glaciers in the southern hemisphere. Let’s start again by reviewing the worldwide glacier map I discovered on the U.S. Geological Survey site. Maybe Cayambe Again? To recap…