Category: Water
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Southernmost Northern Hemispheric Glacier
My trip to Alaska got me thinking about snow, ice and glaciation. There were glaciers aplenty on the Kenai Peninsula but that’s not unexpected at sixty degrees north of the equator. Where, I wondered, was the southernmost glacier in the northern hemisphere? It’s not the first time my mind has wandered in this basic direction.…
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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.…
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Suriname’s Disputed Borders
So this is Suriname. Go ahead and take a look at its shape relative to its neighbors, Guyana and French Guiana. These are the three Guianas. They all line up in a tiny, tidy row on the northeast corner of South American along the Atlantic Ocean. Suriname was once Dutch Guiana, a colony of the…
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Hurricane Katrina: Family Memories 5 Years Later
Has it really been five years already? The memories are starting to fade but they come back to life in ghostly form on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, when the news media forces me to pay attention to them. Our family was one of the lucky ones. I can’t and won’t compare our story to…
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Nuevo León’s Quirky International Border
The border between the United States and Mexico has been a frequent topic of news and conversation this summer. But let’s be clear; Twelve Mile Circle doesn’t generally focus on political issues. Even so, it does have an interest in situations created by geography such as the recent border pirate phenomenon. In fact it was…
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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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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…
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What Coast are They Guarding, Exactly?
Obituaries for the late Senator Robert Byrd remarked upon many things. These included his uncanny ability to deliver vast piles of Federal dollars to his home state of West Virginia. One can debate whether that’s a positive attribute or a negative, but either way it is hard to dispute that Sen. Byrd excelled at this…
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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…