Many METARs enjoy mental puzzles. Here’s a real one with practical significance if you travel like @OrmontUS.
The gist of this article is that many people (including me) oversimplify our concept of geography. Canada is north of the U.S. – in fact, it’s the frozen north, right? South America, of course, is south of the U.S. so all its geographic areas are due south and the U.S. east and west coasts are east and west of the South American east and west coasts, right?
Wrong!
Atlanta, the capital of Georgia, is in fact to the west of Detroit, Michigan. Another surprise: New York City is well to the west of Chile’s capital Santiago. Not only is Santiago de Chile farther east than New York City, but the whole of South America is farther east than Michigan.
Canada extends as far south as California, Barcelona, and Rome. More than 70% of Canadians live below the 49th parallel.
More than 75% of Americans live east of the 100th meridian (Which bisects North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas from north to south). And yet the country’s most populous state (California) is west of that line.
The Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal is actually farther west than its Pacific entrance.
This article has some cool maps. It’s a reminder that we should look at a globe before traveling.
The runner of a youtube channel I follow lives in the UK. Last year, he made a trip to the US to visit several points of interest. As he laid out his schedule, the USians on the channel warned him he needed to allow more travel time between stops, as it appeared he had no grasp of how big the US is.
One of the early things I bought when my son started school was a globe. I’d frequently drag it out when the news started talking about things happening in far-flung places around the world. I think it may have helped him understand the world a bit, and I KNOW it helped me.
There’s very little more intriguing to me than a globe. So much information packed into such a relatively compact space. And there is some information on it that simply cannot be grasped by looking at flat paper maps.
A couple other tidbits that intrigue me.
Most of Europe is north of New York City.
The east of Brazil is closer to Africa than the distance from LA to NY
I was gifted a globe when I was about 10, or less. Biggest problem was the names of countries kept changing.
Fun tidbit. I was watching the movie version of “Mysterious Island” one night. When the leader of the group worked out their location, he gave the coordinates. I jotted them down, and looked them up on that globe. They were doomed, if they couldn’t get off the island themselves. They were really in the middle of nowhere.
I have loved maps since grade school when I had a 48 state puzzle and a globe with places named French West Equatorial Africa, Rhodesia, and Tanganyika. The remnants of that colonial history can still be seen on maps today. I play the map game Worldle, not to be confused with the NYT word game Wordle, every day. Whenever I see a country with strange straight borders, I know that I am looking at a country that had its origins in some city like London, Paris, or Berlin at some conference where the indigenous people of the lands being divided had little or no input about where the lines were being drawn. #Worldle#514 1/6 (100%) https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
“We’ve been taught to picture it like a conveyor belt—even in middle school and high school now, it’s taught this way—that shuts down when freshwater comes in from ice melt,” says Feng He, an associate scientist at UW–Madison’s Center for Climatic Research. However, building upon previous work, He says researchers are revising their understanding of the relationship between AMOC and freshwater from melting polar ice…
In a study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change , He and Oregon State University paleoclimatologist Peter Clark describe a new model simulation that matches the warmth of the last 10,000 years. And they did it by doing away with the trigger most scientists believe stalls or shuts down the AMOC…
“Without the freshwater coming in making the AMOC slow down in the model, we get a simulation with much better, lasting agreement with the temperature data from the climate record,” He says. “The important result is that the AMOC appears to be less sensitive to freshwater forcing than has long been thought, according to both the data and model.”
I wasn’t until I searched for French islands in the North Atlantic.
I don’t dismiss claims like this out of hand, especially with former empires who did a lot of colonizing in the couple of centuries after Columbus. France, Spain, England/Great Britain, the Dutch - all have little bits of their colonies spread around the globe.
@JimA759s your OP said “Maine” and those islands are in Canada. Besides, the distance from France to Saint Pierre and Miquelon is 4,381 kilometers. This air travel distance is equal to 2,722 miles.
Sounds like your feeling for geography needs a little reinforcing. Recommend spending quality time with a globe.
