Firstly, congratulations to the Passion4Geography team and their programme on Radio.4 this morning. Alan has produced a transcript of the programme and you can listen again on the website. Particularly like the article about how lack of private space is ‘pushing’ young people to develop communities on the net. I reckon the Pilot is ripe for a Cybergeography unit, if the powers are reading…

Hopefully you all had a good New Year, despite the weather, lots of photos on Flickr showing the celebrations, the one of London is from Stevie H. The B.B.C. also has some great images and a video showing New Year celebrations around the world. Thanks to Ewan who pointed me to these brilliant panoramic images of celebrations in some of the World’s major cities, very stunning. Not one for Ilkeston though . Some of the French took a different view of New Year and demonstrated against it! I’m thinking of how to combine these resources into a settlement introduction… more soon.

The Independent, paper of Geography, took a more sobering viewpoint of the New Year, warning about potential extreme weather events, as climate change combines with the El Nino weather system. Alan this week posted the disturbing news that part of the Arctic ice shelf over Canada has calved, apart from the potential hazard to shipping from ice bergs and rising sea-levels, should we also worry about dilution of the North Atlantic Drift? There is an interesting Google Maps mash-up of potential flood levels, remember scientists have suggested that the loss of the northern ice sheet, could result in an estimated 7 metre sea-rise, Antarctica could potentially add an additional 62 metres. Not convinced about the accuracy of the map, look at London, the Thames Barrier couldn’t withstand such a rise; but a nice visual representation of the potential hazard. Scaremongering, or it is similar to the calls about the threat to the Amazon and the Ozone layer in the 1980’s, that resulted in effective global action?

On a happier note, the B.B.C. has some nice images of Summer life on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Well I suppose tomorrow, after some dental treatment, I should prepare myself, no offence to student readers, but I’m not particularly looking forward to it.

Happy New Year.

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Written on Mon, 01 January 2007 at 10:32 pm

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