New Times Atlas Turning Greenland Green

Top 10 Unusual & Bizarre Place Names:

  • Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo Jump, tourist site (Canada)
  • Blue Eye (Missouri, USA)
  • Blubberhouses (Yorkshire, England)
  • Mafia Island (Tanzania)
  • Belcher Islands (Canada)
  • River Plonka (Poland)
  • Bing Bong (Australia)
  • Madonna (Maryland, USA)
  • Ogre (Latvia)
  • Truth or Consequences (New Mexico, USA)

Top 10 Places That Aren’t What They Seem:

  • The Aral Sea, now four lakes, 10% of the original area, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
  • Colombia, the country named after Christopher Columbus, even though he never went there
  • The Isle of Whithorn, a village in Galloway, Scotland
  • The Isle of Ely, an area of fens in Cambridgeshire, England
  • Rhode Island, a landlocked state in the USA, not surrounded by water
  • National Park, a town in New Zealand
  • Lochnagar, a mountain near Balmoral, in the Grampians, Scotland
  • Carrot River, a town in Saskatchewan, Canada
  • Hell, a town in Norway where temperatures can reach -20°C in winter
  • Coffee Creek, a town in Yukon, Canada

10 world weather extremes in the last century:

  • The highest shade temperature ever reached was 57.8°C/136°F in Al Aziziyah, Libya on 13 September 1922
  • The lowest screen temperature ever recorded was -89.2°C/-128.6°F at the Vostok Station in Antarctica on 21 July 1983
  • The driest place in the world is Desierto de Atacama in Chile with an annual average of 0.1mm/0.004 inches of rain
  • The wettest place in the world is Meghalaya, India, which gets 11,873mm/467.4 inches of rainfall in an average year
  • The greatest amount of snowfall in one year was recorded at 31,102mm or 1,224.5 inches in Mount Rainier, Washington USA between 19 Feb 1971 and 18 February 1972
  • The hottest place is Dalol, Ethiopia with an annual mean temperature of 34.4°C/93.9°F
  • Yuma, Arizona USA is the sunniest place in the world, with 90% or over 4,000 hours of sunshine a year. We know where we’re going on holiday!
  • Conversely, the place that gets the least amount of sunshine, with none at all for 182 days each year, is the South Pole
  • Mount Waialeale, Hawaii, USA is the rainiest place to visit – with up to 350 days per year. Tororo in Uganda gets the most thunder with an average of 251 days per year
  • The heaviest hailstones recorded weighed 1kg/2.21lb – that’s a bag of sugar – and hit the town of Gopalganj Bangladesh on 14th April 1986

Source: The Times World Atlases

2 thoughts on “New Times Atlas Turning Greenland Green”

  1. Please read the letter sent by a number of glaciologists to the New Times Atlas on my blog. Greenland’s mass loss stands at an observed 200 gigatonnes per year which is observed with NASA’s GRACE satellite, and this yields more like a 0.1% change over 12 years (presumed that we can extend the GRACE observation window). I’m afraid that there is an ugly misunderstanding because of different cartographic interpretations on the boundary of Greenland’s glaciers between two editions of the Times Atlas.

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