Posted by Chantal Déry
on Saturday, January 19, 2013
Students compete in Canadian Geographic's Geo Challenge.
After reading this week’s articles about Memorial University students’ lack of basic geographic knowledge, I realized: the story is the same in every province. In Quebec, it seems like geography makes the news only when the story is negative. Even then, people soon forget about the importance of geography. People don’t react when we cut an hour of geography teaching (after all, math is much more important). Yet, when Canadian students are unable to identify the Atlantic Ocean, there is public outcry. ...
During the summer of 2012, much of Canada along with Ontario recorded some of the hottest and driest conditions in recent memory. These conditions set the stage for one of the busiest fire seasons in the past decade. Ontario’s forests cover a land equivalent the size of Italy, Germany and the Netherlands combined, reaching nearly 71 million hectares of forest. As summer storms sweep through the north, electrical storms often follow, and with them come hundreds of lightning strikes. These strikes ...
Imagine you have a family of six, and they are all heavy eaters. And when I say heavy eaters, I mean heavy, like 3,000-plus calories a day. Now imagine that on your next family shopping trip you have to buy food for your family for the next 50 days. That's three meals a day, two bannocks a day, snacks, dessert and extra meals just in case. In sum, we are talking about over 200 dishes — there are no redos, no emergency trips back to the store and no straying from the plan. Oh, and did I mention ...
People often ask me how I choose my journeys. Quite simple really— I look at blank spots on the map of Canada and/or the world that I've never visited and then figure out a way to do an interesting and aesthetic self-propelled line through the landscape. Nunatsiavut and Nunavik are unknown to me, and having read books like Dillon Wallace's Lure of the Labrador Wild, it was an easy draw. Travelling through new wilderness landscapes makes every paddle stroke and corner fresh and new — it's personal ...
This photo has become nearly emblematic of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the non-profit educational organization that publishes Canadian Geographic magazine. Fun fact: it was taken on this day 20 years ago on the 150th anniversary of the Geological Survey of Canada, when a group of climbers took celebrations to a new level. They had decided to climb Mount Logan in the Yukon, whose actual height had never been measured. Surveyors had previously used a theodolite, a type of telescope, ...
