Canadian Geographic articles from January 1998

Canadian Geographic archives from January 1998

Counting each strike. (lightning)
January 1, 1998... What we know about lightning is only enough to tantalize: a typical strike carries 1,000 watts of power and temperatures of up to 30,000 [degrees] C. It is generated by huge electromagnetic fields, kills an average of seven people each year, and...

Fungal friends. (beneficial fungi)
January 1, 1998... Ecologists have long known that trees can be connected below ground by networks of beneficial fungi. The fungus-tree relationship is a classic example of symbiosis - trees provide the fungus with carbon and, in turn, the fungus captures essential...

Delicious damper dogs and hurt pie for dessert.
January 1, 1998... "Stog yer gob with prog!" Or, stuff your mouth with food is the kindly order a hospitable bayman might have given as he invited a guest to sit down to a Newfoundland outport meal late in the last century. His wife might have added, "Make a long...

Licence to whale. (includes related articles on whaling and the history of commercial whaling)
January 1, 1998... Will hunting bowheads help revive community and tradition for the Inuit of Nunavut? At a few minutes past five on a brilliant August afternoon in 1996, a bowhead whale was breathing its last on the waters of Repulse Bay, a remote, ice-freckled...

Whales of Canada. (includes related article on baleen whales)
January 1, 1998... Whales stir our emotions like no other living animals. They are mammals like us yet they inhabit a world that humans have never fully explored or understood. They achieve breathtaking proportions: the blue whale is the largest animal ever to...

The whaling trade.
January 1, 1998... Despite a relaxed moratorium on whale hunting, the Nuu-chah-nulth come under intense scrutiny for planning to harvest grey whales For centuries, Nuu-chah-nulth hunters along the west coast of Vancouver Island ventured onto the open sea every...

Birth of a berg. (Antarctic icecap)
January 1, 1998... The wrinkles and crevices of the Antarctic icecap are captured in one of more than 5,000 images "snapped" last fall by the Canadian Space Agency's Radarsat satellite as part of an international effort to map the frozen continent. At the centre of...

Photo finish: Canadian Geographic's 13th annual photo contest winners.
January 1, 1998... They come from all parts of Canada and a wide range of backgrounds and occupations. But what all the winners in Canadian Geographic's 13th annual photo contest have in common is a commitment to photography. Good pictures, it seems, are not the...

Blue ground: geologists decipher ancient clues to find diamonds in Canada's North. (Northwest Territories)(includes related articles on the Lac de Gras mine and industrial diamonds)
January 1, 1998... We stand on a hillside of caribou lichen and know that winter is coming. The chill September wind of the Barren Ground blows over the tundra of autumn yellows and crab-apple reds. It buffets the nearby geologists' drill shack and the fresh core...

The joy of lex. (lexicography)
January 1, 1998... Compiling Canada's unique words and usages is a dictionary-maker's labour of love "I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth . . ." Samuel Johnson, preface to his 1755 dictionary From the...

Delusions of Power.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Canadians have a ravenous appetite for electricity: only Norwegians consume more power per capita. Good thing, then, that we can take for granted both the stability of our supply and the fact that it is so reasonably priced. And we can take that...

Dictionary of Canadian Place Names.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... As times changed in politics and public sentiment, Berlin, Ont., changed its name to Kitchener, Stalin, Ont., switched to Hansen, and Gayside, Nfld., opted for Baytona. But Crotch Lake and Swastika, Ont., stayed as they were, and residents...

Jr. Nature Guides.(E-book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... As a reference source, Jr. Nature Guides sound like pure nirvana for a typical pre-teen faced with doing a school project on one of this series' three subjects - insects, birds, or amphibians and reptiles. Richly illustrated and packed with...

The world on an (CD) platter. (compact disc) (Software Review)(Evaluation)
January 1, 1998... A first-time user of this CD-ROM is apt to be quickly impressed with its staggering wealth of information. The Microsoft Encarta Virtual Globe is an atlas with 1.2 million place names as well as an encyclopedia of geography, culture, government,...

The Nature of Monarch Butterflies.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... No insect gets better press than the monarch butterfly - but none is more deserving. The monarch is common in southern Canada, easily recognized, strikingly beautiful and extraordinarily accomplished. It decorates our fields and gardens all...

Farmers struggle to stay green.
January 1, 1998... A self-described city slicker on a student budget, Ben Bradshaw picked a tough row to hoe with his doctoral thesis. Hoping to help Canadians understand how recent cuts in federal agricultural subsidies might affect farmers, Bradshaw wanted to...

Next door neighbourly. (Canadian community's racial tolerance)(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)
January 1, 1998... FRIENDSHIPS ACROSS THE BACKYARD FENCE BEGIN WITH AN ACT OF IMAGINATION My first neighbour was old Mrs. Perry. We lived down by the lake, on Stillwater Crescent, in Burlington, Ont., across the bay from Dofasco's smokestacks. I could stand by...

In living colour. (colors' role)(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)
January 1, 1998... COLOUR IS A CLOAK, A VOCABULARY, A COME-ON THAT LIGHTS UP THE WORLD We float in a sea of cosmic energy. Radio waves from distant stars beat past us with stately grace, their pulses spread along wavelengths that are several kilometres in length....

A street of villages. (Sainte-Catherine Street in Montreal, Quebec)(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)
January 1, 1998... SAINTE-CATHERINE STREET DIVERTS, DETAINS AND ENTERTAINS Some streets are dominated by institutions of learning, others by commerce, others still by churches or banks. Sainte-Catherine Street, which twines a narrow route from lower Westmount...

Invisible realm. (importance of cameras)(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)
January 1, 1998... Cameras have allowed scientists to peer into worlds hidden between the breadth of the universe and the atoms of a raindrop. Inside, they have discovered truth and unbidden beauty In 1674, when a Dutch microscopist and fabric merchant named...

Pacific portal. (British Columbia's coastline)(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)
January 1, 1998... ECCENTRICS OF ALL KINDS HAVE SOUGHT REFUGE IN THE MAYHEM OF BRITISH COLUMBIA'S COASTLINE Hidden here, somewhere on this haunted coast, was a fabled portal that tormented the sleep of Spanish kings and London merchants. The chimerical route to...

Arctic legend. (Inuit myths of the Arctic Ocean; tale of Sedna)(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)
January 1, 1998... THE MYTH OF SEDNA, GODDESS OF THE SEA ANIMALS The Arctic Ocean is the setting for many Inuit myths. One of the best known h the tale or Sedna, mother of the sea animals. Stories about Sedna were a means of passing knowledge, experience and...

Atlantic elegy. (poetry)(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)
January 1, 1998... A POET'S CELEBRATION AND REMEMBRANCE OF AN OCEAN OF ABUNDANCE I. THE SALT I admit it, perhaps only a poet could love the Atlantic's sombre palette: shale grey, bilge green, milt blue; the crimson of sky in the sailor's rhyme, memorizing the...

A Red Sea Rising: The Flood of the Century.(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By the Winnipeg Free Press staff Published by the Winnipeg Free Press 182 pp., $29.95 hardcover The flood that burst the banks of Red River last spring has released a smaller deluge on the shelves of Manitoba stores. You can hardly buy milk...

Faces of the Flood: Manitoba's Courageous Battle Against the Red River.(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Photographs by Tom Thomson, text by Jake MacDonald and Shirley Sandrel Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd. 120 pp., $39.95 hardcover The flood that burst the banks of Red River last spring has released a smaller deluge on the shelves of Manitoba...

Floods of the Centuries: A History of Flood Disasters in the Red River Valley 1776-1997.(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By J. M. Bumsted Great Plains Publications 144 pp., $19.95 softcover The flood that burst the banks of Red River last spring has released a smaller deluge on the shelves of Manitoba stores. You can hardly buy milk without seeing a book on the...

Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science.(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Ann Thomas et al. National Gallery of Canada/Yale University Press 256 pp., $45 softcover Beauty of another order is a lavishly illustrated inquiry that delivers on its subtide and opens fascinating apertures on the history, sociology and,...

Splendors of the Universe: A Practical Guide to Photographing the Night Sky.(Through the Lens With Canada's Best Photographers and Writers)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Terence Dickinson and Jack Newton Firefly Books Ltd. 144 pp., $40 hardcover The point is made in Splendors of the Universe that a camera can see more stars than a telescope. The secret is time exposure, which allows the invisibly dim light...