Canadian Geographic articles from March 1996

Canadian Geographic archives from March 1996

Sick bay for sick buildings.(Geo Watch)
March 1, 1996... Like a spotless operating room ready for surgery, a glistening, stainless-steel chamber sits - pristine and splendid - at the centre of a nondescript National Research Council laboratory in Ottawa. Tubes and pipes feed the room with air that has...

Double-crossing the Lions Gate. (Vancouver bridge)
March 1, 1996... For the last 57 years, crossing Burrard Inlet via Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge has offered drivers a dramatic revelation. Approaching the bridge from Stanley Park, curtains of old-growth Douglas fir and western red cedar part to reveal the...

Ice fog: the frigid veil of winter.
March 1, 1996... When each breath you exhale leaves a trail of frozen mist, you don't have to look at the thermometer to know it's uncomfortably cold outside. At -40 [degrees] C, warm breath condenses instantly into ice crystals, forming what meteorologists call...

Viking echoes in a Canadian surname. (Dingwall)
March 1, 1996... How many of us know much at all about the meaning of our last names? Yet surnames are the most personal words in our home and native tongue. They have come from all the major languages, and their roots reach back into the verbal loam of every...

Polar opposites.
March 1, 1996... Contrasting North Pole adventurers Peary and Weber: the dress code has changed, and so has the menu Between the North Pole expeditions of Robert Peary and Richard Weber lies almost a century of discovery and invention. Sure, both men endured...

Barrens oasis. (Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary)
March 1, 1996... Dene and Inuit will soon manage the Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary, the continent's largest tract of fully protected wilderness What is wilderness? Is it both a physical place and a concept, or perhaps an attitude? The very word conjures up a sense...

When the earth moves. (Great Lemieux Landslide)
March 1, 1996... The Great Lemieux Landslide consumed fields, trees, a road and the confidence of many residents Steve Washam was so intent on finding a good spot to fish one afternoon in June 1993 that he didn't realize his world was in perilous motion. The...

Warpaths: Travels of a Military Historian in North America.
March 1, 1996... North Americans imagine their continent to be a haven of peace. Indeed, the New World has long been seen as a refuge from the political and ecclesiastical tyranny usually identified with European colonialism. But war was common in North America...

Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto.
March 1, 1996... Visitors to Toronto, the ubiquitous Welsh travel writer Jan Morris once observed, often find it a curiously closed city, impassive to the outsider, reserved to the point of brusque silence. It is, she decided, "the most undemonstrative city I...

Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History.
March 1, 1996... Charles Darwin's reputation has undergone a score of mutations since Stephen Jay Gould began writing his monthly column, "This View of Life," in Natural History magazine in January 1974. In just over two decades, Darwinism has gone from being...

Our Boots: An Inuit Women's Art.
March 1, 1996... If you've ever suffered the agony of leaky boots during the January thaw, you know - first foot - the limitations of modern mass manufacturing. Try as they might, the visionaries of the footwear industry have had a heck of a time coming up with...

Imaginary landscape. (poem)
March 1, 1996... Then he heard his mother say hesitantly, "Our stream, does it run to that lake, then?" and his father telling her that it ran to a river called "Black" and that it, in turn, ran to the lake below Madoc. "The lake," his mother asked, "does it...

More schools take up the 'Challenge.' (Great Canadian Geography Challenge)
March 1, 1996... Canadian students by the thousand are brushing up on their geography for the second annual Great Canadian Geography Challenge. So far this year, more than 1,100 schools have registered for the bilingual competition - a 20 percent increase from...

A capital name from a fur-trading people. (Ottawa)
March 1, 1996... OTTAWA - Canada's national capital spreads its toponymic roots deep into the woods of Ontario and Michigan once inhabited by people of an Algonquian nation called Outaouak. Samuel de Champlain met the Outaouak in 1615 as he explored the French...