Regional Geography

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"War has displaced half the people in Syria. Many are part of a larger migrant and refugee crisis in Europe." http://wp.me/P2dv5Z-1YS 

As New Zealand prepares to change its flag, Phil Mercer examines how a country’s cultural identity can be represented by a single design.

They ranked hundreds of towns for such magnetic qualities as vibrant main streets, coffee bars, and an eco-friendly vibe. And while plenty of those features may contribute to a town’s unique personality, the top 20 winners in the quirky category take it a step further. One highly ranked town is an unlikely hotbed for Tibetan monks, while another largely forgoes Valentine’s Day to celebrate Charles Darwin instead.

The U.S. has three times as many gun homicides as other wealthy nations.

Recently, the subject of the varying quality of pizza by region has been raised, thanks in part to discussions of Washington, D.C., which has been accused, disparagingly and incorrectly, of being unable 'to produce a single decent slice of pizza.'  Any major metropolitan area can, with sufficient strength of will and character, and a good source of filtered water, produce a "single decent slice of pizza." (Or, speaking more accurately, a single decent pizzeria.)  Similarly, pointing to single restaurants and pizzerias is not an adequate rebuttal to charges of poor overall pizza production. The ability to support a single decent pizzeria should be regarded not as a point of pride but, if anything, as the bare minimum for qualification as an American city.

Daniel Defoe's famous novel was inspired by the true story of an 18th Century castaway, but the real Robinson Crusoe island bears little resemblance to its fictional counterpart.

MEXICO CITY shook and rattled on April 18th 2014, as a 7.2-magnitude earthquake sent people scurrying under tables for shelter. Tremors are a frequent scare for the...

"A massive chart ranks the world's most overweight countries"

-Source: Martinez R. Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity visualization.

Sometimes confetti-wielding protesters have a point, even if they struggle to make it themselves.

That was the case during the the European Central Bank's otherwise sleepy press conference on Wednesday, when 21-year old protester Josephine Witt, who was clad in a t-shirt emblazoned with the words "End the ECB ***-tatorship," jumped onto the stage and showered ECB chief Mario Draghi with confetti and a manifesto decrying the "overwhelmingly powerful external environment of the ECB's monetary policy." She was quickly carried off, and taken into custody before being released without charges.

So we asked a former U.S. student who went to live in Africa to come up with 11 factoids — a crash course on the continent. Note: We will not test you on these facts.

A punishing dust storm blasted east central Iraq and western Iran Tuesday.

The UK is currently experiencing climbing property prices and a growing housing demand coupled with a shortage of new housing supply. An amplified microcosm of all these problems can be found in Lond

Those on the other side of the fence are not so happy.

The Ring of Fire is a string of volcanoes and sites of seismic activity, or earthquakes, around the edges of the Pacific Ocean.

Mecca is the destination for Muslim pilgrims. To house the millions of worshippers, massive hotels are rising at a furious pace, upsetting those seeking to protect the city's traditional architecture.

Jonah Fisher has been to Rakhine state in Myanmar to meet Rohingya migrants who are being forced to return home - but at a cost.

Fremont police say vandals attacked an inflatable dam on Alameda Creek that resulted in the loss of nearly 50 million gallons of water.

Tesfai Kidane, an Eritrean migrant, made his way to Israel, where he was detained. He returned to Africa. It's not clear what happened next, but he was killed recently by the Islamic State in Libya.

"Every day, the supervolcano lurking under Yellowstone National Park belches up 45,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide — much more than could be produced by the known magma chamber that lies just below the surface. They’ve discovered a magma pool containing enough hot rock to fill the Grand Canyon 11 times, the researchers report online April 23 in Science.

Geophysicist Hsin-Hua Huang of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues found the missing magma by carefully tracking the seismic waves from nearly 5,000 earthquakes that echoed off the supervolcano’s insides.

While large, the researchers say, the reservoir is only 2 percent melted rock and is too deep to contribute to a supervolcanic eruption akin to the explosion that formed the Yellowstone caldera around 640,000 years ago. The estimated odds of an impending Yellowstone doomsday remain exceedingly slim, the authors assure."

The author Alastair Humphreys preaches the gospel of short, perspective-shifting bursts of travel closer to home.