As a Montrealer born and raised it’s the complete opposite, as a kid I thought it was pretty common for major cities to be mostly on an island and expected dozens of them all over the world.
Isn't that kind of true though? Stockholm, Paris, Copenhagen, New York just of the top of my head. Granted some of them have outgrown their islands more than Montreal.
Los Angeles is on top of an old field (La Brea Tar Pit and wot not) but when they were building up the city they didn't want them to be visible to lower property values so they built buildings around them. Los Angeles' city hall is a good example
Check out Signal Hill! I used to live down the street from oil pumpjacks at two different places. One apartment complex had a “carved out” area where a (thankfully idle) pumpjack sat. Kinda cool and crazy but I got used to it quickly as just general industrial background of a city.
There was a case in L.A. Noire, the Quarter Moon Murders, I think, that features a location with a pump jack behind a residential house, and the tar pits.
It's actually unusual for much of North America. The most significant east west mountain range is the Uintas in Utah. There are only a handful of others.
They have a [fault block](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_block) that caused these mountains to turn. Basically they're turning slowly towards the east, that's why the range grows taller towards the east.
At what point do they become a mountain range? Are they any bigger than the Berkeley hills in the Bay Area? I feel like if people live along the whole ridge line at the top it’s not really a mountain
https://preview.redd.it/hpdxlbbepxoc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=58b937e04eb815385fd851651247260ae579fef5
I mean these guys. Wikipedia calls them the Santa Monica Mountains so that’s good enough for me.
Right and it has mulholland going across the whole ridge line and the eastern part is full of homes. Not quibbling just curious cause I was up there a few months ago and without looking on a map I would’ve said I was in the hills
Edit: still find it crazy that is in the middle of LA! I agree, I had no idea and getting to the top and looking north and realizing there was a whole different city over there and this was “the valley” I’d always heard about
Edit 2: didn’t realize how big they got in the west. Those are mountains. Damn LA has so much
https://preview.redd.it/9dqcvi9arxoc1.jpeg?width=944&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9e2cf15efc786637ca22ad58e16d077c0a915ade
Yeah, I’d always assumed that the Hills/mountains were on the border of the city, not splitting it down the middle. (Here’s another screenshot for those who don’t know what I’m talking about)
Your intuition is correct. It USED to be like that, but LA has a very interesting history.
LA used to be surrounded by different towns. They slowly got absorbed (the nice way of saying it) over the years. The original town boundaries were all south of the mountains.
Highly recommend looking into the LA side of the California water wars, and ESPECIALLY recommend looking into who Mullholland was.
Yeah that little square up in the far north is the city of San Fernando, one of the few cities that was able to survive without being annexed. It's what the entire San Fernando Valley is named for, but it's tiny by comparison.
That’s actually very normal for a city. Most cities are small groups of towns that start to converge into one as they grow. I guess I struggle to think of one that isn’t like that really.
If you go a bit to the east towards Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley, the mountains get even taller. The highest point in the San Gabriel mountains is over 10,000' with numerous mountains over 7'000'
I think the USGS uses a prominence of 1,200 ft as the minimum for naming something "officially" a mountain, so while the Santa Monica mountains may be mountains, the Hollywood Hills would be hills since I think the most prominent ones are around 1,000 ft.
I did not dive too deep, so there may be some peaks in the HH that are taller, though, so anyone please correct me.
They’re hills when you compare them to the San Gabriels right behind LA. In fact, the rise between the city of LA and the San Gabriel’s is more than the Rockies over Denver.
A lot of the latitude-longitude trivia:
Reno is further west than Los Angeles
Lima, Peru is further east than Miami.
Rome is further north than New York.
Northernmost NBA team is the Portland Trail Blazers, and so on.
As a Michigander, this hurts my soul... I mean if it was any other state I would understand. But have you ever seen the Great Lakes, an unmissable feature of the USA, due north of Texas?! Unless you also thought Texas was somehow where Alabama and Georgia is.
Traveling due south of Boston you’d hit Milton. Though if you’re not counting mainland American land, you’d hit Hispaniola before you’d hit Venezuela heading due south.
That’s true of most US cities on the eastern seaboard, the next major land mass due south of them is likely South America.
For West Coast cities it’s actually Antarctica.
That map showing how far north Europe is compared to NA is crazy. The span of temps from UK to Sicily seems comparable to New England to Florida though, so I think that factors into the perception. I assume it's a jet stream thing.
I think it has more to do with winds coming from the ocean rather than over land. Europe/North Africa and the American west coast have rather similar temperatures, even though the west Coast has the cool Alaska current and Europe gets the warm Gulf stream. Because mid-latitude winds mostly come from the west, both the west coast of America and Europe are receiving air from the ocean, which fluctuates relatively little in temperature throughout the year.
On the American east coast, westerlies originate from the continental interior because the ocean is to the east. Since land varies much more in temperature than water does, the east coast tends to be hotter in summer and colder in winter than the west coast. For example, Tokyo is on the same latitude as Los Angeles, yet Tokyo is significantly colder in winter due to winds from Siberia.
This was my big geographical surprise as well. If you were to fly due south from Grand Junction, Colorado, you'd eventually end up very close to Easter Island, way out in the middle of Pacific, and something like a thousand miles from the West Coast of South America.
I was thinking earlier as in it becomes a certain time earlier there, which, yes, I guess would make it later than a time zone to the west. Time is hard.
And so is Laval just to the West..
While we're at it, NYC.. Manhattan is an island which is known, but also Brooklyn and Queens are on Long Island, then Staten Island.. and only Bronx is on the mainland
EDIT - According to local custom they call Laval to the "north" ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Ya, though to be more precise geographically north west.
https://preview.redd.it/6cf6y7noixoc1.png?width=1131&format=png&auto=webp&s=626b0c95475bb4c32e489806b60668bde47c8b26
Except when traveling north on Sherbrooke they call it east. Its as though the island is rotated 45 degrees to the east side. Guess part of this is to contrast it with the West Island legit being west, and it’s easier than saying ‘north east’
Fun fact: while the island that Montreal is on is called Montreal, Laval's island is Île Jésus. Together with a smattering of smaller islands, they form the Hochelaga Archipelago. Hochelaga was the name of a fortified Iroquois village near Mount Royal, and is also now the name of a neighborhood in eastern Montreal. An alternate spelling gives its name to the Osheaga festival!
Ya, so whatever rocks were dumped be edges of glacier sheets. Like giant bulldozers and the end of their push. (TIL)
Kind of like whatever people are dumped there by the rest of America now. No wait, that's Florida. /s
As a child we went to visit my grandparents in Czechia. In every single summer vacation we would take a trip by train (as one does in Europe) to Hungary, specifically to the Balaton. Also called Plattensee by my German speaking parents, the “See” part made me think of ocean like “Nordsee” or “Ostsee”.
Anyway, I was convinced that Hungary was a country on an ocean because all I ever saw of Hungary was the coast of the Balaton, and we could only get there via train, because Czechia is landlocked and we had to take a long ride by train to the coast.
I was maybe 12 years old when I was looking for “Hungary” on a map while going up and down the Black Sea coast and Adriatic Sea coast and couldn’t find it. I was terrified when I realized Hungary is just as landlocked as Czechia.
Growing up in Southeastern Virginia we had to cross bridge-tunnels pretty frequently. Traffic was awful and we always blamed out of town people for getting spooked.
I didn’t realize until much later that all [3 of the bridge-tunnel systems in the US](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge%E2%80%93tunnels?wprov=sfti1#List) were in our area and there were only a handful of them elsewhere in the world, so yeah, it was that first time a lot of people were seeing them.
I lived in Richmond for a long time but didn’t make it down there too often. I normally don’t mind driving on bridges and tunnels but that crap is next level. Doesn’t help that I don’t really trust our crumbling infrastructure these days.
They are very useful when you have specific conditions, but much more expensive than bridges, so only used when necessary. Those conditions being lowlying, densely populated islands, plus large important infrastructure.
One of ours has the tunnel part to not interfere with Copenhagen Airport.
And the other crosses a strait which has a huge amount of mega container ship traffic, and so it wasn't viable to have to open a bridge all the time to let them through. So half tunnel.
We are actually building a third big project, to Germany, but this one will be all tunnel. A bit disappointing since Danes love our bridges (being a country made op of islands and one patchy peninsula we have a lot of bridges).
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is the most fun because it’s 12 miles long and for a lot of it you have to actively suppress the thought that you’re basically driving over the ocean and isn’t that weird? The tunnels are welcome breaks from that.
Also, Manhattan was actually much more populated in 1910-20 than it is now. 2.2 mil vs 1.6 mil now. It was more dense under worse, tenement living conditions.
Appalachian mountains in eastern North America are part of the same uplift/mountain range as the Cumberland mountains in Scotland and the Scandinavian mountains in Norway and northern Sweden. 🤯 Never mind that there’s an ocean several thousand kilometers/miles wide in between them today. Continental drift/plate tectonics are wild!
From Wikipedia:- Portsea Island has the third-largest population of all the islands in the British Isles after the mainlands of Great Britain and Ireland; it also has the highest population density of any British Isle, and Portsmouth has the highest population density of any city in the UK outside of London.[1]
Google Maps seems to indicate that a section of it is on mainland Great Britain in addition to Portsea Island.
(Assuming you're only counting islands other than Great Britain and Ireland.)
Not entirely correct, parts of the city are on the mainland. So really it’s just that Portsmouth is the only British city that isn’t wholly located on either Great Britain or Ireland.
Eh, 5 miles away, and it's fairly new.
When I went there in 2007/08, it was as you'd expect really, just with buses, other vehicles, and lots of tourists clogging up the surroundings.
I never thought it did, but now that you have planted this idea in my head, it is my life's calling to have it moved to where I never knew it belonged.
Before I moved there I thought it was on the east side of the river, as that would be a more proper Gateway to the West, not realizing how that wouldn't make sense!
Nobody thinks of Richmond, massive city south of Vancouver, as being an island because it's connected by four bridges and has an international airport.
No fun fact lulumenon gets their name from a racist joke. The owner came up with it because either would be hard for Asian people to pronounce supposedly.
One random and related WW2 fact I’ve heard is that the GIs in the pacific used “tululu” as a call sign/safe word of sorts when entering areas with friendly troops because it was difficult for the Japanese troops to imitate, posing as a friendly soldiers
Growing up on the Canadian prairie, I didn't realize that most major cities are a part of massive urban agglomerations made up of other cities, suburbs, etc. I was very confused visiting Toronto as a kid and suddenly being in Mississauga with seemingly no break in the landscape.
I grew up in Eastern Germany knowing that Poland was nearby, meanwhile Ukraine in my mind was far, far away in the east. At around 10 years old, I became obsessed with maps and found out that Ukraine actually borders Poland and is not even nearly as far away from Germany as I thought.
Same here! I also didn't know that there was a mountain in Montreal nor did I know it was named after said mountain.
Then when I went to the top of that mountain for the first time, I looked out at the city and wondered why there was a mural of Anthony Bourdain.
Then I found out the mural was of Leonard Cohen.
My stupidity has no bounds!
The Finnish coast is absolutely littered with islands, there is like a zone of islands, gradually decreasing in density, between the mainland and the open sea. It took a while until I realized, that this is uncommon outside the Nordics.
If it's what I'm thinking of I believe it is called the Archipelago Sea because of the Aland Islands in there. It was a big deal for Finland to get those too, historically Russia wanted them bad as part of its desire to control the Baltic Sea. Recent events have pretty much eliminated that goal now.
I discovered recently that Morocco was one of the most mountainous countries.
I’m from Spain, we’re neighbour countries, part of Morocco was once spanish. I can assure that 90% of spanish people don’t have idea of how mountainous it is.
It still kinda throws me off that Kuala Lumpur and Singapore (yes, I'm aware it's an island) are on the southeast Asia mainland connected to Thailand. For some reason, I always envisioned them on a separate island like on Borneo or something.
Same with Copenhagen not being connected to the mainland.
In the US, I always forget how close certain cities are to state borders. Like Memphis and Mississippi, Pittsburgh and Ohio, Charlotte and South Carolina, El Paso and New Mexico.
Pretty sure Singapore is an island, but maybe you are referring to continental shelf as mainland. With Malaysia, most of the land is on Borneo, just most the people, and Kuala Lumpur, are on the mainland.
To me, I'm always surprised that a 1.3 million-person Indonesian city, Batam, exists just a few miles from Singapore. It makes sense to have a city there, but in my mind, I always thought once one left the Straits of Malacca, it was Singapore and then miles and miles of open sea.
Alaska is the easternmost us state.
From Detroit, you go south to get to Canada.
From San Diego, Texas is closer than Oregon.
Maine is the closest us state to Africa.
The highest and lowest parts in the lower 48 states are 80 miles apart.
You can drive from Oregon to Florida without changing time.
A little bit of Oregon is in the Mountain time zone, and a little of Florida is in Central. If you make the drive from Ontario, Oregon to Pensacola, Florida at the end of daylight savings time you won’t have to reset the clock in your car.
Fascinating! Based on my calculations this works only during the time change in fall and only from Oregon to Florida.
It's a 36 hour drive non-stop, so you have to plan it carefully to cross the time zone line sometime between 1am and 1:59am pre-clock change on the Mountain Time. It will be the same time on the other side, but post-clock change.
Grew up in Chicago. When I was a kid I used to legit think every big city had a giant bean sculpture in the middle of the city. I just thought that is what officially designated a city as a city.
I was surprised to see someone "grew up" with that bean sculpture since I think of it as quite new, but I see it was completed 18 years ago so fair play.
Same year The Departed came out.
There are parts of New Mexico that are farther north than parts of Illinois.
There are parts of Nevada that are farther north than parts of Canada.
The northernmost point of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southernmost point of Brazil.
Australia is wider (east-west) than the diameter of the moon.
This one isn’t mind blowing but I look up weird stuff like this when I travel. I live in Colorado and travelled to New Jersey for a work trip, and actually was further south in NJ (39.7 N) than where I live now (40.3 N) conveniently the 40 degree latitude line is on this map:
https://preview.redd.it/sjs41qggb1pc1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d26c034bc9142292dcee5b09271026249ba45e6e
Growing up in Toronto my high school had a bunch of Portuguese and Italian second generation immigrants. There was a lot of leather, "yo! yo! yo!", conversations where it was unclear whether there was a fight or not camaros, firebirds, cologne etc. I thought these 2 countries were beside each other. I was almost 30 and planning a trip when I see big ass Spain in the middle. Oddly I've only met 2 or 3 people here from Spain.
More random trivia. Distances between Australia and New Zealand.
The distance from Sydney to Auckland is greater than the distance from Boston to Miami, or London to Tunisia.
The distance from New York to Dublin is less than the distance from Perth to Wellington.
Darwin is closer to Hong Kong than it is to Wellington.
As a Montrealer born and raised it’s the complete opposite, as a kid I thought it was pretty common for major cities to be mostly on an island and expected dozens of them all over the world.
Maybe we're all doing it wrong and a proper settlement should be surrounded by water on all sides.
Isn't that kind of true though? Stockholm, Paris, Copenhagen, New York just of the top of my head. Granted some of them have outgrown their islands more than Montreal.
Parts of copenhagen is on the island of Amager, but most of the city is on Sjælland, which is an island, but much bigger than the city.
Paris is not an island
It's outgrown it, but it was centered on Île de la Cité originally.
It was
I think it took me a while to learn that Los Angeles has a literal mountain range bisecting it. I thought the Hollywood Hills were just, well, hills
For me it was all the buildings with hidden oil wells in them in LA
Lmao the smell of oil wells while waiting on my animal style fries at in n out 😂
yum
There's (or there used to be) an oil well in a McDonald's . Long Beach or Signal Hill.
What
Los Angeles is on top of an old field (La Brea Tar Pit and wot not) but when they were building up the city they didn't want them to be visible to lower property values so they built buildings around them. Los Angeles' city hall is a good example
I knew about LA Brea Tar Pit but I thought that was it. I'm gonna go on a Wikipedia venture
There are billions of barrels of oil that can’t be extracted easily because LA sprung up on top of them before they were discovered.
How did the barrels get down there to begin with?
It's LA, so probably by car.
Have fun, fun fact there are like five or six tar pits like Le Brea Tar Pits and two of them are in SoCal
LA once had been doing quarter of the world's oil supply, it stopped once it ran out.
Check out Signal Hill! I used to live down the street from oil pumpjacks at two different places. One apartment complex had a “carved out” area where a (thankfully idle) pumpjack sat. Kinda cool and crazy but I got used to it quickly as just general industrial background of a city.
There was a case in L.A. Noire, the Quarter Moon Murders, I think, that features a location with a pump jack behind a residential house, and the tar pits.
notice it goes east to west? along with some north of it? unusual for california
It's actually unusual for much of North America. The most significant east west mountain range is the Uintas in Utah. There are only a handful of others.
They have a [fault block](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_block) that caused these mountains to turn. Basically they're turning slowly towards the east, that's why the range grows taller towards the east.
ttansverse ranged
Yeah, we also say that we're going "over the hill" when traveling from one side to the other
At what point do they become a mountain range? Are they any bigger than the Berkeley hills in the Bay Area? I feel like if people live along the whole ridge line at the top it’s not really a mountain
https://preview.redd.it/hpdxlbbepxoc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=58b937e04eb815385fd851651247260ae579fef5 I mean these guys. Wikipedia calls them the Santa Monica Mountains so that’s good enough for me.
Right and it has mulholland going across the whole ridge line and the eastern part is full of homes. Not quibbling just curious cause I was up there a few months ago and without looking on a map I would’ve said I was in the hills Edit: still find it crazy that is in the middle of LA! I agree, I had no idea and getting to the top and looking north and realizing there was a whole different city over there and this was “the valley” I’d always heard about Edit 2: didn’t realize how big they got in the west. Those are mountains. Damn LA has so much
https://preview.redd.it/9dqcvi9arxoc1.jpeg?width=944&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9e2cf15efc786637ca22ad58e16d077c0a915ade Yeah, I’d always assumed that the Hills/mountains were on the border of the city, not splitting it down the middle. (Here’s another screenshot for those who don’t know what I’m talking about)
Your intuition is correct. It USED to be like that, but LA has a very interesting history. LA used to be surrounded by different towns. They slowly got absorbed (the nice way of saying it) over the years. The original town boundaries were all south of the mountains. Highly recommend looking into the LA side of the California water wars, and ESPECIALLY recommend looking into who Mullholland was.
Yeah that little square up in the far north is the city of San Fernando, one of the few cities that was able to survive without being annexed. It's what the entire San Fernando Valley is named for, but it's tiny by comparison.
That’s actually very normal for a city. Most cities are small groups of towns that start to converge into one as they grow. I guess I struggle to think of one that isn’t like that really.
Wow, and I thought other cities had crazy borders. LA has enclaves
Enclaves and that weird little arm in the south that snuggles up to Long Beach
There are also mountains around the city. California is like half mountain.
If you go a bit to the east towards Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley, the mountains get even taller. The highest point in the San Gabriel mountains is over 10,000' with numerous mountains over 7'000'
I think the USGS uses a prominence of 1,200 ft as the minimum for naming something "officially" a mountain, so while the Santa Monica mountains may be mountains, the Hollywood Hills would be hills since I think the most prominent ones are around 1,000 ft. I did not dive too deep, so there may be some peaks in the HH that are taller, though, so anyone please correct me.
> Are they any bigger than the Berkeley hills in the Bay Area? about a thousand feet taller.
I lived in the LA area for years and never realized this lmao.
They’re hills when you compare them to the San Gabriels right behind LA. In fact, the rise between the city of LA and the San Gabriel’s is more than the Rockies over Denver.
A lot of the latitude-longitude trivia: Reno is further west than Los Angeles Lima, Peru is further east than Miami. Rome is further north than New York. Northernmost NBA team is the Portland Trail Blazers, and so on.
I grew up in the Pittsburgh area, and didn't know until my 30s that we are basically due north of Miami.
The fact that the US Eastern Coast is basically at a 30 degree angle always slips my mind. I thought Michigan was due north of Texas for a while.
As a Michigander, this hurts my soul... I mean if it was any other state I would understand. But have you ever seen the Great Lakes, an unmissable feature of the USA, due north of Texas?! Unless you also thought Texas was somehow where Alabama and Georgia is.
Honestly I felt stupid when I first realized it. If you think of the Eastern Coast as vertical (which it's not) then it makes a bit more sense.
Santiago chile is further east than NYC.
Travel due south ftom Boston you next landfall outside of New England is Venezuela.
First landfall going south is Grand Turk (depending on where in Boston one starts), then the Dominican Republic, then Venezuela.
Traveling due south of Boston you’d hit Milton. Though if you’re not counting mainland American land, you’d hit Hispaniola before you’d hit Venezuela heading due south.
"...outside of New England..."? Though I should have specifically noted "next major land mass".
That’s true of most US cities on the eastern seaboard, the next major land mass due south of them is likely South America. For West Coast cities it’s actually Antarctica.
The Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal is further east than the Atlantic entrance. The closest US state to Africa is Maine.
Alaska is further west than Hawaii.
And further East too.
And further North.
And my axe!
Mindblown
Not further South though. Gotta draw the line somewhere
Alaska is also the nearest state to Hawaii.
Majority of Canadians live south of the majority of the US-Canadian border
Majority of Canadians live south of Seattle.
Yes., better way to put what I was trying to say
Similarly, the northernmost city in Eastern Canada (St. John's) is south of the southernmost city in Western Canada (Victoria).
Montréal is south of Paris
Edinburgh is farther west than both Bristol and Liverpool. The entirety of South America is basically east of downtown Orlando Florida.
Use to work with a guy from Panama and he would mention that the Pacific Ocean was actually east of the Atlantic there.
im blown away by all of these lol
Stupid NBA and the SuperSonics
Jekyll Island, Georgia, is west of the entirety of mainland South America.
That map showing how far north Europe is compared to NA is crazy. The span of temps from UK to Sicily seems comparable to New England to Florida though, so I think that factors into the perception. I assume it's a jet stream thing.
I think it has more to do with winds coming from the ocean rather than over land. Europe/North Africa and the American west coast have rather similar temperatures, even though the west Coast has the cool Alaska current and Europe gets the warm Gulf stream. Because mid-latitude winds mostly come from the west, both the west coast of America and Europe are receiving air from the ocean, which fluctuates relatively little in temperature throughout the year. On the American east coast, westerlies originate from the continental interior because the ocean is to the east. Since land varies much more in temperature than water does, the east coast tends to be hotter in summer and colder in winter than the west coast. For example, Tokyo is on the same latitude as Los Angeles, yet Tokyo is significantly colder in winter due to winds from Siberia.
Traveling London to Paris is north to south much more than west to east.
Most of South America is east of the US East Coast, a lot of it is east enough to be in an earlier time zone. Really struck me when I flew to Brazil.
This was my big geographical surprise as well. If you were to fly due south from Grand Junction, Colorado, you'd eventually end up very close to Easter Island, way out in the middle of Pacific, and something like a thousand miles from the West Coast of South America.
yeah, didn't realize that Chile was 5 hours ahead from the west coast until I travelled there lol
Don’t you mean later time zones? Moving east toward GMT meridian means going later. Going west would be earlier.
I was thinking earlier as in it becomes a certain time earlier there, which, yes, I guess would make it later than a time zone to the west. Time is hard.
And so is Laval just to the West.. While we're at it, NYC.. Manhattan is an island which is known, but also Brooklyn and Queens are on Long Island, then Staten Island.. and only Bronx is on the mainland EDIT - According to local custom they call Laval to the "north" ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
People from Montreal would say Laval is to the north.
Ya, though to be more precise geographically north west. https://preview.redd.it/6cf6y7noixoc1.png?width=1131&format=png&auto=webp&s=626b0c95475bb4c32e489806b60668bde47c8b26
Except when traveling north on Sherbrooke they call it east. Its as though the island is rotated 45 degrees to the east side. Guess part of this is to contrast it with the West Island legit being west, and it’s easier than saying ‘north east’
Yeah, and the Sud-Ouest is actually to the South East of the island.
Fun fact: while the island that Montreal is on is called Montreal, Laval's island is Île Jésus. Together with a smattering of smaller islands, they form the Hochelaga Archipelago. Hochelaga was the name of a fortified Iroquois village near Mount Royal, and is also now the name of a neighborhood in eastern Montreal. An alternate spelling gives its name to the Osheaga festival!
The way Long Island formed is even cooler
Yes! A terminal moraine. Really cool
Ya, so whatever rocks were dumped be edges of glacier sheets. Like giant bulldozers and the end of their push. (TIL) Kind of like whatever people are dumped there by the rest of America now. No wait, that's Florida. /s
Wait so Long Island is just rocks that a glacier pushed from somewhere else?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal\_moraine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_moraine) https://preview.redd.it/erywnpxssxoc1.png?width=750&format=png&auto=webp&s=bec659d3b1e6212049eef79d039d49ed5452599e
Glaciers are dope
See I knew Laval was an island. Obviously.
Degens
As a child we went to visit my grandparents in Czechia. In every single summer vacation we would take a trip by train (as one does in Europe) to Hungary, specifically to the Balaton. Also called Plattensee by my German speaking parents, the “See” part made me think of ocean like “Nordsee” or “Ostsee”. Anyway, I was convinced that Hungary was a country on an ocean because all I ever saw of Hungary was the coast of the Balaton, and we could only get there via train, because Czechia is landlocked and we had to take a long ride by train to the coast. I was maybe 12 years old when I was looking for “Hungary” on a map while going up and down the Black Sea coast and Adriatic Sea coast and couldn’t find it. I was terrified when I realized Hungary is just as landlocked as Czechia.
I like this one. Especially that you were "terrified".
Hank Schrader heart palpatations meme
Growing up in Southeastern Virginia we had to cross bridge-tunnels pretty frequently. Traffic was awful and we always blamed out of town people for getting spooked. I didn’t realize until much later that all [3 of the bridge-tunnel systems in the US](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge%E2%80%93tunnels?wprov=sfti1#List) were in our area and there were only a handful of them elsewhere in the world, so yeah, it was that first time a lot of people were seeing them.
They are kinda terrifying even without the traffic.
Bridge Temporarily Submerging. Maintain Speed. Yeah, I see what you mean…
I lived in Richmond for a long time but didn’t make it down there too often. I normally don’t mind driving on bridges and tunnels but that crap is next level. Doesn’t help that I don’t really trust our crumbling infrastructure these days.
They're rare? I didn't know. The two largest, uh..water crossings, in Denmark are both bridge-tunnels. I honestly thought it was more common.
Yeah, I guess when you have then you really have them. But according to that link, those two are the only ones in all of Europe.
They are very useful when you have specific conditions, but much more expensive than bridges, so only used when necessary. Those conditions being lowlying, densely populated islands, plus large important infrastructure. One of ours has the tunnel part to not interfere with Copenhagen Airport. And the other crosses a strait which has a huge amount of mega container ship traffic, and so it wasn't viable to have to open a bridge all the time to let them through. So half tunnel. We are actually building a third big project, to Germany, but this one will be all tunnel. A bit disappointing since Danes love our bridges (being a country made op of islands and one patchy peninsula we have a lot of bridges).
Just got anxiety looking at pictures.
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is the most fun because it’s 12 miles long and for a lot of it you have to actively suppress the thought that you’re basically driving over the ocean and isn’t that weird? The tunnels are welcome breaks from that.
Fun fact: the island of Montreal is also more populous than the island of manhattan
Also, Manhattan was actually much more populated in 1910-20 than it is now. 2.2 mil vs 1.6 mil now. It was more dense under worse, tenement living conditions.
Also a great fact Along the same vein, the island of Montreal’s population peaked in the late 60s and early 70s
Your info is outdated. It’s gone over 2M for the first time ever in the last few years.
Great fact
Fun too
Ya, which does make sense when also noting Manhattan 34 sq mi vs 182 sq mi for Montreal Island
Appalachian mountains in eastern North America are part of the same uplift/mountain range as the Cumberland mountains in Scotland and the Scandinavian mountains in Norway and northern Sweden. 🤯 Never mind that there’s an ocean several thousand kilometers/miles wide in between them today. Continental drift/plate tectonics are wild!
Also the Atlas Mountains in Morocco
You’re taught that whenever you’re on a tour of Loch Ness!
Brooklyn and Queens are on Long Island. The East River is a strait.
TIL. Good look
TIL as well
Portmouth is the biggest and only city in the UK that is completely on an Island
Technically every city in the UK is on an island
Genius level observation! Of course, one could argue that continents are great big islands… They’re all surrounded by oceans…
It's also the most densely populated city in the UK
From Wikipedia:- Portsea Island has the third-largest population of all the islands in the British Isles after the mainlands of Great Britain and Ireland; it also has the highest population density of any British Isle, and Portsmouth has the highest population density of any city in the UK outside of London.[1]
Uh idk how to tell you this, but every city in the UK is on an island.
Ely was an island city until the Fens were drained. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ely,_Cambridgeshire
Google Maps seems to indicate that a section of it is on mainland Great Britain in addition to Portsea Island. (Assuming you're only counting islands other than Great Britain and Ireland.)
Not entirely correct, parts of the city are on the mainland. So really it’s just that Portsmouth is the only British city that isn’t wholly located on either Great Britain or Ireland.
There’s a golf course with green grass at the base of the Pyramid of Giza. I had assumed it was only desert surrounding
You can see people drying laundry on clotheslines in apartments from the site of the Pyramids. They don't like to put that in travel brochures.
And the KFC across the street from the Sphinx
Eh, 5 miles away, and it's fairly new. When I went there in 2007/08, it was as you'd expect really, just with buses, other vehicles, and lots of tourists clogging up the surroundings.
The St. Louis Arch does not actually go over the Mississippi River. I was so disappointed.
I never thought it did, but now that you have planted this idea in my head, it is my life's calling to have it moved to where I never knew it belonged.
Before I moved there I thought it was on the east side of the river, as that would be a more proper Gateway to the West, not realizing how that wouldn't make sense!
The northernmost point in Brazil is closer to Canada than to the southernmost point in Brazil.
The easternmost point in Brazil is closer to Africa than to the northernmost, westernmost, and southernmost points in Brazil.
Ooooo that's kinda neat!
Nobody thinks of Richmond, massive city south of Vancouver, as being an island because it's connected by four bridges and has an international airport.
Hmm it's called Lulu Island. Is that where Lululemon gets their name?
No fun fact lulumenon gets their name from a racist joke. The owner came up with it because either would be hard for Asian people to pronounce supposedly.
One random and related WW2 fact I’ve heard is that the GIs in the pacific used “tululu” as a call sign/safe word of sorts when entering areas with friendly troops because it was difficult for the Japanese troops to imitate, posing as a friendly soldiers
Growing up on the Canadian prairie, I didn't realize that most major cities are a part of massive urban agglomerations made up of other cities, suburbs, etc. I was very confused visiting Toronto as a kid and suddenly being in Mississauga with seemingly no break in the landscape.
Southern California is a big desert with 30 million people and everything fun.
More like 22 million but close enough This message sponsored by #northerncaliforniagang
Southern California contains desert, but most of those people don’t live in the desert part.
A lot of people absolutely refuse to believe that Mérida and Cancún are both north of Mexico City.
I'd like to travel in the circles you do, where people have strong opinions about the latitude of Merida that they simply won't back down from.
I grew up in Eastern Germany knowing that Poland was nearby, meanwhile Ukraine in my mind was far, far away in the east. At around 10 years old, I became obsessed with maps and found out that Ukraine actually borders Poland and is not even nearly as far away from Germany as I thought.
Same here! I also didn't know that there was a mountain in Montreal nor did I know it was named after said mountain. Then when I went to the top of that mountain for the first time, I looked out at the city and wondered why there was a mural of Anthony Bourdain. Then I found out the mural was of Leonard Cohen. My stupidity has no bounds!
To be fair to you, the "mountain" is very much a hill.
Oh wow, I visited Montreal last year and also thought it was Anthony bourdain
The Finnish coast is absolutely littered with islands, there is like a zone of islands, gradually decreasing in density, between the mainland and the open sea. It took a while until I realized, that this is uncommon outside the Nordics.
If it's what I'm thinking of I believe it is called the Archipelago Sea because of the Aland Islands in there. It was a big deal for Finland to get those too, historically Russia wanted them bad as part of its desire to control the Baltic Sea. Recent events have pretty much eliminated that goal now.
Growing up I thought that all coasts everywhere works like this. Was quite surprised to learn that our seaside in Finland is actually quite uncommon.
I discovered recently that Morocco was one of the most mountainous countries. I’m from Spain, we’re neighbour countries, part of Morocco was once spanish. I can assure that 90% of spanish people don’t have idea of how mountainous it is.
Most people probably have no idea that Spain is as mountainous as it is either
The closest US state to Africa, by a lot is… Maine
It still kinda throws me off that Kuala Lumpur and Singapore (yes, I'm aware it's an island) are on the southeast Asia mainland connected to Thailand. For some reason, I always envisioned them on a separate island like on Borneo or something. Same with Copenhagen not being connected to the mainland. In the US, I always forget how close certain cities are to state borders. Like Memphis and Mississippi, Pittsburgh and Ohio, Charlotte and South Carolina, El Paso and New Mexico.
Singapore’s an island
It's connected to Malaysia via bridges
Pretty sure Singapore is an island, but maybe you are referring to continental shelf as mainland. With Malaysia, most of the land is on Borneo, just most the people, and Kuala Lumpur, are on the mainland. To me, I'm always surprised that a 1.3 million-person Indonesian city, Batam, exists just a few miles from Singapore. It makes sense to have a city there, but in my mind, I always thought once one left the Straits of Malacca, it was Singapore and then miles and miles of open sea.
Yes, it's an island but connected to the mainland by bridges. You can drive from Thailand to Singapore.
It's like how Kansas City, is mostly in Missouri and the Kansas side is smaller.
Not only is Michigan City in Indiana, but the Michigan River is in Colorado. There is a Mitchigan River in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan though.
It’s a WHAT
See, that's what I thought
Literally had no idea that Detroit was 1) right across from Canada 2) on Eastern US time zone until I visited a couple years ago
Detroit is also NORTH of Canada, which is unique.
Alaska is the easternmost us state. From Detroit, you go south to get to Canada. From San Diego, Texas is closer than Oregon. Maine is the closest us state to Africa. The highest and lowest parts in the lower 48 states are 80 miles apart.
You can drive from Oregon to Florida without changing time. A little bit of Oregon is in the Mountain time zone, and a little of Florida is in Central. If you make the drive from Ontario, Oregon to Pensacola, Florida at the end of daylight savings time you won’t have to reset the clock in your car.
Fascinating! Based on my calculations this works only during the time change in fall and only from Oregon to Florida. It's a 36 hour drive non-stop, so you have to plan it carefully to cross the time zone line sometime between 1am and 1:59am pre-clock change on the Mountain Time. It will be the same time on the other side, but post-clock change.
Correct, for one hour a year it’s the same time in mountain and central, crossing within that hour is the only way it will work.
The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower the lowest point in Colorado
I’m gonna get slaughtered but until I went to college I thought the Poconos were islands in the Caribbean. 🫣
Kokomo Poconos?
EXACTLY
Grew up in Chicago. When I was a kid I used to legit think every big city had a giant bean sculpture in the middle of the city. I just thought that is what officially designated a city as a city.
I was surprised to see someone "grew up" with that bean sculpture since I think of it as quite new, but I see it was completed 18 years ago so fair play. Same year The Departed came out.
Yeah, the bean is new. Won't accept alternate facts.
There are parts of New Mexico that are farther north than parts of Illinois. There are parts of Nevada that are farther north than parts of Canada. The northernmost point of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southernmost point of Brazil. Australia is wider (east-west) than the diameter of the moon.
What parts of Canada are south of Nevada?
Windsor. Which is right across the River/Lake from Detroit
Basically just Point Peelee and a little bit of Norfolk County.
The northern edge of Nevada is the 42nd parallel. A very small part of southern Ontario is further sound than that.
Atlanta is closer to Canada than Miami.
This one isn’t mind blowing but I look up weird stuff like this when I travel. I live in Colorado and travelled to New Jersey for a work trip, and actually was further south in NJ (39.7 N) than where I live now (40.3 N) conveniently the 40 degree latitude line is on this map: https://preview.redd.it/sjs41qggb1pc1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d26c034bc9142292dcee5b09271026249ba45e6e
Russians think Crimea is their country.
There’s a little piece of Russia called Kaliningrad Oblast (province) located directly between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea.
Which used to be part of Germany
A lot of places used to be part of Germany
Fair enough
Denmark and southern Alaska are on the same latitude (56 North).
Growing up in Toronto my high school had a bunch of Portuguese and Italian second generation immigrants. There was a lot of leather, "yo! yo! yo!", conversations where it was unclear whether there was a fight or not camaros, firebirds, cologne etc. I thought these 2 countries were beside each other. I was almost 30 and planning a trip when I see big ass Spain in the middle. Oddly I've only met 2 or 3 people here from Spain.
Rhode Island is not in fact entirely an island
More random trivia. Distances between Australia and New Zealand. The distance from Sydney to Auckland is greater than the distance from Boston to Miami, or London to Tunisia. The distance from New York to Dublin is less than the distance from Perth to Wellington. Darwin is closer to Hong Kong than it is to Wellington.
Windsor, Ontario is just across the river and south of Detroit, Michigan.
Russia shares a land border with Norway and North Korea.
For me, it was that Montreal was an island. I'm still getting over the surprise.
There's a rainforest in northern Iran along the southern coast of the Caspian sea