BBC Aerial Journeys

Thanks to Val Vannet for highlighting Aerial Journeys - a collection of programmes from the BBC Archive featuring - as the name suggests - aerial journeys.

One that will be of particular interest is The Living Isles - After the Ice. (And no, I don't remember it from the first time round!!)

New battle over Arctic oil plans

This news story from Thursday about the plans for huge expansion of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic will be of interest to both AS and A2 geographers as you will all be looking at Cold Environments later this year.

Well worth a look at the video clip of David Shukman flying over Prudhoe Bay as well...

On the theme of exploitation of Arctic "resources", the controversy over Greenland's whaling continues...

Wettest January to August period on record...

According to this article from the BBC, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) have confirmed that this year has seen the wettest January to August period on record.

Worth a read, and worth a look at some of the reader comments as well!

Today's lessons...

AS

After introducing the course, outlining expectations and completing our profiles, we went on to look at the hydrological cycle. We talked about the systems approach and will look in more detail on Monday at the idea of open and closed systems. For Monday's lesson, you're putting all the key terms we talked about into a diagram... You might find the S-Cool website helpful if you are struggling.

Although you have the bits of the specification that you need, if you want to look at the whole thing, you will be able to find it on the AQA website

A2

After long discussions about Wales and AS results, we reminded ourselves about some of the key words and ideas that we need to consider relating to Recreation and Tourism. Again, some useful reminders on the S-Cool website.

There will be more information about Wales on Tuesday, but if you are planning a shopping trip this weekend, the OS map you need is OL17 - the Explorer (orange) map for Snowdon and Conwy Valley.

Welcome/Welcome back!

If you are an A2 geographer reading this, you've hopefully been following the posts over summer anyway, but if not - welcome back!

If you are an AS geographer reading the blog for the first time after this morning's lesson - welcome!

I set up Geogtastic6 last year and we only had AS geographers. My plan is to continue this year with both AS and A2 on the same blog. That does mean that not every post will be directly relevant to you, but as we are doing the new AS and the old A2 this year, there will be some overlap (eg. you will all be doing some Population work, and some Cold Environments work). You will also find labels at the bottom of each post - if you click on those, they will take you to all the posts with that particular label - which means that you can check out rivers-related work that we did last year, for example.

If you find any useful websites, or hear about any interesting geographical news stories, upcoming geographical TV programmes, etc., leave a comment and let us all know!

More on the coastal erosion story from yesterday...

Have a read of this post from Pruned which looks at the coastal erosion story I posted about yesterday, and also features some of Andrew Stacey's excellent photographs...

Coasts may be "abandoned to the sea"

That's according to Lord Smith, the new chairman of the Environment Agency, who says that coastal erosion is the most difficult issue that the Agency have to deal with, but that some parts of the coastline are so badly eroded that they are not worth protecting.


The picture shows part of the Holderness Coast (East Yorkshire), but large parts of Norfolk and Suffolk are under threat as well. Read the full article from the BBC here.