Last day of summer.

Yesterday (a single day of 26C within a week of otherwise plummeting temperatures. Down to 21C one day ... BRRRR!) may have been the last day of summer. To celebrate, I took the last summer holiday of the year, to Iceland, courtesy of Google Earth. First of all I visited Reykjavik, and admired its tininess compared to the sprawling 30 million people's worth of conurbation that I live in. The photos of views over the city look like a medium sized British town. Then I went for a fly over some of the glaciers and thought how sad if would be if they melted and we couldn't any more go flying over glaciers on a Friday afternoon. Or - could we lobby Google Earth to keep historic earths so when the whole earth is a big red desert we can see what the good old days were like?

It was at this point that I noticed that the continental shelves and the ocean ridges are visible on Google Earth. Of course I immediately thought of this and went prospecting. Well, probably a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it was fun to go and look without having to get in a Russian submarine. Seems to me that most of the Arctic is part of Greenland and Canada. The gap of deep water between Russia and the Arctic looks ominous to me - I think Putin's trying it on. More amazingly, we can all go and look and develop an opinion based on just enough evidence to reinforce our prejudices.

Anyway, as long as they don't have a big war over it, life looks pretty nice for those last few breeding pairs that will be left in Canada, Russia and Greenland. Plenty of oil, nice long summer evenings, and regular holidays on the balmy beaches of Iceland.

jules