Since I moved to the States I’ve had to deal with people always telling me that I must be so used to the cold and snow, being from Scotland and all.
Then I have to gently tell them that it’s not really like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in Britain these days, especially not on the warm west coast of Scotland where we rarely scraped up enough snow for stunted snowman.
And then 2010 rolled in and brought this with it:
On the high-res version at NASA’s Earth Observatory site, you can zoom in and see that big cities like London and Birmingham show up as kind of grey blotches.
But look at that. It’s everywhere! It has covered the entire country! Beautiful, and astonishing (and less fun for the people who still live there than it is from me, looking at it from here).