So I say, why not turn it around? Why should we not interrupt some of our voracious pop-media consumption to check in with those things that operate at a rather different pace? Here are a few sites that I check regularly, all of which have a geographical or meteorological theme.

• Cryosphere Today is the 'newspaper' of sea ice and snow cover. Updated daily, it uses a variety of images, graphs and movies to show how the sea ice and snow cover of the polar regions changes through the years and seasons. The movies of last year's record arctic sea-ice melt are a must-see. We're currently entering this year's peak melting season for the arctic; will this year's sea ice minimum be another record-breaker?
   
• Strange Maps is a blog with a difference. Each post is based around a different example of artistic, deviant, fantastic — or just quietly strange — cartography. But the images themselves are often of less interest than the descriptions. It is the engaging commentary that accompanies each map which puts it into its historical and cultural context, and which deserves your attention. Strange Maps posts every couple of days.
   
• The U.S. National Hurricane Center gives not only warnings of current tropical storm and hurricane activity in the Atlantic and East Pacific, but also forecast storm development up to 48 hours ahead during the hurricane season. Wikipedia also has a great series of articles on the current and previous hurricane seasons, which run from 1 June to 30 November in the Atlantic and 15 May to 30 November in the East Pacific. Long-range forecasts by scientists at Colorado State University and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that this will be a season with above-average hurricane activity, but only time will tell.

Sixteen years after they first leapt overboard into the Pacific Ocean, a flotilla of small plastic ducks (along with some beavers and turtles) is heading for Britain’s beaches.  29,000 plastic bath toys were released when their container was washed off a Chinese cargo ship in 1992, subsequently providing an unparalled data set for researchers with an interest in ocean circulation.  Curtis Ebbesmeyer (the severed feet consultant) is one such scientist who has been tracking the ducks.  Their movement has been inputted by Ebbesmeyer into a computer model called OSCUR (Ocean Surface Current Simulator).  Developed by James Ingraham, OSCUR uses air pressure measurements as a means of calculating the direction and speed of wind across the oceans - and consequent surface currents.

After some ducks first washed up in 1993 near Sitka, Alaska - a full ten months after their great escape, - the scientists used OSCUR to correctly predict that the remainder would follow the Sub-polar and 6,800 mile-long Subtropical Gyres of the North Pacific Ocean.  The Gyre currents did indeed induce a mass westward flocking of tiny plastic water fowl to Japan.  From there, they promptly doubled-back to Alaska, thereby completing an approximately oval circuit (one that roughly marks the extent of the filthy Pacific Garbage Patch).  Upon their return to Alaska (by now it was the end of the 1990s), many of the ducks haplessly drifted northwards, decelerating into the Bering Strait to become trapped in slow-moving pack ice.  Ebbesmeyer forecast the toys patiently sitting on their frozen tails for five or six loooooooong years before next reaching the North Atlantic, where warmer waters would finally thaw the ice and bring liberation; further adventures might then reasonably be expected to take place in Canada, Greenland and New England - ending with the Gulf Stream ushering a warm north-westerly paddle towards the British Isles.  All of this has now come to pass, exactly as Ebbesmeyer said.  Expect the ducks to turn up on British beaches any day now – by which point, the hardly little critters will have travelled 17,000 miles.

This graphic shows the Pacific orbital path taken by the ducks.