Simon Winchester's Atlantic

I love catching a fragment of something so exciting that you have to pull over to write it down. On Patt Morrison's KPCC show today Simon Winchester declared that the reindeer brought over to South Georgia by the Norwegian whalers at the beginning of the 20th Century are the only reindeer in the world not affected by the radioactive fall-out from the Chernobyl nuclear power disaster in the 1986. I am unable to verify this fact, but it makes me want to rush out to buy his book. (My great grandfather, you see, was a Norwegian whaler and a ship's captain who had a bay in the South Orkney Islands named after him. I'm not entirely sure what he did to deserve that but now I'm on a mission to find out if he had anything to do with the nuclear-free reindeer.)

map thanks: Annie Hill & Trevor Robertson

Simon Winchester's new book is entitled Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

For more from KPCC (it's a brilliantly exciting, swashbuckling interview) click the link below:

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories