In this new era of the always-on, of the citizen-journalist and of instant gratification, there is less room for the slower-paced pleasures of life. Sure, time, money and skill permitting you can still go on holiday, read a book or build an extension to your house. But it’s getting impossible to imagine any of these things without interruptions from e-mail, texting, or checking with IMDb to see who played Sam in the film adaptation.

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.