Mea Culpa: Space walruses on a mission to save the planet

John Rentoul minds our language in last week’s Independent

A walrus, not actually in space (PA)

This was my favourite headline of the week: “Public urged to count walruses from space to help monitor melting sea ice.” A wonderful idea for a hit children’s TV series, featuring space walruses arriving from another planet to help reverse climate change. There was no need to correct this charming ambiguity, but we could have said “walruses visible from space”, as the report was of a project asking amateur environmentalists to count walruses on satellite images.

The article also provided a rare example of that old journalistic staple, “an area larger than Wales”. We said: “The British Antarctic Survey said the satellites would generate thousands of high-resolution images of walruses congregating on more than 25,000km2 of Arctic coastline.”

I know we were only repeating what the British Antarctic Survey said – including the comparison with Wales – but this is confusing. A coastline is a length, and would be measured in kilometres, not square kilometres; that would seem to be referring to a coastal area, which would be long and thin, and comparing it with Wales, which is not.