Over hundreds and thousands of years, glaciers reshape the landscape beneath them. As they creep forward, the combined weight of the glacier and the perpetual forward movement means the ice continuously erodes away the rock below, permanently changing the terrain. During the last Ice Age much of Scotland and northern Britain were covered by a thick sheet of ice. Where there might have been once a ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Fossil dunes
Desert winds continually rework the sands on their surface, shifting grains up the stoss side of a dune to pile the sand higher… until the pile gets too steep and collapses under its own weight. This slipping of material along the front of the dune, allows it to move forward and migrate. The movement of the sand grains up and over the crest of the dunes is recorded in the internal structure of the ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Beneath a star-studded sky
Marco Matteucci captured this image of the night sky on the slopes of Mount Rosa, the second tallest peak in Alps. Mount Rosa straddles the border between southern Switzerland and Italy the pink mountain’s name comes from the Franco-Provençal word rouése, meaning glacier. Much off the Swiss side of the mountain is enveloped in the ice of Gorner Glacier, the second largest glacier in the Alps. On t ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Spectacular splatter – the marvels of a mud volcano
Mud volcanoes, unlike many others, do not extrude lava. Instead, they release glutinous bubbling brown slurry of mineral-rich water and sediment. They range in size from several kilometres across, to less than a metre – the little ones are known as mud pots, reflecting their diminutive nature. The world’s largest, though, is Lusi: a mud volcano in East Java that released an astonishing 180,000 cub ...[Read More]