Road cuttings provide a great window into the wonders of what’s beneath the Earth’s surface. In this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays Bahram Sadry takes us through a beautiful fault between Tabriz and Tehran, Iran… These incredible rock outcroppings along Zanjan-Tabriz highway (the northwest of Iran), are unlike any other outcrop in the world. They are a group of faults and fractures, brecciation and gra ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Surface spirals
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is no ordinary image; it’s a snapshot of surface ocean speeds and the extent of ice cover in the North Atlantic. It was produced using a high resolution model of ocean eddies – high resolution here means that details are simplified into grids 3 km across, or one 20th of a degree. Three kilometres may sound like a pretty large area, but in oceanographic modelling, thi ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Capturing the aurora
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, are created as charged particles interact with the Earth’s atmosphere. These electrons are part of the solar wind and as they pass through the Earth’s magnetic shield (the magnetosphere); the charged particles collide with those in our atmosphere, emitting light. In the southern hemisphere this phenomenon is known as the aurora australis, but both are caus ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Lime Pancakes
These are the Pancake Rocks of Punakaiki, on the west coast of New Zealand. They are made of limestone that was deposited as calcifying organisms fell to their fate on the sea floor about 30 million years ago. Since then, the limestone has been uplifted, exposed, and eroded by the wind and the sea. Each of the limestone layers are separated by a thin sheet of mudstone in an arrangement known as st ...[Read More]