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]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The perfect partnership
Pogonophores are deep sea worms that thrive in dark, deep sea conditions thanks to the presence of symbiotic bacteria. The bacteria are chemoautotrophic, that is, they fix carbon through oxidation processes, rather than using light to fix it, as is the case for photosynthesis. By utilising oxygen in the water, the bacteria can oxidise compounds such as hydrogen sulphide in order to fix carbon. The ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Curl up under a peat blanket
Rannoch Moor is the largest area of unbroken (no houses, no roads) blanket bog in the United Kingdom. Blanket bogs – as their name suggests – blanket the ground in an extensive layer of peat. They form in regions where there is high rainfall and comparatively little evapotranspiration. These waterlogged conditions are found throughout much of the northern hemisphere, and allow blanket bogs to form ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Mammoth structures, springs and snowmelt
Spring waters are rich in minerals, carrying with them dissolved components of the rocks they have travelled through. The water that discharges at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park is highly alkaline (contains a lot of dissolved CO2) and rich in calcium, but as the water cools, the calcium precipitates to form the white limestone terraces you see here. This limestone is known as tra ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: A clash of hard and soft landscapes
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by the photographer himself, who describes the striking scenery of the Conwy estuary in Wales… After a workshop with salt-marsh specialists in Conwy (Wales, UK), I stayed a couple of days to explore the surroundings. Living and working in The Netherlands, for me intertidal areas are typically wide, flat expanses of land, where the horizon is far awa ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Curaçao’s coral coastline
Easterly trade winds can carry warm moist air to the island of Curaçao, having picked up moisture while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Lying just south of the hurricane belt, Curaçao can still suffer the effects of these storms. For the most part, though, the coast has experienced little damage, leading to great preservation of the fossil reefs that fringe its coast. The northern coast of Curaçao, w ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Monitoring the melt
Automatic weather stations (AWS) play a prominent role in making meteorological measurements in remote areas. These measurements can feed into climate models; providing better projections for rainfall, temperature and more. This peculiarly perched piece of equipment is just such a weather station: Out in the Swiss Alps, this AWS is making measurements of temperature, precipitation, wind speed, rel ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Capping a volcano
This is Damavand Volcano, Iran. Its history is one of short bursts of eruptive activity followed by long periods of quiescence and while there are active fumaroles near Damavand’s summit, the volcano has been dormant for the past 1000 years. The cloud that encircles its peak is known as a cap cloud, so-called because these peculiar clouds form around high peaks, adding a flat white cap to mountain ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Getting a handle on Greenland’s glaciers
The picture below shows several small glaciers surrounding the Greenland ice sheet, in Tassilaq, near Kulusuk, East Greenland. The dark lines are glacial moraines, responsible for the transport of rock material from mountains towards sea. The photographer, Romain Schläppy, highlights that “an important scientific topic consists to place the recent and ongoing Greenland warming in the broader conte ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Mendenhall Glacier
Much of the Mendenhall River Basin is glaciated; indeed, the river flows out from under a glacier in the northern part of the valley and into a lake. This glacier, rather aptly, is known as Mendenhall Glacier, a 19 km long lake-calving monster in Alaska, USA. Meltwater from this glacier makes up the primary source of water for Mendenhall River, although several creeks also contribute to the flow, ...[Read More]