Nothing better characterises the wild US West than endless landscapes of red hoodoos, spires of rock protruding from the bottom of an arid drainage basin or badland. Found mainly in desert and dry, hot areas, hoodoos are distinctive from similarly-shaped formations, such as spires or pinnacles, because their profiles vary in thickness throughout their length. Their distinctive colour bands are the ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Amazonian floodplain
After the Nile, the Amazon River is the second longest river in the world and, by releasing up to 300,000 cubic metres per second into the Atlantic Ocean, accounts for approximately one-fifth of the planet’s total river flow. The river and its tributaries are characterised by extensive annual flooding of over 350,000 square kilometres of forested areas. Floodplain water levels may exceed 9m. Not a ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Storm in Mount Waddington
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by the photographer herself, Marion Bisiaux (now at Stendhal University, Grenoble, France), who tells us about her exciting field trip to the British Columbia’s Coast Range. This picture was taken during the Waddington Range Ice Core Project in which I participated during my PhD at the University of Nevada, Reno, US and at the Desert Research Instit ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Irish coast
Among geoscientists, the beautiful island of Ireland is best known for its Giant’s Causeway, an area with some 40,000 polygonal columns of layered basalt that formed 60 million years ago as a result of a volcanic eruption. But another recognisable feature of the Emerald Isle, is its lush green vegetation, a product of the island’s mild climate and frequent rainfall. It was on a rare sunny day of a ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Melting ice
The speed and extent of Greenland’s ice sheet melt dominated the media over the summer, and for good reason. Dramatic satellite images showed that, in just a few days, 97% of the island’s ice sheet surface thawed, melting over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Usually, during the summer only around half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet melts and ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Ellesmere Island
Located within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Ellesmere Island is the world’s tenth largest island and features Canada’s most northerly point but little else apart from vast landscapes of pristine natural habitat. It is separated from Greenland only by the Nares Strait, a major pathway for sea ice flushing out of the High Arctic. Belonging to the Canadian territory of Nunavut, Ellesmere’s perman ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Light reflection
In this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays, brought to you by the photographer herself, Jacqueline Isabella Gisen (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands) tells us about light refraction and reflection in a beautiful Autumnal landscape. This shot was taken spontaneously on my way to Clingendael Park in The Hague, Netherlands, for an Autumn’s photography activity on 4 October 2011. It was misty and ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The power of ice
There has been a lot of talk about Greenland lately in the context of global climate change. And for good reason. Over 80% of its total surface is covered by ice, the volume of which exceeds 2,850,000 km3 or enough to raise global sea levels by a staggering 7 m if fully melted. The Greenland ice sheet consists of layers of compressed snow from over 100,000 years of snowfall. As a result, ice cores ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Blue haze
In this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays, brought to you by the photographer himself, Lukas Hörtnagl (University of Innsbruck, Austria) tells us about the ‘blue haze’ or ‘tule fog’ of California’s Sequoia National Park. I was visiting the United States to attend the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2011 and decided to stay four more weeks to visit some of the National Parks in C ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Ephemeral winter wonderland
Today’s text is brought to you by the author of this impressive picture, Patrick Klenk (Heidelberg University, Germany). This photograph is part of a series of images which I took in Death Valley National Park on a brisk December morning in 2011. In this case, we were close to Aguereberry Point, a mountain viewpoint located at 1961m above sea level, overlooking the central part of this “vast ...[Read More]