This image, captured in Chile by Lilli Freda from Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, depicts a cloudless sky, a calm blue lake (Llanquihué), and a picture-perfect mountain with a snow-covered top. But the serenity of the landscape is only apparent: the triangular structure in the background is in fact the very active and explosive Osorno volcano. “Osorno is a 2652-m-high strat ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Orange anvils
The anvils in this picture are not heavy steel or iron blocks but rather soft clouds coloured orange by the setting sun. The term is used to describe the upper part of a cumulonimbus or thunderstorm cloud that tends to spread out in an anvil shape as warm air bumps up against the bottom of the stratosphere (the atmospheric layer between 15-50 kilometres height). Katja Weigel, a researcher at the I ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Waves hitting Cycladic rocks
When he is not researching in the space sciences, Ioannis Daglis, the director of the Institute for Space Applications and Remote Sensing at the National Observatory of Athens in Greece, is often out with his camera. This picture of sea waves slamming cliff rocks in the Aegean Sea is a beautiful example of his artistic work, and one that shows some science too. “I took this photo at Vitali Bay in ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Zurich lit by lightning
In Zurich, Switzerland, June is often the wettest month of the year. Summer thunderstorms that give clouds a purple-grey colour and bright up the skies with strong lightning bolts are common place. This picture, taken by Ryan Teuling from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, captures one of these bolts, lighting up the centre of the city.Teuling took this photo in June 2008 when he worked at ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: El Tatio geyser field
Excursions following scientific conferences often give researchers a chance to observe geosciences phenomena in remote areas. That was the case for Simon Gascoin, from the Centre d’Etudes Spatiales de la Biosphère in Toulouse, France who got to photograph geysers in a Chilean desert after the EGU Alexander von Humboldt conference in Santiago de Chile in late 2008. “The picture shows the El T ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Huts in Arcachon Bay
Yann Vitasse, now a researcher at the Institute of Botany, University of Basel in Switzerland, got a wonderful present in 2009 for completing his PhD: a flight on an ultralight aircraft above the southwest coast of France. It was then he took this stunning photo of the Arcachon Bay, a water area near Bordeaux that is fed by the Atlantic Ocean and by a number of fresh waterways.“Here you see the fa ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Sundogs in Alaska
The northern part of the US state of Alaska is tundra, an area where freezing-cold temperatures hinder tree growth. The result is an unobstructed view of the rising or setting sun that allows photographers to beautifully capture our star. It was in this treeless area that Yongwon Kim, a researcher from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, took this stunning photo of an eerie sun in 2010.Sundogs, at ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Frozen river meets the sea
This image shows part of the frozen delta of the Siberian River Lena. Thomas Ernsdorf, a researcher at the Department of Environmental Meteorology, University of Trier in Germany, took this photo during a Russian-German expedition to the Laptev Sea, the largest ice factory of the Arctic Ocean, in April 2008. “The main goal of the expedition was to investigate the polynia (large open water and thin ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Sky-high dancing lights
This photo, taken in early 2011 at Murphy Dome, a mountain in Fairbanks North Star Borough in the US state of Alaska, shows a beautiful natural phenomena known as aurora.Auroras, also called northern lights in the Northern Hemisphere, are stunning light displays visible mainly at high latitudes. There, it is easier for energetic particles from the Earth’s magnetosphere and solar wind to follow the ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Volcanic twilight
Mount Etna, located in the east coast of Sicily in Italy, is one of the most active volcanos in the world and is home to spectacular eruptions. This photo, taken by Robin Campion from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, shows bright-red lava and a smoking scoria cone on the upper east flank of the volcano during an eruption in 2006.“Fast-flowing lava flow was erupted from an eastwards tr ...[Read More]