This week’s featured image may appear to be a painted landscape, but the picture is in fact a photo, taken ten years ago by Victoria Arcenegui, an associate professor at Miguel Hernández University in Spain, during a controlled forest fire in northern Portugal. The blaze is actually hot enough to distort the image, making some of the flames appear as brush strokes, beautifully blurring together th ...[Read More]
Dust devils are like miniature tornadoes, they form when a pocket of hot air near the surface moves fast upward and meets cooler air above it. As the air rapidly rises, the column of hot air is stretched vertically, thereby moving mass closer to the axis of rotation, which causes intensification of the spinning effect by conservation of angular momentum. In the Atacama Desert [in Chile] they are r ...[Read More]
Pictured here is a solitary mangrove tree, rooted off the northern coast of the Indonesian island Flores. While this tree has the shallow sandy reef to itself, mangroves are often found clumped together in large forests covering tropical and subtropical coastlines. The propped-up roots of mangrove trees often tangle together, creating a dense natural barrier that can weaken the coastal impact of o ...[Read More]
The color and symmetry of the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) sticks out against the endless green of the rainforest. Built in a remote and pristine location, the ATTO tower is the tallest construction in South America. In a joint Brazilian-German project, atmospheric scientists aim to unravel the interaction of pristine rainforest with the atmosphere. With its height of 325 meters, the ATTO ...[Read More]
The Yasur volcano located in Vanuatu archipelago is permanently active since its discovery in 1774 by Cpt. James Cook. Its activity consists mainly in moderate regular strombolian explosions within the crater. But sometimes, more powerful explosions throw ash and bombs beyond the crater rim and may represent a hazard for tourists and people living next to the volcano. Otherwise, the Mt Yasur displ ...[Read More]
The winter season is a good time to take advantage of cold weather activities, whether that’s hitting the ski slopes or warming up by a fire, but for Renato R. Colucci, it’s also one of the best time’s to study the Earth’s underground cryosphere. Colucci, who took this featured photograph, is a researcher at Italian Institute for Marine Sciences (ISMAR) of the National Research Council (CNR) and i ...[Read More]
This magnificent pattern is the result of hundreds and hundreds of years of evolution. In this structured minerotrophic peatland in Northern Quebec (Canada), which can also be called a string fen or aapa mire, the green peat ridges (or strings) alternate with water-filled hollows (or flarks). Often flarks are replaced by ponds, which vary in number and size. This pattern of strings and flarks (or ...[Read More]
I’ve taken many photos on fieldwork, everywhere from Malaysia to Antarctica but this particular photo was taken in my ‘home’ lab at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, UK. Atmospheric scientists collect air samples canisters such as these from around the world: from high altitude research aircraft (such as the Geophysica), long-term measurement time series (such as Ca ...[Read More]
Pictured here is a snapshot of an environment in transition. Today’s featured photo was taken at the foot of Monte Fitz Roy, a jagged Patagonia mountain located in Los Glaciares National Park on the border between Argentina and Chile. The Patagonia region in South America is the second biggest source of glaciers in the southern hemisphere, behind Antarctica, but the region is losing ice at a rapid ...[Read More]
I am a petrographer at the University of Padova, Italy, studying the metamorphic rocks that form the deep Earth’s crust beneath our feet, and what happens when they get so hot to start to melt. I’ve spent (enjoyed I should say) more than 30 years looking at rocks with an optical microscope. This simple, cheap tool, and more importantly, its skilled use, remain key ingredients for good research in ...[Read More]