In the middle of the Apennines lays the Gran Sasso d’Italia mountain chain, a picturesque collection of mountains situated in the heart of Italy. Featured here is one of the chain’s peaks, called the Corno Grande, meaning ‘Big Horn,’ coloured with a faint reddish light of a late-winter sunset. Sitting at 2,912 metres, this summit is easily the highest mountain in the Apennines. The areas sur ...[Read More]
This fold is part of the metamorphic core of the Pyrenees. The shear zone is almost vertical, producing a small parasitic fold (a smaller fold within a larger one), which looks almost as if it continues into the sky. The metamorphic sediments are about 500 million years old and have been deformed several times, most recently during the alpine orogeny. The alpine orogeny was period of extensive mou ...[Read More]
The Kuril Island Chain is formed by four active volcanoes: Golovnin, Mendeleev, Tyatya and Smirnov. Stolbchaty Cape, where the Okhotsk Sea meets the coast of Kunashir Island, is not far from Mendeleev Volcano – responsible for the many hot springs in the area. These are fed by seawater and heated as the water comes into contact with magma and hot rocks within the mantle. The picture shows an outcr ...[Read More]
Picture yourself in the Himalaya mountain belt: millions of years of continental uplift have produced a vast kingdom of towering monoliths, and they continue to grow as the Indian plate pushes further north into the heart of Asia. These dramatic, breath-taking and downright enormous geological structures can be simplified into the following tectonic units: the Leugogranites, the Transhimalaya, the ...[Read More]
