Our little Piston Bully crevasse-detecting vehicle, with Erebus silently steaming in the background. It will be a bumpy next few months!
This is the South Pole Overland Traverse, day one, team of six, 78° South, a couple miles in, with many more to go…
“Welcome to the void” said one of the current crew…
I now sit cliff-side above one of the most spectacular views in Greenland. Just out of reach, icebergs float through the Ilulissat Ice Fjord in such density…
The southern tip of Greenland is a collection of countless islands and fjords.
Disko Island: the grooviest place name you’ve never heard of and the second largest island of Greenland…
The mysterious Richat Structure in the Sahara, Mauritania. (September 23, 2021).
To mix things up and make it interesting for me as I pore through satellite databases, I thought I’d give myself a challenge for the next several posts: find “geometric shapes” visible from space…
An Earthly galaxy of ice, Disko Bay, Greenland.
Locked under ice most of the year, desolate, dark, sparsely populated: you could just as well be looking at the landscape of a recently discovered planet…
Hurricane Laura in the Gulf of Mexico prior to landing on the Texas/Louisiana Border. Laura passed overhead here in Puerto Rico as a tropical storm several days prior. This NASA tool allows easy access to MODIS satellite data, allowing the easy viewing of scenes such as the one above from August 26, 2020.
Hurricane Laura prior to landing on the Texas/Louisiana Border. Laura passed overhead here in Puerto Rico as a tropical storm several days prior…
This island within an island within an island is technically called a third-order (or recursive) island…
From top to bottom: Carlisle Island, Cleveland Volcano (Chuginadak Island) & Herbert Island.
On the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), Okmok (the large caldera on the northeast corner of the island) rated as a 6 (of 8), or “Colossal”…
West slopes of Mount Shasta.
The upper slopes of Mount Baker are cloaked in glaciers, which themselves are often covered in snow. Here, crevasses are much more apparent, which give light to how the glacier flows and deforms. Seracs, shearing, transverse crevasses, etc. are very easy to identify...
The Drygalski Ice Tongue is a ~4000 year old floating extension of the David Glacier near McMurdo Station in the Antarctic Ross Sea…
Elephant Foot Glacier, Landsat 8, August 31, 2019. This is a textbook example of a piedmont glacier, located within North East Greenland National Park, the largest preserved land region in the world.
I’ve spent some time put together an app you can download for free that bypasses the need for any fancy software, automatically merging different satellite bands, pan sharpening the image from 30m to 15m resolution, and adjusting the output for easy final color corrections in any basic image editing program…
Spot the two near-perfect alluvial fans in the image above. This region is just to the south of Badwater Basin, the lowest point in Death Valley and the Western Hemisphere. The larger of the two alluvial fans is the mouth of Copper Canyon, which is home to one of the most significant paleontological sites in the world, where camels, two-toed llamas, big cats and mastodons have been found in the fragile muds.
Walk through the Mojave Desert, and you might become exhausted from the desolation and homogeneity of your surroundings. View it from above, and you will instead see a complex landscape formed by a variety of geological processes and carved by a seemingly scarce resource: water…
Mount Rainier still in winter mode on April 23, 2020. Landsat 8.
Drive to Crater Lake for clues of what the future may hold for some of these Cascade volcanoes. Like Mount St. Helens, the former volcano called Mount Mazama had a series of explosive eruptions (~7700 years ago) that led to the collapse of its upper slopes…
Lake Baikal rules the worldly superlatives: deepest lake, largest by volume (contains ~20% of the world’s surface freshwater) and home of the only exclusively freshwater seal…
From a scientific standpoint, it appears that these volcanoes are somewhat neglected, perhaps due to their inaccessibility (and I couldn’t even find a Wikipedia article if that means anything)…
These images show just three of hundreds of ephemeral salt lakes scattered around the west and north of Australia. Only after monsoon rains do they fill…
More expansive than the state of Rhode Island (~4000 square kilometers), this is the largest glacier of its kind in North America, and the largest non-polar piedmont glacier in the world…
Unlike other deserts across the world, one reason this area is not covered in sand dunes despite the high presence of erodible stone is due to cryptobiotic soil—a living crust composed of lichen, bacteria, cyanobacteria, algae and fungi…
To get a true sense of size, view the above image at full screen and search for the three active airstrips located within the delta fan…