Stonehenge is in this picture if you know where to look. The bend in the river at Amesbury helped me find it.
Zhangye Danxia - Geology From a Storybook
Long ago, colorful sediments were deposited in western China, layer after layer, century after century. If you were there at the time, you would have seen unremarkable ground, a single hue of dirt no different from a thousand other places on Earth.
But after thousands and thousands of years subject to the forces of pressure and tectonic movement, the total of those layers has been pushed upward, letting us peek at a rainbow-hued slice of Earth’s past perhaps unmatched on this planet. The planet looks more like the cross-section of a jawbreaker candy than layers of rock in these photos, near Zhangye, China.
The Zhangye formation, not to be confused with this danxia, a UNESCO heritage site, reminds us how our crust is heaved and hurled throughout the ages, a slow evolution that will continue into the distant future. It’s yet another story of Earth’s past, written in stone, but perhaps with the same pen as a fantasy storybook.
Check out more photos from Flickr user Melinda ^..^, and take some time to tour the formation in Google Earth.
One of my absolute favourite places on Earth.
Hexagonal rocks-WUT: The columns form due to stress as the lava cools. The lava contracts as it cools, forming cracks. Once the crack develops it continues to grow. The growth is perpendicular to the surface of the flow. Entablature is probably the result of cooling caused by fresh lava being covered by water. The flood basalts probably damned rivers. When the rivers returned the water seeped down the cracks in the cooling lava and caused rapid cooling from the surface downward. The division of colonnade and entablature is the result of slow cooling from the base upward and rapid cooling from the top downward. (via Hexagonal rocks)
Columnar basalt is just too awesome.
Nature inspires awe - cloud, ice and rock in southern South America.
Absolutely AMAZING.
Amazing Views of the World’s Volcanoes From the International Space Station
Head over to the source link and take a look through this awesome gallery of Volcanoes as snapped by the ISS over Earth:
Few people have seen as many volcanoes as the astronauts that inhabit the International Space Station.
Not only does their imaging of the Earth’s surface capture volcanism action, but it can provide remote sensing information on volcanoes that geologists cannot visit with any regularity. In honor of the thousands of volcano images that have been taken from the ISS, I present a gallery of some of the best shots I found, including some volcanoes that most people don’t even know exist!
Found this lil ice sickle just outside of Lake Tahoe. 6 more images and a small recount are on Full Frame Collective.
Donner Pass, CA | 2013
Submission, faulty tower ridge on Mt Cook with the Tasman Glacier behind
Submission: A small selection of the 60,000 nesting pairs of Brunnich’s Guillemots on the cliffs of Alkefjellet, Svalbard
http://celestial-navigation.tumblr.com/post/38700683809/spitsbergen110-bird-cliffs-on-flickr
