Articles

A wildlife filled trip through Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain

explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2344:_26-Second_Pulse

socialsudo

Barot - The Hidden Paradise of Himachal Pradesh 😍 This is my first travel video with my family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 do watch the video and comment about your thoughts in the comments :) 🎥you can watch it on my YouTube Channel SOCIAL SUDO(link given in my bio also) ☝️

reeloflife:

Colorado

Part II of my Colorado series, taken on Ilford Delta 100 film 🎞

A self-portrait, and two landscape photos taken within the ‘Garden of the Gods’

stealth-science:

Rocks are cool guys.

It’s possible the last two pictures are fossilized ripples and mud cracks.  but I can’t prove anything. 

ketrinadrawsalot:

Zoning Out Doodle Time: Trilobites

Hold on ‘tite’ to that Tektite

Tektites are small glassy objects which, unlike meteorites, are found only in certain, rather limited areas of the Earth’s surface. They are named according to the area in which they are found and the principle types are: australites from the southern part of Australia, Tasmania and coastal islands; philippinites from the Philippine Islands and southern China; javaites from Java; malaysianites from Malaysia; indochinites from Thailand and Indochina; Ivory Coast tektites from the Ivory Coast, West Africa; bediasites from Texas, USA; Georgia tektites from Georgia, USA; and moldavites from the Czech Republic. It is estimated that something like 650,000 tektites have currently been collected, of which the philippinites account for some 500,000.

Tektites are usually small, the majority being less than 300gm in weight, and about 1 to 3cm across, but some examples up to 12kg are recorded. The shape of tektites is very variable, but discoid, lensoid, button-shaped, tear-drop, dumb-bell, spherical and boat shapes commonly occur. Some tektites are shiny but others have a rough, strongly etched and abraded surface, often with a system of grooves which reflect flow patterns within the glass. Most tektites are jet-black but thin flakes are transparent or translucent in shades of brown. The moldavites, however, are dark green and in thin flakes are transparent and bottle-green.

When a meteorite collides with the planet’s surface, the violence of the impact and the high temperature generated by the collision cause significant changes in rocks. If the temperature is high enough (between 1,000 and 1,200˚C) to melt silica in the rocks shocked by the impact, the silica is ejected as molten droplets, which cool into oval or button shapes due to air resistance. The sample I am holding is from China where large impact areas rich in tektites have been found.

Tektites are not themselves meteorites, but as they are generated by asteroid impacts they often appear in mineral collections or be grouped with meteorites.

~ JM

Image Credit: My Own

More Info:
Solving the tektite puzzle: http://bit.ly/1CQwzSb
Koeberl, C. (1992). Tektite origin by hypervelocity asteroidal or cometary impact: Target rocks, source craters, and mechanisms. Geological Society of America Special Papers, 293, 133-152. http://bit.ly/1NDdPMr

goldbugsofficial

Preparing the delicate antennae of a pyritized trilobite from upstate New York.   The soft parts like antennae are rarely preserved on trilobites.  This specimen is being prepared upside down (ventrally) to expose the rare view of the ventral anatomy.  The work is done primarily with micro-air abrasion which is essentially a sandblaster used in conjunction with a microscope. The unit fires a pressurized stream of tiny abrasive particles to remove the rock from the trilobite.  This machine has been rebuilt to utilize sub-micronuc particles and in this video the media being used is 50 nanometer precipitated calcium carbonate. The benefits to using tiny particles allows features as small as 5 microns to be undamaged during the work.  The trilobites are bristling with small hairs and claws and of course eggs in some cases.  Preparing antenna is delicate work and the antennae are always unpredictable under the rock as they curve and bend often so over-spraying can completely eliminate one.

A detailed introduction to the Trilobites for #trilobitetuesday. Anatomy, a tour of the variety of species and morphologies, and how scientists use their body types to learn about their behavior.

thelostcanyon:

Deep pools in the limestone substrate along the Pedernales River, Blanco County, Texas.

yeswe_travel

Look how littel I am, next to this massive mountain..

Can you see the beauty around me ✨ .

DE)

Flinders Ranges Map

This area in southeastern Australia is particularly important for geologic history. The Flinders Ranges are the result of a sedimentary basin that began forming and filling 800 million years ago prior to being built into mountains starting 500 million years ago, creating the complex folding and uplifts that are now exposed at the surface.

Because of the time represented by this basin, rocks from it cover the proposed “Snowball Earth” events and provide some of the best examples of glacial processes.

Those rocks are then followed by rocks from the Ediacaran period, the time just before the Cambrian when multicellular, animal life existed on Earth, but without hard parts that are easy to fossilize. In fact, the Ediacaran hills are just southwest of the area covered by this satellite image collected by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel Satellites.

This is a false-color image. Different minerals and different rocks are absorbing light at different wavelengths, and those absorbances are being assigned to colors that we can see. Thus, we’re using infrared light to be able to distinguish one rock from another, one layer from another. While the rocks don’t look like this in the field, the image itself would be extremely useful because this is basically a broad-scale geologic map, collected from space. You can even make out areas of active sediment cover at the western side.

The original image would be large enough to print and hang on a wall.

-JBB

Image credit: ESA
https://flic.kr/p/2jrAweP

petersolarz:

Untitled © Peter Solarz

The amazing landscape of Wadi Rum (The Valley of the Moon) in southern Jordan

prjctdiva:

if anyone wants to take an educated guess as to what those are, feel free!

What do we think, rutile or tourmaline?

alandhart

Chinese fluorite? Nope! An absolutely remarkable specimen from a recent find at Joe Larkin’s granite quarry, Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland! This quarry has produced some amazing specimens over the last few years, and this multiple protruded and stepped growth modified cube is one of the best I have seen. But look carefully and look at the incredible ‘sectoral’ zoning! Ok thinking head on, latest research indicates the purple colour is due to an ‘F’ centre where a Ca ion is replaced by an electron, with rare earth elements (REE) exhibiting some control over this irradiation defect centre giving purple colour. With that analysis showing REE concentration is greater on certain faces (110)>(100)>(111). It is complex, but this crystal shows remarkable ‘purple bands’ on the rhombic dodecahedron (110), but almost colourless on the octahedron (111), although he octahedral face looks very much like stepped growth. However the zoning is in a narrow band resulting in this ‘iron-cross’ zoning, beautifully defined and quite bizarre, strangely ‘creeping’ over the top to lip onto the flat cube face and central to the (110) can you see it? I wondered why the whole face is not purple? Well look carefully on the corners some really small ‘low angle’ faces are present, I suspect possible {421}, a pretty rare form which is known from some Cornish fluorites and may ‘cut off’ the colour. There is a LOT going on here. Maybe the granite which it sits on has provided the low irradiation over millenia to produce this remarkable specimen, certainly the best I have seen from here! Isn’t nature’s chemistry crazy? Exceptional. Gail and Jim Spann Collection

The Great Rift

The mountains of Idaho are split by a wide valley known as the Snake River Plain. Much of this landscape was once volcanic, as massive eruptions associated with the Yellowstone Hot Spot blasted their way across the state over the past 20 million years, flattening the mountains as you see here. Every so often, molten rock associated with the Yellowstone system finds a new path it can take up to the surface, and none have been more active recently than the Great Rift.

The Great Rift stretches from the Pioneer Mountains, seen in the distance, for about 85 kilometers to the southeast. Its most dominant feature, seen in this photograph, is Craters of the Moon National Monument, an area that has hosted a variety of volcanic eruptions including lava flows from rifts and construction of cinder cones from lava fountaining over the past 10,000+ years.

These Cinder Cones are aligned with one of several fractures associated with the Great Rift. When lava finds its way to the surface, it often breaches as a long fissure, but the edges of a fracture tend to cool off quickly turning the fissure into a single column that throws molten rock upwards in the centers. A set of four major fractures run from here to the southwest, feeding 2 other volcanic systems, and to the Northeast where they are buried by the volcanic activity in the Craters of the Moon field.

Has anyone ever managed to spot this field from a plane window? I’d love to see if we can make out the rift alignment from a more distant shot.

-JBB

Image credit (Original) NPS, now moved:
https://www.kmvt.com/content/news/Blaine-County-supports-designating-Craters-of-the-Moon-as-national-park-318230011.html
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/idaho/kings-bowl-crater-id/
https://www.nps.gov/crmo/learn/photosmultimedia/photogallery.htm

myminerallove:

Smoky quartz crystal