The Earth Story

Undulating lenticular clouds over Grand Teton

Lenticular cloud features often form over mountains, created from winds disrupted by the topography. Winds that run into peaks will be shifted into eddies, moving up and down and enabling the formation of interesting clouds.

Last week, Jackie Skaggs, the public affairs officer in Grand Teton National Park, captured photos of a spectacular undulating lenticular cloud formation over the peaks in the park.

The clouds bent up and down as the winds changed, creating the up and down pattern captured in the photos.

-JBB

Image credit: Jackie Skaggs/NPS http://bit.ly/1MlX1dw http://www.nps.gov/grte/photosmultimedia/index.htm

Cathedral rock, 1861 While we often share stunning pictures of Yosemite, some of the oldest photos in existence reveal the beauty and majesty of the place just as clearly as any modern example. These historical photos were the direct inspiration for the political pressure by early environmentalists that influenced President Lincoln's bill designed to preserve the Yosemite Valley's pristine beauty, and remains the legal foundation stones of the National Park system.  Taken by one of the first landscape photographers on primitive equipment, they seem to me very detailed and high quality compared to most photos of this era that I have seen. The images are currently on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In those days taking pictures was a hobby that required a certain boy scoutish dedication. The kit was heavy, there were no developing stores so you had to have a darkroom and deal with complex processes using nasty chemicals. They needed a special large camera so big it took 50x50cm glass plates coated in silver based chemicals and 12 mules to lug everything he needed, back in the day when Yosemite was a little known and remote place, hard of access. The photographer cut his teeth in California's mining industry, snapping precise photos of land for claim lawsuits, though his subsequent fame as a landscape photographer came from this series of pictures. Despite his success, he ended up impoverished, and was just negotiating with Stamford University to sell them his entire collection of photos when his life's work was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Loz Image credit: Carleton E Watkins/Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2014/nov/04/carleton-watkins-yosemite-photography-america A photo gallery: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/nov/04/carleton-watkins-yosemite-magnificent-american-west#img-2

Smeared sky What happens if you take many photos of a skyscape and stack one to two hundred of them together tracking the changes throughout the day. A Canadian photographer gave it a go, and these photos are the result. I've never seen the Earth in this kind of way, it's like a stacked time lapse of the sort that I wish I had the visual memory to perceive as a gaze at a sky over the course of the day. Loz Image credit: Matt Molloy https://500px.com/MattMolloy

Silvretta Reservoir Near the border between Switzerland and Austria sits this lake, formed after the building of several dams in 1938. The lake sits more than 2000 meters above sea level, one of many lakes at these elevations held within the Alps. The rocks are the end result of huge tectonic shifts over the last 100 million years as Africa gradually approached Europe. These rocks were buried about 50 kilometers deep in the crust during the Cretaceous, about 80 million years ago, and were rapidly uplifted afterwards through enormous tectonic shifts. -JBB Image credit: BRainy photography: https://www.flickr.com/photos/124089352@N08/14907278043 Read more: http://www.galtuer.com/en/galtuer-info/info-a-z/silvretta-stausee_az76794 http://www.steinmann.uni-bonn.de/arbeitsgruppen/strukturgeologie/lehre/wissen-gratis/geology-of-the-alps-part-1-general-remarks-austroalpine-nappes