earthstory reblogged
Sunset Over the Blue Ridge Mountains, Buena Vista VA - May 2019
This massive thunderstorm provided hours of stunning moments from this apocaliptic sunset shot to constant lighting strikes visible after dark.
This is a short time-lapse video highlighting the best locations in Shenandoah National Park. The park is located in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and encompasses part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's one of the most beautiful national parks across the United States and is known for it's scenic drive, Skyline Drive, that travels all the way through the park. Shenandoah has everything from cascading waterfalls to spectacular vistas. I hope you enjoy the video and go check out Shenandoah for yourself to find your own spots!
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Geologic and scientific exploration of Massanutten Mountain, Shenandoah Valley and mountains of Virginia
earthstory reblogged
Just 75 miles from the bustle of Washington, D.C., Shenandoah National Park is your escape to cascading waterfalls, spectacular vistas and one of the best drives on the east coast. There are 75 overlooks along the park’s Skyline Drive that offer stunning views of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to the west or the rolling Piedmont to the east. So roll down your windows, feel the breeze and experience every curve and turn of this beautiful drive. Photo from The Point Overlook at milepost 55 by National Park Service.
Sunrise over Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. At this site, parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains run almost north-south across the Virginia/West Virginia/Maryland countryside, but the Potomac River has eroded its way through the ridges. This gap hosts the meeting site between the Potomac and the Shenandoah Rivers - both of them are funneled along the ridges until they find a small gap right here. This site also served as a Civil War era munitions depot and was involved in several campaigns, including the Antietam Campaign in 1862 and John Brown’s raid before the war.
Shenandoah Valley, located in gorgeous rural Virginia, is part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the oldest mountain range in the world.
Shenandoah National Park, located at the northern section of the valley, struggles to maintain its dark skies as the surrounding towns such as Harrisonburg, Charlottesville and even as far back as Washington D.C, produce high levels of light pollution. Although the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division of the National Park aims to curb light pollution on federal lands across the United States, severe urban light pollution of surrounding towns often negates those efforts.
This video reveals an interesting phenomenon which occurred in Summer 2015, when endless storms hammered the east coast of the United States for weeks. During one night, the clouds from those storms blocked much of the light pollution, which coupled with the clarity of the atmosphere, provided a rare crystal clear sighting of the Milky Way from the high elevation of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
This video was filmed as part of SKYGLOW (skyglowproject.com), an ongoing crowdfunded quest to explore the effects and dangers of urban light pollution in contrast with some of the most incredible dark sky areas in North America. This project is being produced in collaboration with International Dark-Sky Association (darksky.org), a non-profit fighting for the preservation of night skies around the globe.
Originally premiered on BBC Earth: bbc.com/earth/story/20151219-a-rare-glimpse-of-the-milky-way-over-the-shenandoah-valley
The film was shot and edited by Harun Mehmedinović on Canon 5DIII & 6D Cameras aided by Alpine Labs' Michron, powered by Paul C. Buff Vagabond Mini. The startrails were created using the rotation of Earth's axis and STARSTAX. LRTimelapse was used to process some of the shots.
Shenandoah National Park - part of the Blue Ridge province of mountains uplifted when Africa slammed into North America to complete growing Pangaea. Surrounded by valleys that host the Shenandoah River, this long linear park features a single road, Skyline Drive, that can take you almost the whole way across.
This is a short time-lapse video highlighting the best locations in Shenandoah National Park. The park is located in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and encompasses part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's one of the most beautiful national parks across the United States and is known for it's scenic drive, Skyline Drive, that travels all the way through the park. Shenandoah has everything from cascading waterfalls to spectacular vistas. I hope you enjoy the video and go check out Shenandoah for yourself to find your own spots!
earthstory reblogged
Enjoy these photos from my trips to Shenandoah in honor of NPS being ungovernable af on twitter pt 1
Fly poison, Allegheny stonecrop, a view of the Blue Ridge, American mountain ash, columnar jointing in metabasalt
Stony Man Sunset
The great mountains at the east coast of the continent slowly eroding. Ancient lava flows and igneous intrusions dotting the landscape. Sediments building a shelf out into the ocean. This isn’t just the setup of the East Coast of America today, it also was the setup on the eastern half of Laurentia, the continental craton that today represents the heart of North America, half a billion years ago.
A billion or so years ago, many of the ancient continental landmasses collided to form a Supercontinent called Rodinia. The eastern fraction of the Laurentian craton was uplifted to create a huge geologic feature known as the Grenville orogeny – a chain of mountains that ran from what is today Scandinavia, through all of North America, and all the way out the other side where it affected Australia and Antarctica. That mountain range crosscut continents just as the Alps, Himalayas, and ranges in-between cross cut Asia and Europe today.
That mountain range eventually broke apart, creating the Iapetus Ocean. When that supercontinent disassembled, it created large outpourings of lava all over the Laurentian coast. These rocks are the remnants of those outpourings.
This sunset photo was taken from Stony Man Summit in Shenandoah National Park, looking west over the Shenandoah River Valley. The rocks are greenshists. They are the remnants of those lava flows, but they have since been metamorphosed. They were caught up in the next great collision of continents, the arrival of Africa off the eastern shore of North America. In the process they were buried at the bottom of the mountain range, heated, and then thrust upwards. Today these rocks make up the core of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and stand high, dominating the surrounding landscape.
-JBB
Image credit: Shane Lin https://flic.kr/p/cCk22C
References: http://bit.ly/29oJFSz http://bit.ly/29t41s0 https://instruct.uwo.ca/earth-sci/300b-001/grenv.htm
Source: facebook.com
Skyline Drive is the main road through Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. To the west, it overlooks the Shenandoah River Valley with a spectacular view. In this clip, that valley is completely filled with fog, found below the level of the viewer. Neat.
earthstory reblogged
From NASA Earth Observatory Photo Of The Day; December 5, 2014:
The Sinuous Shenandoah
Meandering rivers are so commonplace that they are easy to ignore. But if you happen to fly over the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, you might catch a glimpse of a stretch of river that you won’t soon forget.
The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this view of the meanders on August 3, 2013. The top image shows a detailed view of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River near Woodstock, Virginia, where the river’s meanders are unusually sharp and tightly packed. In 48 miles (77 kilometers) of flow, the river travels only 16 miles (26 kilometers) as the crow flies. The lower image offers a broader view of the area. While the river’s winding pattern is most pronounced between Strasburg and Edinburg, the South Fork of the Shenandoah also takes a remarkably sinuous path as it flows toward Front Royal, Virginia.
How did the Shenandoah River get such a distinctive shape in this area? According to geologist Callan Bentley of Northern Virginia Community College, the modern landscape was sculpted by a series of geological processes spanning hundreds of millions of years.
The story begins some 500 million years ago during the Cambrian Period, when layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone were being built along the edge of an ancient predecessor of the continent we now call North America. The gradual deposition process that created the sedimentary rocks went on for 200 million years—a period about 1,000 times longer than modern Homo sapiens have existed as a species.
About 300 million years ago, Africa began a cataclysmic, slow-motion collision with North America that thrust those sandstone, shale, and limestone layers—which had been horizontal when they formed—into a complex mash of northeast-southwest trending folds and rugged mountain ridges. Geologists call this period of mountain-building the Alleghanian orogeny.
As the pressure forced mountain ridges up, rock layers were pressed so intensely that they cracked in many places. Hundreds of northwest-southeast fractures emerged perpendicular to the rising mountain ridges. As hundreds of millions of years passed, the rugged mountains that rose during the Alleghanian orogeny were eroded away by wind and water until the area was nearly flat once again.
Rivers need relatively gentle landscapes to meander, and it was in this period—sometime in the past 100 million years—that the Shenandoah River probably began to assume its modern meandering form. Rather than forming irregular meanders as most rivers do, the Shenandoah followed that pre-existing network of fractures in the bedrock formed during the Alleghanian orogeny. “The water simply found it easier to follow those fractures than to cut down into unfractured bedrock, particularly in the shale and clay-rich sandstone northwest of the Massanutten mountain system,” explained Bentley.
While the same processes occurred on the South Fork, the meanders are less pronounced, perhaps because there are fewer fractures on that side of the ridge. “Later on, when the modern Appalachian Mountains were uplifted or the river’s base level dropped—or both—the river began to cut down anew, and the meanders we see today became ‘locked in place’ along the fracture set,” Bentley said.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michael Taylor and Adam Voiland, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey; Caption by Adam Voiland; Instrument(s): Landsat 8 - OLI
Source: earthobservatory.nasa.gov