The Earth Story

Double Rainbow Caldera This shot of double full rainbows was taken by Jasman Singh Mander after a July storm and shared through the US Department of Interior’s feeds. The shot covers much of the area of Crater Lake including Wizard Island, vertical wisps of clouds, and the hint of sunlight peeking through. -JBB Image credit: Jasman Singh Mander https://instagram.com/jasmanmander/ US Dept. of Interior: https://instagram.com/usinterior/ https://twitter.com/Interior/status/606117454230609920

A wintry sunrise in Arches National Park. Image credit: photographer Jacob W. Frank, shared by the U.S. Dept. of Interior and the National Parks service: https://www.facebook.com/ArchesNationalPark

This one is a little heartbreaking. The caption tells the story:

Summer Sunset, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

What part of “Leave no trace” is so hard?

This is an outcrop of sandstone in Arches National Park, near a spot known as Frame Arch – an arch that gives a view of Delicate Arch, one of the park’s most popular sites (seriously take a look at this December crowd: https://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js26VQN6h).

This picture shows an outcrop of rock about 2 meters across. The etchings on the surface appeared in late April and they’re deep; the Park Service estimated it probably took someone an hour or more to carve that deeply into sandstone. There were probably a number of people who walked by while this outcrop was being defaced.

There is basically no way to fully restore a rock surface once this happens. The Park Service can try to fill it, but it’s never going to be able to match the color and texture of the rock. It could cement over the rock entirely, but it’s a park, that really defeats the purpose. The Park Service can also try to grind into the rock, but that requires “damaging the entire surface” and in a place like Arches, that could cause instability of the surrounding rocks.

The Park Service will, of course, try to do something, but it’s not free, there will be tens or hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars likely spent trying to repair what these people did in a few hours. The Park Service will also try to find out who did this, and maybe they were dumb enough to post the image on their Facebook pages, but it’s a National park so you can’t have video cameras everywhere.

The Park Service recently noted that there has been a surge of vandalism in the last 10 years across the properties they manage. They speculate it is a result of social media; sign your name and post it to your profile.

Yesterday we noted people forcibly breaking into a protected area in Death Valley National Park, shooting security cameras, and killing an endangered animal (http://bit.ly/1snPq87). That’s one extreme, but events like this are far more common. The Parks host tens of millions of visitors system-wide per year. This kind of damage degrades the parks for everyone and it forces the Park Service to spend money on repairs that could be otherwise spent keeping those facilities in good working order. A simple can of spray paint costing you a few dollars can cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair because it must be done without further damage.

Please stop this and if you see someone doing something like this, stop them or report them. If you have any information about defacement like this one in Arches, the Park Service would probably appreciate the information and often there are rewards available.

-JBB

Image credit: Arches National Park http://bit.ly/1SUDKFX

References: http://www.myrockymountainpark.com/graffiti-in-parks/ https://www.nps.gov/arch/planyourvisit/graffiti.htm

Yawn

Spring Cherry Blossom season in Washington DC

Update on a story we covered previously...

Why yes, “A National Park Love Letter” is the sort of thing I share. 

Stratigraphy

In 1941, the US Department of Interior, which runs the National Park service, commissioned nature photographer Ansel Adams to provide photographs for the walls of the Interior Department’s new headquarters in Washington, DC. The project was never finished due to the United States’ entry into the Second World War, but the already-captured photographs were still property of the Interior Department.

The US National Archives has made over 200 of these files available online. They cover many major stops in the western US, including Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Carlsbad Caverns, Kings Canyon, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain National Parks.

The pile of sedimentary layers that is the Grand Canyon is laid open by the Colorado in this shot by Adams. Look at how you can track the entire 300 million year sequence – from the sandstone atop the Great Unconformity to the Kaibab Limestone at the top. Really impressive how the Coconino Sandstone, a deposit of cross bedded sand dunes, stands out even at this distance, and how you can spot a slight hint of slope to the uppermost surface.

-Image credit: Dept. of the Interior/National Archives https://www.archives.gov/research/ansel-adams/

Water waste

A couple years ago I took a trip through Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That park is America’s most-visited park and it has a huge number of sites where you can stop and just enjoy the scenery or, let’s be honest, run across the street to put a hand lens on the rocks.

When I left that day, I’d filled up the couple grocery bags in my car with discarded water bottles picked up from the roadside and there were plenty more I didn’t have room for.

Anyone who has visited a National Park…or heck, looked at any roadside is familiar with this problem. The U.S. reportedly consumes about 30 billion bottles of water per year. Most of the plastic from those bottles winds up in the trash – less than ¼ is actually recycled – and then there’s the side of the road.

A combination night sky/rolling fog view from BLM lands in California to celebrate the 69th anniversary of the creation of the Bureau of Land Management.