The Earth Story

Pura Tanah Lot

The best architecture intends its designs to blend in with the natural elements of the landscape, and I have seen few more pleasing examples than this combination of sea stack and Hindu temple just off the island of Bali in Indonesia, in which the manmade blocks and natural outcrop seem to blend into each other without clear boundaries. Along with six other shoreline temples all within sight of each other, it is supposed to help protect the island from evil influences and pay homage to the guardian spirits of the sea, while being protected in turn by savage sea snakes. The venomous sea snakes at leastare real, and live in wave eroded caves at the base of the sea stack.

The temple was supposedly founded by a 16th century CE holy man on a stack that can be accesses at low tide. The temple is forbidden (as many Hindu ones are) to non Hindus, but the stack itself can be approached and explored. The name means 'Land in the Sea' in Balinese. Religiously it represents a syncretism between traditional Balinese animism and later Hinduism.

Loz

Image credit: Fabio Giamondi

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tanah-lot

The Chesapeake Bay Crater

35 million years ago, the Earth was much warmer than today due to higher abundances of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There were either small or no ice caps at the poles, leading to high sea levels that flooded the edges of the continents that are exposed today. This was the situation when a large rock from space came hurtling in, hitting the submerged continental shelf off the coast of what is today the state of Virginia. The object was between 3 and 5 kilometers in diameter. The impact of this rock caused a massive explosion and formed a crater 85 kilometers in diameter. It shattered the existing rocks, creating a debris pile known as a breccia that has since been buried by sediment shed off the continent.

The Chesapeake Bay Impact Structure still controls features of the shoreline today. It’s no coincidence that it sits right at the mouth of the modern day Chesapeake Bay.

The presence of this crater has caused the land above to subside, or sink, more than the surrounding land for 35 million years. That subsidence has caused rivers to flow to this location, making it a central point for erosion and downcutting.

15,000 years ago, sea level was much lower due to the presence of huge ice caps, so rivers flowed through the Chesapeake Bay impact structure out to sea, cutting wide canyons. When sea level rose, it flooded those canyons, creating shoreline features called estuaries around the world. The Chesapeake Bay is an estuary created by the flooding of river valleys that were fixed in location by an asteroid impact 35 million years ago. The East Coast of the United States today is shaped, in part, by a rock from space that landed tens of millions of years ago.

-JBB

Image credits and more: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs49-98/ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chesapeake_Crater_boundaries_map.png

Upheaval Dome

Located in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, Upheaval Dome is a must-visit for any hiking/geology enthusiast. A huge structure, roughly 5 kilometers (3 miles) in diameter and over 300 meters (roughly a 1000 feet) at its deepest, Upheaval Dome is an area of overturned and fractured rock that looks like a bullseye in the Earth. What caused this gigantic structure? That is a question many scientists have been asking for decades. Because Upheaval Dome is located on top of a massive salt layer, the Paradox Salt layer to be exact, experts proposed an idea, that the structure was created through this salt layer pushing upwards, squeezed up because of the weight of the overlying rock and the relatively low density of the salt, much like how squishing a jelly donut will cause the jelly filling to break through the top of the donut. The upwelling salt then spread like a pancake and weathered away. The mystery? There is no salt or salt residue present anywhere on the surface!

The other theory is that Upheaval Dome was created by a meteorite impact. This impact would have caused the uplift that we see today and could explain the ideal circular shape of the structure. There have been no meteorite fragments found anywhere around the structure, however, there is one piece of evidence that convinces many experts that Upheaval Dome was formed by a meteorite impact. This piece of evidence is a piece of shocked quartz that was found on the rim of the structure. Shocked quartz is only seen in very quick, violent geologic events, namely meteorite impacts.

Salt dome or meteorite crater, if you want to see Upheaval Dome up close and personal, there is a hiking path for any interested visitors. Decide for yourself which one you think it might be!

-AND

Image Credit: https://flic.kr/p/ciSjn7 -Photo by Doc Searls

Sources: http://bit.ly/2tC1Ddg https://go.nasa.gov/2u77Sqn http://bit.ly/2sJS6xK

Full Moon rising over Maine

Sunlight hitting the edge of the mountains, Montana. 

Terminus of an Icelandic glacier

Lenticular cloud hanging out over glacier and hills in Iceland

My goodness this is unfair. The rest of the world is angry at you for having experienced this.

You know what? Maybe this is the time I should legitimately crowdfund a trip. I’ll get more vines of this? I’d chip in for that. My word. 

Is there such a thing as a video camera drop instead of a mic drop?

A camping trip to...Yosemite.

It would appear that Canada has a nice coating of snow. Look at how it pulls down the branches on those trees and coats the landscape.

Oregon in action floodwaters.