The Yarra Yarra Lakes Nature Reserve is a system of small salt lakes near the town of Carnamah, Western Australia. Once the site of a great river, this landscape has formed due to changes in land and sea level, a drier climate, and infrequent rains. Lakes here will change color throughout the year, turning blue in the winter as they fill with water and pink in the summer as they evaporate and leave behind salt.
-29.689000°, 115.887000°
Source imagery: Planet
You know what? It’s really like that sometimes.
This is automatic stress relief
Gordon Mortensen（b.1938 United States)
Spring Flowers
reduction woodcut
[ID: A highly detailed woodcut of a grassy pond's edge at sunrise or sunset- there are reeds, a few trees, and scattered wildflowers, and the sky and water are pale pink. End ID]
Phyllis Shafer, Magical Moment at Fallen Leaf Lake, gouache on paper, 17.5 x 22.5 inches.
Excerpt from this Margaret Renkl Op-Ed from the New York Times:
Last fall, in a moving essay for The Bitter Southerner, the writer Janisse Ray called the Okefenokee “a gigantic, ethereal, god-touched swamp in southeast Georgia that’s like no other place on earth.” This is the kind of ecstatic language the refuge inevitably inspires. Some 700,000 people visit it each year, and I have always intended to return. Now I’m worried I won’t ever have the chance.
Twin Pines Minerals, an Alabama-based mining company, has applied to build a strip mine less than three miles from the wildlife refuge. The mining operation would target a geological formation called Trail Ridge, a raised area of land on the eastern border of the swamp. During prehistoric times, Trail Ridge was a barrier island. Today the ocean is some 45 miles away, and Trail Ridge functions as a low earthen dam that holds the Okefenokee in place. “Trail Ridge is not only ecologically important in and of itself,” notes the Georgia Conservancy, “but also serves as scaffolding for the health of the Okefenokee.”
But Trail Ridge contains titanium dioxide. Twin Pines proposes to extract the mineral by peeling off the topsoil, digging out the sand pits, separating the sand containing titanium and then returning the mineral-free sand to its approximate original location.
It might sound like a decent plan if you’ve never seen what happens when a coal company practices mountaintop removal mining, which also works according to a destroy-extract-replace model. Strip mines dramatically alter the environment. Recreating ancient ecosystems afterward isn’t possible.
And as the Okefenokee Protection Alliance points out, risking this wildlife refuge just isn’t necessary. Titanium dioxide isn’t hard to find elsewhere, and procuring it is not exactly an issue of national security: “Though titanium is used in everything from surgical tools to military equipment, mineral commodity experts expect the minerals that might be obtained here to be used for more pedestrian purposes — primarily as a pigment for coloring things white like paint, plastic and even toothpaste.”
On Jan. 19, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division opened a period of public comment about the company’s draft plan. It’s not necessary to live in Georgia to comment.
the remote, secluded and little known rice terraces of yuanyang county in china’s yunnan province were built by the hani people along the contours of ailao mountain range five hundred years ago. during the early spring season, the terraces, once planted, are irrigated with spring water from the forest above, reflecting sunlight to create these stain glass like landscapes
photos by jialiang gao, hai thinh, javarman, isabelle chauvel, chaluntorn preeyasombat and thierry bornier
[ID: nine aerial photographs of the rice terraces, as described, reflecting different colors of light and dotted with trees. End ID]
Bendik Riis (Norwegian, 1911-1988), Furuskog [Pine Forest]. Oil on board, 81 x 74.5 cm.
[ID: A photograph of rich green mosses, ferns, and maybe grasses growing on stones in the middle of a river. The plants are bowed down with wind or rain and the water is rippled as if rain is falling. End ID]
today on neat hozier retweets: disappearing birds!
[ID: A tweet, retweeted by Hozier, but originally by Daniel Holland. It reads: “The flashing black and white these sandpipers display is caused by their black backs and white chests. Coupled with the colors of the sky it looks like they keep disappearing.” Below the tweet there’s a video of a flock of birds flying just above the ocean shoreline. The sand, sea, and sky are all a slate grey. The birds are in a murmuration, and as the shape of the group shifts parts of the cloud seem to disappear. The invisibility moves through the birds in spiraling stripes almost like a barbershop pole. End ID.]
Paradise meadows - Mt. Rainier
Just remembering my summer trips.
