• ES Picture of the Day 27 2023

    From Black Panther@21:1/186 to All on Fri Jan 27 11:00:32 2023
    EPOD - a service of USRA

    The Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) highlights the diverse processes and phenomena which shape our planet and our lives. EPOD will collect and archive photos, imagery, graphics, and artwork with short explanatory
    captions and links exemplifying features within the Earth system. The
    community is invited to contribute digital imagery, short captions and
    relevant links.


    Winter’s Black and White — and Gray — World

    January 27, 2023

    RayB_epod_slcapsnow424c_01jan23 (003)

    RayB_epod_muryparksnow459c_03jan23 (003)

    Photographer: Ray Boren

    Summary Author: Ray Boren

    Storminess and repetitive snow-shoveling kept me home most of the time,
    but during a few breaks in the weather I felt compelled to see what all
    that snow was doing. I was surprised by how desaturated the urban world
    around me seemed, as demonstrated in the two photographs here. And to
    be clear: These are COLOR photographs. The first, taken on New Year’s
    Day, January 1, 2023, is of a tree-lined promenade that encircles the
    Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Strips of fresh snow, instead
    of springtime cherry blossoms, line the trees, and a man can be seen
    walking away, disappearing around a curve in wispy fog. A second image,
    taken on the third day of the weather event, January 3, 2023, features
    a calm, reflective pond fed by Little Cottonwood Creek, in Salt
    Lake City, in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley.

    Seeing the world “ in black and white” has come to imply a narrow
    perspective. But the lack of color, as we perceive it with limited
    human eyes, can represent both reality and an aesthetic choice.
    Ansel Adams, the famed exponent of black and white photography,
    noted this, and used the gradations between black and white to express
    his appreciation for the grays in his images — and in life. “Our lives
    at times seem a study in contrast,” he said, “love and hate, birth and
    death, right and wrong … everything seen in absolutes of black and
    white. Too often we are not aware that it is the shades of gray that
    add depth and meaning to the starkness of those extremes.”

    Plentiful rain turned to water-heavy snow as the new year, 2023,
    debuted where I live, on the Rocky Mountains’ western margin. Snow
    piled up over several bleak mid-winter days, as low blankets of cloud
    smothered the landscape. The U.S. National Weather Service reported
    that an atmospheric river — sometimes called a “Pineapple Express”
    — was flowing from the tropics across the Pacific Ocean, aiming its
    potent moisture first at coastal California, which experienced
    flooding. The flow surged inland across the Sierra Nevada Range and
    North America’s Great Basin before slamming into Utah’s Wasatch
    Mountains (and ski resorts). It’s a heck of a way to run a historic
    drought, which has been afflicting the West for two decades, according
    to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.


    Salt Lake City, Utah Coordinates: 40.7608, -111.8910


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    Cryosphere Links

    * Guide to Frost
    * What is the Cryosphere?
    * Bentley Snow Crystals
    * Glaciers of the World
    * Ice, Snow, and Glaciers: The Water Cycle
    * The National Snow and Ice Data Center Google Earth Images
    * Snow and Ice Crystals

    -
    Earth Science Picture of the Day is a service of the Universities
    Space Research Association.

    https://epod.usra.edu

    --- up 47 weeks, 4 days, 20 minutes
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  • From Black Panther@21:1/186 to All on Mon Feb 27 11:01:10 2023
    EPOD - a service of USRA

    The Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) highlights the diverse processes and phenomena which shape our planet and our lives. EPOD will collect and archive photos, imagery, graphics, and artwork with short explanatory
    captions and links exemplifying features within the Earth system. The
    community is invited to contribute digital imagery, short captions and
    relevant links.


    Northeastern Nevada’s Pilot Peak

    February 27, 2023

    RayB_pilotpeak659c_28jan23 (003)

    Photographer: Ray Boren

    Summary Author: Ray Boren


    Looming prominently, and helpfully, above the Great Basin of
    western North America, Nevada’s Pilot Peak has proved to be a
    beacon to desert travelers. The mountain rises to an elevation of
    10,720 feet (3267.6 meters) above the sage, salt flats and lower ridges
    of the Great Salt Lake Desert. It has an appealing pyramidal aspect
    even in mid-winter, as shown in this photograph, taken on January 28,
    2023, from an Interstate 80 exit south of the mountain, not far from
    the twin, stateline communities of West Wendover, Nevada, and Wendover,
    Utah.


    Native Americans, such as the region’s resident Goshute and
    Shoshone peoples, mountain men, and 19th-century emigrants all
    found Pilot Peak an invaluable landmark. Historic markers near the
    freeway exit note that the early, California-bound
    Bartleson-Bidwell wagon party, cutting cross-country northwest of
    Great Salt Lake, camped by the mountain and precious springs that they
    found there in 1841, having left the Oregon Trail in today’s Idaho
    in search of a new route to north-central Nevada’s Humboldt River.
    The summit’s name is attributed to government explorer John C.
    Fremont, who in 1845 first glimpsed it from the Cedar Range, about
    75 miles away, and recognized its value as a guide for emigrants. Only
    a year later, the Donner-Reed party reached Pilot Peak and its
    springs after an arduous and time-consuming traverse of the desert and
    salt flats on the untested Hastings Cutoff, which caused delays
    that contributed to the company’s subsequent snow-bound tragedies that
    autumn and winter in the still-distant Sierra Nevada Range.


    Pilot Peak’s “prominence” — its impressive 5,726-foot (1745 m.)
    rise and views above surrounding valleys — places it among an elite
    group of summits in the United States, according to hikers and
    mountaineers. Primarily composed of sedimentary rocks, including
    shale, the short Pilot Peak Range is among the many mountain
    sequences that help define the Basin and Range physiographic
    province, extending from Utah’s Wasatch Mountains on the east to
    California’s Sierra Nevadas on the west. Geologists explain that
    tectonic extension stretched the earth’s crust over millions of
    years, forming the basin’s series of mountain blocks and intervening
    valleys.



    Pilot Peak, Nevada Coordinates: 41.0210, -114.0778



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    Geography Links

    * Atlapedia Online
    * CountryReports
    * GPS Visualizer
    * Holt Rinehart Winston World Atlas
    * Mapping Our World
    * Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
    * Types of Land
    * World Mapper

    -
    Earth Science Picture of the Day is a service of the Universities
    Space Research Association.

    https://epod.usra.edu

    --- up 21 minutes
    * Origin: -=> Castle Rock BBS <=- Now Husky HPT Powered! (21:1/186)