geosciences

North Pennines: high, rain-glimmering roads, precipitous valleys, gritstone chimneys and shafts abandoned among the cotton-grass of the moors. Washing-floors and waterwheels by upland streams, stone portals in the flanks of the hills leading to the mines. The landscape of WH.Auden's earliest poetry: Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago; Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below. . . The seams of coal and veins of lead below the moors are rich in prismatic minerals as well as in metalliferous ore. Auden wrote in the 1930s of lead-mines in decline: ghosts of industry in remote country. But, in the 19th century, lead extraction had flourished in Weardale and on Alston Moor as part of the mining activity which stretched across the north of England from County Durham and Northumberland, to West Cumberland and the Isle of Man. See this link: http://www.thingsmagazine.net/text... - Halil from Bookmarklet

*bumped again for Spidra* FYI I can now 100% confirm that search no longer finds old posts. I searched for this and found zilch, but luckily posted the link as a DM to M F [who now seems to have left :( ] eons ago and found it that way! Not good! :( - Halil

Perceptual rainbow palette - Matlab function and ASCII files In my last post I introduced cubeYF, my custom-made perceptual lightness rainbow palette. As promised there, I am sharing the palette  with today’s post. For the Matlab users, cube YF, along with the other palettes I introduced in the series, is part of the Matlab File Exchange submission Perceptually improved [...]

Etna has decided to keep up the pace this month — after multiple impressive lava fountains last week, the volcano took a short breather than included some small explosive eruptions from the summit craters. However, last night the New Southeast ...

Hi All! You are in for a wonderful treat! We are working on an e-book about the JR - to be released in the beginning of April. Here is a guest post from our e-book illustrator, Alice Feagan:   Display on Kids page read more

I use a variety of social networking tools to perform my job, but there's one that's more important and valuable to me than all the rest combined: Twitter. Yesterday afternoon there was a discussion on Twitter that exemplifies its value and fun: are there visible meteors on Titan?

Thursday at noon PST/3pm EST/20:00 UT we check in with Emily Lakdawalla to bring us up to speed with Curiosity's computer problems and we check in on NASA's budget status.

Ever wonder what it would taste like if you could lick the icy surface of Jupiter’s Europa? The answer may be that it would taste a lot like that last mouthful of water that you accidentally drank when you were swimming at the beach on your last vacation.

Last week, the Earth Institute and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society hosted a discussion on cities, food and climate. What were people saying? Find out in this Storify recap of reactions from across Twitter!

There’s something so awesome about a heavy snowfall, so transformative – it really inspires me. I went out skiing this morning, and I’ve never seen our house looking more beautiful. The snow is about 11 inches deep so far: It’s a wet, heavy snow. Temperatures are hovering right around 32°F (0°C), so it’s sticking to everything. Our lower driveway: Our road: While I was skiing across the floodplain down by …

An intensifying winter storm has moved off the coast of Virginia this morning, and will bring heavy rain and snow, strong winds, and coastal flooding to most of the Mid-Atlantic and New England coast over the next two days. Rain is mixing with snow in the Washington D.C. area, where 4 - 8" of snow is expected today, down from earlier forecasts of 8 - 12". According to The Capital Weather Gang, today's snowstorm needs at least 6.6" of accumulation to crack the top-te...<br /><a href="http://www.wunderground.com/blog...">Read More</a>

It’s lovely here in the Fort Valley this morning! Lily went skiing: Lola sat in the window: Yay!

A few months ago, I shared some pictures taken during a set of four flights from Cape Town, South Africa to Nome, Alaska: Cape Town to Amsterdam Amsterdam to Minneapolis Minneapolis to Anchorage Anchorage to Nome Now, I’d like to share some pictures taken during the return journey in September 2012, which was Nome –> Anchorage –> Seattle –> Amsterdam –> South Africa. This first post contains some pictures taken …