En Tequila Es Verdad

At last, my darlings, I have finished! Our trees are fully cooked, piping-hot out of the oven and waiting for you to savor. Yum!

While you’re here, a couple of outtakes (i.e., photos I didn’t have enough room for):

Aerial view of seared zone south of Camp Baker after May 18 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Cowlitz County, Washington. May 22, 1980. Image courtesy USGS.

I didn’t use this one in the main post, because it’s not as obvious, but if you look closely within the scorched zone, you’ll notice how abrupt the transition from burnt to unburnt is. The hot cloud just went woosh up into the air, and while one tree perished, its neighbor was spared. Pretty wild stuff.

Speaking of wild, this was a common scene round my childhood city:

Panorama of the Schultz Fire, Flagstaff, AZ. Image courtesy Calvin Johnson, Leupp, Arizona and Coconino National Forest.

No, the San Francisco Peaks weren’t erupting. Nor was any other volcano. Some stupid bugger didn’t know how to handle a campfire in dry country, and next thing you know, half the mountain’s on fire. It burned Schultz Peak all the way up. My darlings, when Smokey the Bear tells you to be careful with fire in the forest, please be fucking careful with fire in the forest, m’kay?

Thank you. Now, get thee to the baked trees, and let me know how they turned out.
Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s go back to basics for a bit. I’ve had a challenge thrown in my teeth. Southern Geologist didn’t intend it as a challenge, I’m sure, when he* said, “The big picture/history drags people in much more easily than discussing rock types.” But I’m a contrary sort of person. And something went ping. I see no reason why we can’t have our rock cake** and eat it, too. Besides, understanding the basic rock types is essential for geology. Most of you probably know them already, but what if a physicist or a biologist or one of those other hammer-deprived science types stumbles in here? We don’t want them going, “Ig-meta-whowha?” and running away, now, do we?

Besides, I have purty pictures and a snarky sense of humor. That will hopefully be enough to entertain those of you who can recite the three basic rock types in your sleep.

Let us begin in fire, because that is the way the world began***.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where were we before the craziness that was this weekend happened? Oh. Right. Oregon!

Forgot to mention our stop by the Prehistoric Gardens on Day the Seconde, didn’t I? Allow me to rectify that with this nifty picture of a T-Rex, me, and a Stellar’s Jay.

Moi at Prehistoric Gardens. Image credit Lockwood DeWitt.

We didn’t have time to go fool around inside, but we got a brochure for Evelyn, because we’re going to drag her there when she visits. Absolutely!

At the beginning of Day the Thirde, we dipped into California for a very brief time. I haven’t got any pictures of the knockers there, but I will have someday, because sea stacks stranded inland? Hells to the yes! They look awesome.

We were, however, burning to get to the Josephine Ophiolite, and we zipped along the Smith River, and suddenly… Read the rest of this entry »

A probe sweeps through space. Roughly 4.2 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) away, you sit and watch images of another world appear. You notice a mottled surface, and on its horizon, jetting an incredible 260km (162mi) above its surface, a plume.

This photo was taken by Voyager 1 looking back 2.6 million miles (4.5 million km) at Io, three days after its historic encounter. This is the same image in which Linda A. Morabito, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, discovered the first extraterrestrial volcanic eruption (the bright curved volcanic cloud on the limb). Image courtesy NASA/JPL.

This is the first volcano ever seen erupting outside your planet. Read the rest of this entry »