The Beautiful Cathedral Cliffs Rise Above The Forest: Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming

Olympic Peninsula

michaelmatti

Psst NASA is currently running a poll to decide the name of the next Mars rover!

These are the nine finalists! The poll closes in five days, so go vote here! The winning name will be announce in March :)

I miss doing microscope work. Can we make a thread of our favourite thin section? This is mine

Actinolite Schist

Heidi Gustafson, who has spent the past five years collecting and working with ocher, walks along Whidbey Island’s Double Bluff Beach, off the coast of Washington, in search of the material. She came to scout this area, where she spent time as a child, after recalling its interesting cliff exposure.Some ochers, Gustafson believes, are calling out to be turned into a pigment. Others are more resistant. Those ocher fragments are either returned to their point of origin, or, if Gustafson cannot get back there, placed outside in a stone graveyard of sorts that she has created in the forest near her cabin. A few of her ocher-based artworks hang on the wall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/t-magazine/ocher-heidi-gustafson.html

A Stark Forest Of Standing Stones

The Pinnacles, a stark forest of standing stones on a plain of bright yellow sand.

Thousands of limestone pillars stand in groups in the silence of Western Australia’s south-west ‘Painted Desert’, part of the Nambung National Park. Nothing but the sighing and moaning of the wind breaks the eerie silence of the Pinnacles Desert. Any science fiction writer seeking a setting of a spinechiller need look no further than this alien spot, perhaps the inspiration of the blockbuster movie ‘Pitch Black’?

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On one side this may look like just a ordinary clam shell but when you flip it over it contains beautiful golden calcite crystals. The crystals formed when the clam died and a cavity formed allowing the crystals to develop. Took over two million years to do this. Found on the east coast of Florida in Brevard County.

capturing_the_cosmos

Amazing aerial tour around Shiprock - a solidified volcanic plug surrounded by dikes of solidified magma, New Mexico/Navajo Nation.

henry_do

The beauty of our world lies in the details.

This account has been sharing old videos of the many decades of lava flows on Kilauea. Often that volcano will wake up after only a few months of inactivity when it does go quiet, so it probably won’t be long before they get new footage.

Here’s an incredible lava breakout. A crust of pahoehoe is fractured by the pressure of the lava behind it, and the lava spills out onto the surface. Watch how some of the other still-soft rocks nearby flex downwards as the new lava moves on top of them. Also watch how the videographer slowly retreats…

epiclava_

Break on through…

Iceland: Landmannalaugar, Suðurland

i love cats. like we as a species just really go out of our way to obtain fat little house goblins in the hopes that they will occasionally acknowledge us