Tulip Farms Bloom in Color
From the air, tulip farms look like a giant kaleidoscope. Brilliant stripes of red, yellow, purple, pink, orange and green make up a glorious technicolor patchwork.
The Netherlands devotes more than 25,000 acres to tulips and produces more than three billion tulip flowers each year. Farmers plant the bulbs in late October and harvest them in May, selling the the cut flowers to florists and supermarkets. Two-thirds of the vibrant blooms are exported, mostly to the U.S. and Germany.
This photo shows an extraordinary 60 million tulips coming into flower. When the flowers and color are gone, the land is cultivated for vegetables.
Living with Volcanoes
National Geographic features life in Indonesia in the shadow of smoldering Mount Merapi. Columns of noxious gas and jittery seismographs signal an imminent explosion. The government has ordered a full-scale evacuation, but many residents have refused to leave.
Merapi, whose name means “fire mountain,” is a natural-born killer. Rising almost 10,000 feet, it ranks among the world’s most active and dangerous volcanoes. An eruption in 1930 killed more than 1,300 people. The surrounding area is frequently affected by lava flows, rockfalls, and toxic gases.
Nowhere else do so many live so close to so many active volcanoes—129 by one count. On Java alone, 120 million people live in the shadow of more than 30 active volcanoes.
Ansel Adams Photographs
Ansel Adams (1902–84) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West. In 1941, the National Park Service commissioned Adams to create a photo mural for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. The theme was “nature as exemplified and protected in the U.S. National Parks.” World War II halted the project, and it was never resumed.
The National Archives still retains 226 photographs taken for this project, most of them signed and captioned by Adams. They were taken at many national parks parks including Glacier, Grand Canyon, Kings Canyon, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone and Yosemite.
Microsoft Launches WorldWide Telescope
From the world of competitive astronomical websites (isn’t the Internet grand?) comes this new offering from Microsoft, WorldWide Telescope. Like others before it Microsoft’s new offering allows users to explore planets and other celestial objects. You can also view/track objects from any place on earth and in any point in time. Of course as you might expect from Microsoft there’s more going on than that. There is a lot of imagery from NASA including the Mars rovers, Hubble telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. There are also ‘tours’ set up by expert astronomers or you can even save your own ‘5 year missions’.
Like with Google’s ‘The Sky’ or the open source Stellarium users must first download the free WorldWide Telescope software from Microsoft (windows only).
WorldWide Telescope (via BBC News)
Volcano Thunderstorm
“Few sights in nature can compare to the sheer magnificence of a volcano erupting in full flow. But while scenes of molten lava are relatively commonplace, this otherworldly picture of Chaiten Volcano in southern Chile shows a truly spectacular, and devastating, volcanic phenomenon.
“As clouds of toxic ash and dust tower into the sky, they ionize the air, generating an explosive electrical storm. Colossal forks of lightning spark around the noxious plume as it spews from the volcano’s crater, creating an image of raw, terrifying energy - as if the air itself were ablaze.”
The 3,300-foot Chaiten Volcano, 800 miles south of the Chilean capital Santiago, is erupting for the first time in thousands of years.
Sunsets and Sunrises
National Geographic is known for its stunning photography, as demonstrated by a new online collection of sunset and sunrise photographs from around the world.
This photo shows how the “splendor of the past endures in an Egyptian pyramid. Camels have provided desert transport in parts of Africa and Asia since ancient times.”
Flooding the Grand Canyon… on purpose!
Every few years, the U.S. Department of Interior purposefully floods the Grand Canyon by opening large tubes in the Glen Canyon Dam, allowing 300,000 gallons of water per second to pass through the dam and flood the Colorado River downstream. This is equivalent to 1.3 million garden hoses and could fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes.
Since the dam was built in 1963, 98% of the sediment carried downstream by the Colorado river has been lost, blocked by the dam. So the manmade flood delivers this rich sedimentary residue downstream and restores natural sandbars that are essential to native plant and fish species.
Tree Circus
Axel Erlandson was an American arborsculptor who in 1947 created “The Tree Circus,” a horticultural attraction in central California featuring uniquely-shaped trees.
Axel began as a bean farmer in the 1920s. When he noticed how easy it was to sculpt the hedges on his farm, he wondered if he could do the same with trees. Axel would create his designs first on paper, then prune, bend and graft the trees into shape.
In 1945, Axel’s wife and daughter visited Santa Cruz where they saw lines of people waiting to see oddities such as the leaning buildings at the Mystery Spot. Upon returning home, they mentioned this to Axel and wondered if people would pay to see his trees. Axel jumped on the idea, bought a small piece of land in Scotts Valley along a main tourist road, and transplanted his best trees at their new home. The Tree Circus opened in the spring of 1947.
