Lilliehöökbreen glacier complex
Calving front of Lilliehöökbreen glacier
Bearded seal on ice.
Atlantic puffin waving hello.
Barnacle geese with a chick (in nest, far right).
Exploring the edge of sea ice, approximately 81 degrees north latitude.
Landing at Hamburgbukta, northeast coast of Svalbard.
occur everywhere in Svalbard.
Walking down a medial moraine in Kongsfjord.
never disappoints the guests and expedition staff!
Walrus are, without a doubt, my favorite marine mammal.
at the shooting range in Longyearbyen.
Landing site at Kapp Lee.
Slumbering walrus.
Landing site at Bolthodden.
Spectacular alpine geology.
Remains of Swedish-Russian “Arc of the Meridian Project” base from 1899.
Tidewater glacier in Bellsund.
Remains of beluga whale hunting camp.
Well maintained Norwegian hunter/trapper cabin at Bamsebu.
The mast at Ny Alesund where Roald Amundsen launched his balloon in 1926.
Geological buffet of various rock on a recessional moraine.
Sun flare in Isfjorden.
in the Norwegian Sea, a volcanic hot spot on which the most northern active volcano on Earth is found.
View on approach.
Beerenberg volcano, rising to 2,277 m (7,470 feet) above sea level.
M/V Sea Spirit at anchor.
An extraordinarily happy geologist, five months and nine days into “retirement.”
as we continue to travel north across the Arctic Circle and towards Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago.
The Faroe Islands are a pile of Paleogene-age basalts, deeply cut by magnificent fjords.
greeting each other at their burrow on Fair Isle in the North Sea.
and home to Sir James Hutton, father of modern geology, who formulated some of the seminal ideas in geology and was a proponent of uniformitarianism in the 18th century.
has been wonderful the past two weeks, with two geological highlights shown below.
Columnar jointed basalt at Giant’s Causeway, northern Ireland.
Fingal’s Cave, Island of Staffa.
Charismatic Atlantic Puffins.
Two thousand year old archaeology at St. Kilda.
Gannets galore at Bass Rock in the Firth of Fourth!
This lichen-encrusted spheroidally-weathered granite outcrop provided a colorful foreground to the dramatic cloudscape above my camp at 8,300 feet in the Medicine Bow Range.
associated with the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where they test fired Athena and Pershing missiles during the Cold War.
The well-protected blockhouse structure.
One of three Athena missile launch stands, with the rolling support structure in the rolled-back position.
Learn more about this historic relict: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_River_Launch_Complex
is an unusual and rare CO2-driven cold water geyser that is depositing a colorful mound of travertine. Furthermore, it’s the result of an improperly abandoned oil/gas exploration well immediately south of Green River, Utah, and it periodically erupts on 8 and 22 hour-long cycles that are poorly understood.
An older, innactive but natural travertine and barite mound, originally described by John Wesley Powell on his explorations in 1869: “We stop to examine some interesting rocks, deposited by mineral springs that at one time must have existed here, but which are no longer flowing... “
Mini-rimstone dams on the steeper portions of the travertine mound.
The most active portion of the travertine mound.
Here’s an interesting technical reference about this unusual feature: GEOSIGHTS: CRYSTAL GEYSER, GRAND COUNTY, UTAH.
Experimenting with a light-painted foreground using my Black Diamond Storm headlamp.
Stepping into the scene and pointing a 600 lumen Ledlenser MH-10 headlamp skyward.
Panorama created by stitching together five portrait-oriented shots.
purchased today at Arches National Park for $80 for becoming a senior citizen. Priceless!
accompanied a very stormy sunset in Castle Valley this evening, and here’s a frozen image of a peculiar horizontal cloud-to-cloud lightning bolt.
Image captured using Pluto Trigger device on tripod-mounted Canon 5Diii, f/4 at 1/15 sec at ISO 200.
where I caught their courtship behavior (click any image to enlarge).