Tag: Nature
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Moloch horridus
This ‘grotesque Australian reptile’ – in the words of my Oxford Dictionary – is popularly called thorny devil or thorny dragon. I think its official name – Moloch horridus – sounds more horrid than the popular one. Here’s what I read in my friend Jane’s reptile book: “the Moloch horridus is the sole member of the Genus…
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Desert art
Drawings in the sand through the interplay of wind and sturdy desert grass. Using the grass-stalks as a compass, the wind has drawn circles around each plant. At first they must have been very faint, but after days and days of strong wind from different directions they are now clearly visible, engraved in the red…
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Kata Tjuta
or: What’s in a name? Looking from the red planet Mars at the red continent Australia on planet Earth we may be able to see, with the best available telescope, an image like you’ll find here (please click), on a picture made by NASA. From that far we perceive a group of heavily eroded bulges in the…
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Before sunset
A catamaran blocks my view of the sun that is about to set in the Indian Ocean. But the very last rays manage to pass under the elevated bottom of the boat, producing a faint reflection on the gently rolling waves. Similarly, but differently, in the photo below the rays of the setting sun penetrate a…
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Shipwreck
No, no African boat people drowned in the Mediterranean. Only a harmless event of children at play in a countryside abounding in water. Wet clothes, that’s the only discomfort they’re suffering. A house on the waterfront; a boat or cycle as favourite mode of transport; more Dutch than this you can’t get it. Photos of the week: Weerribben,…
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Weerribben
An old peat bog: after centuries of peat production now a nature reserve to explore leisurely by canoe or silent electric boat. Peat once was popular fuel enabling people to make it through the long, cold winters. With shovels it was dug and cut into bricks, row after row, layer after layer, creating the channels that…
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Giants in the wind
In the last decade the number of electricity generating windmills in Holland has increased considerably. In some regions even to the extent that one can speak of an uncontrolled proliferation, with action groups as a result that protest against the pollution of the horizon. See for example the situation in a part of Flevoland, Holland’s youngest…
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Flatland
Maybe it’s thanks to my Dutch origins that I still remember with delight the little book Flatland, in which Edwin Abbott gives full rein to his mathematical imagination in his description of a two-dimensional world. Although the Dutch landscape – especially its immense, flat polders reclaimed from the sea – does come rather close to…
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Cheers!
This large steaming lake probably owes its name of Champagne Pool to the bubbles caused by the escape of carbon dioxide at the surface. The water is hot, about 75° C., and contains many minerals like gold, silver, mercury, sulphur, arsenic, thallium, and antimony. Their deposits on the sides of the lake, just under the…
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Devil’s Bath
Devil’s Home, Devil’s Ink Pots, ….. the mineral deposits at the surface of the collapsed craters and in the hot water of the crater lakes often seem to evoke images associated with the devil. So here we have what is popularly called the Devil’s Bath. Has the little lake got its fluorescent green colour because…
καιρός remembered 