Tag: Nature
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Desert art
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…
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Kata Tjuta
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…
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Before sunset
Before sunset A catamaran is blocking my view of the sun, which is about to set over the Indian Ocean. But the very last rays of sunlight manage to penetrate beneath the boat’s raised floor, creating a faint reflection on the gently lapping waves. Similarly, but differently, in the photo below the rays of the…
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Shipwreck
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:…
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Weerribben
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…
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Giants in the wind
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…
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Flatland
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…
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Cheers!
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…
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Devil’s Bath
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…
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Splashy colours
Splashy colours The overflow of the Frying Pan Lake (see last week’s post) forms a hot water creek that finds several small hot springs in its path. The water contains a variety of minerals like antimony, molybdenum, arsenic and tungsten. These minerals leave deposits, thus creating – together with the bright green algae – pictures…
