An inverted Grand Canyon

That happened back in December 2014, and the video was posted on the Grand Canyon's flickr account.

Last week's rainbows

This rainbow was hanging over my house last Wednesday.

Or, rather, these three rainbows were hanging over my house last Wednesday...

The highest rainbow, the one going the opposite way from how you would expect, probably came from the ice crystals in the upper atmosphere because we had our first few flakes of snow the night.

Googling the Grand Canyon

Google just Street-Viewed (is that a word?) the Grand Canyon, and you can take their tour through Google Maps.

That's awesome.

On their blog, they also shared video about how they did this, with a team of hikers carrying down forty-pound, backpack-mounted cameras. (More photos of the hikers here) They went down Bright Angel Trail and South Kaibab Trail, out to Plateau Point, and eventually all the way to Phantom Ranch.

They have been to the North Rim but only on the roads, no hiking down from there. Maybe that's for next summer.

Really?

Today's shocking, stunning, amazing, bewildering fact of the day...courtesy of the Smithsonian's blog...

The bit.ly link leads to this article on the rebounding population of the bowheads on Alaksa Dispatch's website.

Nature redemptive

It's been a rough week as Casa de ChemGuy.

The Girl is buried in school work as am I.
The job has been a challenge in more ways than I feel like discussing.
The rec team got whomped yesterday, closing the season on a down note.

But luckily, nature was there this morning to make me happy.

I looked out the kitchen window and saw this...

Damn, nature, you redemptive...

Update: Twin Creek Preserve

Turns out that the newest park in Sharonville isn't much to look at just yet. I mentioned the ribbon cutting of Twin Creek Preserve last week, but when Calen and I wandered to said Twin Creek Preserve on Thanksgiving Wednesday, we didn't find much to explore.

At this point Twin Creek Preserve is pretty much a muddy field of sticks.


That's I-275 in the background. The foreground green is the corner of one of the two youth soccer fields that are largely finished.

Spread between the soccer fields are a trio of plastic coyotes (with 'real' fur tails) designed to keep, I'm assuming, geese off of the fields.

If you want to check out some more, I've taken the liberty of copying the photo albums from the Mill Creek Watershed's photo page on the Preserve.

Aerial Photos of Twin Creek Preserve

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Volunteer Plantings at Twin Creek Preserve

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

You can also check out some pre-construction images...

Pre-Construction of Twin Creek Preserve streams

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

And here are the directions in case you want to check the place out yourself.

There's been some more media coverage of the Preserve, as well...

• Mill Creek dump now a park
• Dirt flies as Mill Creek project gets flowing
• Park project to restore Mill Creek route (video)

Here's the full plan for the eventual Preserve...

I'm really looking forward to seeing (and maybe canoeing) the place when spring rolls around and once the plantings start to mature.

Favor...book recommendation?

 I've been fascinated reading about the Ohio and Mississippi River flooding this spring.

From hearing that we had the second wettest month in history (behind January 1937 by less than a quarter inch), I started hunting down information about the 1937 flood and was stunned to learn that the 1936 flood was actually worse upriver in Pittsburgh.

I've followed onward to learning about the Morganza Spillway and the Bonnet Carre Spillway - the latter of which is fully open now, the former of which is about to be opened - and the Old River Control Structure.

From wikipedia...

If either the Old River Control Structure or the Morganza Spillway were to fail, the consequences for Louisiana, the region, the nation, and international commerce would be immense. In this event, the main channel of the lower Mississippi River would likely change permanently to the Old River and Atchafalya River channels in the Atchafalaya Basin, thus bypassing Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Existing port facilities may have to be relocated or replaced, as would Morgan City and many smaller communities. Transportation by road, rail, sea, and barge would all be dramatically affected. Sedimentation and erosion patterns would change, including development of a new river channel and delta, as well as a new pattern of floodplains. Changes to salinity of coastal waters (less saline near new delta, more saline near present delta) would affect marine life, fisheries, beaches, and coastal marshes, as well as submerged infrastructure.^[5][11]

At this point, I want to go deeper. I want to read a book that presents a holistic view about our efforts to tame the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and to go down and visit these places. I want to see Cairo and Morganza, Bonnet Carre and Old River Control.

It's been fifteen some years since I read Control of Nature, and I'm looking at Mississippi Floods, but now I want to know more.

Does anybody have any idea of a book that would work for what I want?

(By the way, thanks to Frank3.0 for the top photo.)

1937 Flood Home Movies

Cincinnati Re-Adventure posted a YouTube home video of the 1937 flood.



I've been dwelling on thoughts of the 1937 flood lately after hearing that we've just passed into the record books as the rainiest month in Cincinnati history. The Ohio River is close to 53 feet (it crested at fifty-six feet late last week), a foot or two above flood stage. Back in January, 1937, the Ohio River crested at nearly 80 feet.

Eighty feet...I can't even comprehend that.

What's a meltdown?

With all this talk about a possible meltdown in Japan, it's pretty probably that there are folks out there who don't know just what a meltdown really would be.

Sure, I could explain it to you, and you'd understand it marvelously because I'm just that awesome a teacher. I've got a few other things to do, though, so let me recommend the NYTimes's outstanding interactive infographics specifically about the Japanese reactors.

Damn, Nature, You Scary

With apologies to TheDailyWh.at and thanks to Mainichi Shimbun and Itsuo Inouye of Reuters and AP, respectively, I present these two photos of the Japanese tsunami as collected by The Atlantic...

Update: I can't find a way to embed these, but I'll also recommend viewing two videos in particular, both showing the tsunami as it rolls inland.

Wow...just...wow...

If you're going to Australia, please take a towel.  They could use one.

Source: TheDailyWh.at

Look what I saw yesterday

The snow has returned to Cincinnati earning us two snow days this week and pushing our first semester exams to finish up after Winter Break.

With the snow, apparently, comes the deer to our backyard.  This time there were two deer in our yard but just outside the fenced area.  Seeing them twice in a year- both times when there was a bunch of snow on the ground - makes me wonder whether I'm seeing them because...

• ...they're that much easier to see against the snow.
• ...they're always around but are just covered up by the scrub growth.
• ...they're a lot braver when the snow is covering up their normal sources of food.

When we first moved into The Homestead, we saw deer in the front yard a few times in that first year but haven't seen them since then.  These two sightings do let me know that they're around but that I haven't been seeing them.

It was a nice little snow day treat.

The Big Picture: National Geographic's Photography Contest

To quote...

National Geographic is once again holding their annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30th. For the past eight weeks, they have been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to rate them as well. National Geographic was again kind enough to let me choose some of their entries from 2010 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected [on their website] are 47 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers.

Check all forty-seven.

My choices.

Water: the cause of and solution to all of life's problems

Two stories about rivers today, folks, one shockingly unhelpful and one possibly really helpful...

The first river story is a tragic one, that of the Albert Pike Campground on the Little Missouri River in Arkansas.  The campground lies - or rather, lay - next to the Little Missouri River along a flat, wooded area built up with a mixture of rustic cabins and tent sites.  In addition to the natural beauty - isolated lowlands beside the river surrounded by steep hills leading away from the river, one of the attractions of the area is the remoteness, the lack of cell phone reception or any input from the outside world - including any warning system or radio tower (that fell two years ago in the windstorms that eventually knocked out Ohio schools for a week.)

The typical river level just downstream from the campground runs near three feet deep with a volume of fifty cubic feet of water per second, flows that can lead to a nice, relaxing downstream paddle or even to children splashing away in the river while parents casually watched nearby.  On the morning of June 11th, however, the drainage from thunderstorms in the area - thunderstorms that brought up to ten inches of rain overnight - rushed down the hillsides and funneled into the Little Missouri (nice video of the storms and the topography here), raising that river level from 3 feet to 23.3 feet, taking the flow of the river from 50 cubic feet per second to somewhere over 20,000 cubic feet per second.  The graphs - posted by the Outside Blog - speak volumes.

Those people never had a chance.



The second river tale is one that might...might have a happier ending.  This is the story of the Atchafalaya, a river and swamp that branches off from the Mississippi River at the Old River Control site of the Army Corps of Engineer's continuing battle to keep water flowing in the Mississippi River channel instead of diverting into the Atchafalaya and finding a new path to the Gulf of Mexico.

At the moment, the Army Corp keeps seventy percent of the upper Mississippi's flow heading into the lower Mississippi and allows thirty percent to head off into the Atachafalaya.  Paul Kemp, an Audubon Society scientist, suggest in National Geogpraphic this week that the ratio be shifted so that more water flows into the lower Mississippi - more like 80-20 - and that a number of upstream dams be opened so that the flow increases even more to push the flow through New Orleans even higher and to help keep the Deepwater Horizon oil spill at bay.

The Mississippi will not be able to keep the oil at bay indefinitely, however. The river's flow naturally declines each summer, and by August, Kemp's idea will no longer be effective.

If only we could stop the oil leak before August...

Frozen Falls

I happened upon this photo from the Wikipedia article about the Journey Behind the Falls attraction on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, and it just reminded me how much I desperately want to see the frozen Niagara Falls some winter.

That is all...

Snow Day

Happy snow day, everybody.

These pics were taken from inside our walkout basement at around 5:30 Tuesday evening...the door was open, but my feet were on indoor carpet...

 

  

  

 

There are certainly times when I miss living in Cincinnati, but today wasn't one of them.

Today's meditation

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

Thanks to neatorama for today's calming bonus Sunday post.

Hittin' the glory hole

We've all seen rainbows - well, except for people with one eye, they've been deprived of the whole rainbow joy thing, but that's a story for another day.

Today's tale is about a weird, mutated rainbow effect that people see in rare occurances. The rare rainbow-type effect is called a glory - and there's a bunch of science explaining the whole thing. Something about light refracted within tiny droplets of fog or mist - check the science here if you're interested. I dunno about that, but the pictures are pretty cool.

The site Atmospheric Optics has loads of cool photos and explanations of rainbows, glories, ice halos, distorted suns, and all sorts of freaky optics in the atmosphere (shocking that they would have that, I know).

Tomorrow, YouTube of some of my favorite 80s videos - with no Michael Jackson, because we've all seen those too many times already.

Think of a lone polar bear on a piece of ice all that's kind of melting

I caught an interesting turn of events in the always funny crossover area between government and science. Looks like the US government has noticed that the polar bears are kinda not doing well. It seems that this global warming thing seems to be threatening them - something about them living on ice and ice melting as the world warms. Who knew?

And then there's the entertaining bit about the fact that if the government declares an animal / species to be threatened (as the polar bear has been proposed to be) then they kind of have to do something to prevent any further damage and maybe even help undo the damage already done.

Wait for it...

Pause...

Um...

If the government says (and scientists seem to agree) that polar bears are threatened because of global warming, then the government has to kind of...um...well...stop...um...global warming, right?

And our government has been a little reluctant to do that in the past, and the current administration sort of leans on the side of big business, so this could be a very interesting turn.

Will the government do something like - oh, I don't know - regulate business polution? Or maybe they could do something to promote a little less driving or at least decrease the pollution from automobiles?

Let's not get too crazy about that, boys. We don't want to take too drastic a step there in terms of stopping that whole global warming thing there.

The evils of the suckle...

Little article in the West Chester Pulse-Journal pointed out a semi-typical story for a smallish-town paper - a local inventor done good.

Seems there's a guy near us in Hamilton, Ohio who's invented the Honeysuckle Popper a little device for - as the moniker suggests - popping out honeysuckle bushes - an invasive species (with all the pejorative connotations that go with that term.)

I especially recommend playing around on the Honeysuckle Popper website. It really reveals the designer's sense of style, honesty, and humor. I'm hoping that the guy makes a decent bit of coin from his invention.