May 18, 2011 When working out on the ice sheet, it is useful to have a base of operations, so as to not have to move your whole camp every day you want to go to a new place. For our project, Swiss Camp served as our base of operations. Swiss Camp is one of just […]
May 17, 2011 When we arrived at each study site, we began the process of constructing a GPS station. The first step was probing the snow for crevasses before we start unloading heavy equipment from the sled. By mid-summer, this region will all be bare ice but now it is still covered by about a meter of […]
May 16, 2011 Each day we traveled to a new site in the area around Swiss Camp and set up a new GPS station on the ice sheet. We looked a bit like an Arctic version of the Beverly Hillbillies with Tom puttering the snowmobile out of camp pulling a big red sled piled up […]
May 16, 2011 On the way up to Greenland a few weeks ago, we discussed very briefly the science that has brought us here to Greenland this spring. Now that we have some pictures of our work, let’s discuss it in a bit more detail. As you already know, Matt and I were traveling about […]
Three meteoroids were seen hitting the moon last week — all of them possible pieces of Comet Halley! The Eta Aquariid — the meteor shower caused from Comet Halley, see post below — radiant was positioned so that almost the entire visible part of the moon was exposed to it. On the evenings of May 9-11, members of …
May 15, 2011 With a 50-50 chance of good weather, Matt and I headed out to Swiss Camp on Wednesday, May 4. We were lucky to get a break in the clouds and the wind that allowed the plane to land and drop us off safely with Koni and company. The weather continued to deteriorate over the […]
While poking around looking for imagery of the 1973 flooding on the Mississippi, I discovered some fascinating, very high resolution aerial photography. Images of Morgan City—a community near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River that was damaged by flooding in 1973, and will likely be hit by rising water in the next few weeks. Both […]
Historic flooding along the Mississippi River gives me an excuse to show another of my favorite maps, from Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. Each color represents an old channel, dating back 1,000 years or so. Those that correspond to historical records are dated, while older channels are ordered according […]
Last week, Jessica Ball of the American Geophysical Union’s Magma Cum Laude blog pointed out this map of natural hazards in the U.S., published by the New York Times: The map has many of the design virtues common in graphics from the Times (clean, focused on the data, clearly labeled, small multiples), but when I […]
We at the Meteoroid Environment Office are hoping that you have clear skies on May 5/6 when we have the opportunity to see pieces of Comet Halley whiz through Earth’s atmosphere!Image of an Eta Aquarid meteor, taken the night of May 3, 2011. (NASA/MSFC)Comet Halley (NASA)Depending on your age, you may remember 25 years ago …
