A photo posted by Daily Overview (@dailyoverview) on
A Daily Overview commenter has mixed feelings over the photo:
So cool...except for that whole coal thing
Norfolk Southern says the Lambert facility has an annual throughput capacity of 48 million tons. The company has been courted by a Canadian counterpart over the past several months for a possible merger, but it’s not going very well:
Norfolk Southern has sternly rejected all of Canadian Pacific's takeover offers even as they approached roughly $30 billion. Norfolk Southern has said the offers have been so “grossly inadequate” that there wasn’t much point in discussing a possible deal.
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The popular beach is home to Bondi Rescue, an Australian reality show chronicling the day-to-day activities of the local lifeguards. For more photos of Australia in summer bloom, check out this slideshow by Alan Taylor.
One commenter on this satellite view of Rawlins, Wyoming, sees a “paint palette,” while another goes with “eyeshadow compact.” A more grounded guess:
This is the tailings pond at the Sweetwater uranium mine/mill complex in Wyoming’s Red Desert. The different colors are due to different bacteria working to break down dissolved solids from the remnants of uranium mining.
A photo posted by Scott Kelly (@stationcdrkelly) on
For a lonely view of Kelly’s Super Bowl party inside the International Space Station, see here. Down here on Earth, readers have responded to my previous note with some of their own meaningless sports commentary, which could come in handy for the second half of the bout between the Broncos and Panthers:
“I think we’ve got a ball-game here!” (when a team that’s losing, often badly, stages a rally, usually futile, and the announcers try to sound excited).
Another reader shares her comment-generation strategy:
My favorite is to just repeat the job of the position: “The defense is really gunna have to stop these plays.”
Granted, my sister went an entire football season repeating this every game and no one was the wiser: “They keep running him like that that’s he’s GUNNA get injured.”
Here’s one from an actual Super Bowl 50 halftime announcer just now:
I think Cam Newton’s gotta get out of the pocket and start making plays on the field.
And finally, this reader has fool-proof commentary for when it’s all over:
(to comment on a team that lost): “They left their game plan in the locker room”
(to comment on a team which won): “They came to play”
Yesterday, a pair of cosmonauts got a bit of fresh air, going for a spacewalk outside the station. They reportedly began by “casting off a flash drive into space, giving a ceremonial send-off to recorded messages and video from last year’s 70th anniversary of Victory Day.”
A photo posted by Scott Kelly (@stationcdrkelly) on
This big red glob is almost certainly the Richat Structure, a geological formation in the Sahara Desert. Scott Kelly wouldn’t be the first astronaut to admire the plot from afar; NASA describes how the structure “has become a landmark for shuttle crews”:
This prominent circular feature in the Sahara desert of Mauritania has attracted attention since the earliest space missions because it forms a conspicuous bull’s-eye in the otherwise rather featureless expanse of the desert. Described by some as looking like an outsized fossil in the desert, the structure [has] a diameter of almost 30 miles… . Initially interpreted as a meteorite impact structure because of its high degree of circularity, it is now thought to be merely a symmetrical uplift that has been laid bare by erosion. Paleozoic quartzites form the resistant beds outlining the structure.
Either way, this song is going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
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In response to the questioned posed above, one commenter guesses:
With all those different colors I would say that it is mixed baby greens. They plant strips of different lettuces 1-5 acres in the same field. Harvest to order from the supplier. All in a less than 40 day cycle. All sprinkler irrigated (I would say that is the vertical cross stripes). Very short season but very intensive farming.
But the consensus among the commenters is sugar cane. Another one is full of wishful thinking: “After the upcoming elections in November, it will be ganja!” Details from the Bradenton Herald:
Organizers of a medical marijuana ballot initiative announced last week that medical marijuana would officially appear on the 2016 ballot, but efforts to get recreational marijuana on this year’s Florida ballot are struggling significantly.
Ten billion gallons of pollution-laden water was pumped into Lake Okeechobee during four days of emergency measures to avert South Florida flooding, officials disclosed Monday. Amid an already rainier-than-usual winter, heavy rains last week triggered the controversial “back pumping” of water from South Florida’s vast farming region, the Everglades Agricultural Area, north into the lake. That helped protect lakeside towns as well as sugar cane fields and vegetable farms from flooding, but at the expense of allowing fertilizers and other pollutants that wash off the land to end up in the lake.
To create the island, a 30 meter (98-foot) layer of earth was created on top of the seafloor with 21 million cubic meters of landfill. The material was excavated from three separate mountains. As of 2008, the total cost of Kansai Airport was $20 billion USD, including land reclamation that has been necessary to prevent its continued sinkage (7.1 centimeters per year as of 2008) into the bay.
Kansai opened in 1994 to relieve overcrowding at Osaka International Airport, which now handles only domestic flights. Zoomed-out images of the area here.
Bucket-wheel excavators run on tracks at the Tagebau Hambach open-pit mine in Niederzier and Elsdorf, Germany. These massive machines (up to 315 feet tall and 730 feet long) continuously scoop materials from the surface in order to extract lignite. Lignite, often referred to as “brown coal”, is a soft combustible sedimentary rock that is formed from naturally compressed peat and is used as a fuel for steam-electric power generation.
But several commenters were upset over the mining photo, especially this one:
I just got very angry when I saw the comment “beautiful.” The Earth is so important! We as humans can not survive without it, yet we do things like this that are destroying it and will get to the point where the planet can no longer support us. I just feel that it should never be promoted.
Grant responds:
The points you make there are absolutely correct and very in line with the mission of Daily Overview. I appreciate you taking this view. However, because someone views this image or any on the account as aesthetically beautiful is by no means wrong. By looking at these “ugly” things in a “beautiful” way, perhaps we can start more important conversations like this.
The conversation continued from several other commenters:
Are you aware of the rare precious metals mined at massive cost to produce a smartphone? If you are upset about the Earth being destroyed, switch off your phone and give it away. Spend less time on Instagram and do something positive instead of criticizing someone else’s contribution.
Another suggests:
Instead of unfollowing, why don’t you donate to or volunteer for a cause you can stand behind? Raising awareness does nothing if no one is willing to act.
Each Overview starts with a thought experiment. We consider the places where man has left his mark on the planet and then conduct the necessary research to identify locations (and the corresponding geo-coordinates) to convey that idea.
The mesmerizing flatness seen from this vantage point, the surprising comfort of systematic organization on a massive scale, or the vibrant colors that we capture will hopefully turn your head. However, once we have that attention, we hope you will go beyond the aesthetics, contemplate just exactly what it is that you’re seeing, and consider what that means for our planet.
One more commenter adds:
Favelas in my country, Brazil, are horrible, but it does not mean they aren’t sometimes good sources for photography.
I don’t work in the coal (or any mining) industry, but it steams my broccoli to see the knee-jerk reaction to a picture of mining. Certainly the activity does produce a lot of environmental ruination. Done responsibly, it can also result in a lot of environmental transformation. I just googled “rehabbed mines in Germany” and it took me a few seconds or so to find this story of “environmental and recreational areas where tourism has blossomed.”
Every economic activity is transformative, by its very nature. Eco-tourism can be very harmful to pristine ecological zones. Agriculture is notoriously harmful, but look how many pictures of farms (of all types) taken from space we enjoy. By posting those ignorant reactions to the mining, you help propagate ill-informed objections to jobs and social benefits that a legitimate economic activity would bring.
Another reader:
Ground-level pictures of those lignite operations are astonishing, too. Here is one of those bucket-wheel excavators trekking across the German countryside to a new mine site. Naturally, there are videos:
Along the south coast of South Korea, seaweed is often grown on ropes, which are held near the surface with buoys. This technique ensures that the seaweed stays close enough to the surface to get enough light during high tide but doesn’t scrape against the bottom during low tide. [...] Since 1970, farmed seaweed production has increased by approximately 8 percent per year. Today, about 90 percent of all the seaweed that humans consume globally is farmed. That may be good for the environment. In comparison to other types of food production, seaweed farming has a light environmental footprint because it does not require fresh water or fertilizer.
It’s called the Pingualuit Crater, located on the Ungava Pennisula in Quebec, Canada. The satellite image was taken just over a week ago. Mapbox, an open source mapping platform for developers, has more on the “remarkably circular” crater:
Not photographed until the 1940s and not surveyed until the 1950s, Pingualuit Crater (formerly Chubb and New Quebec Crater) was widely accepted as a meteorite impact crater on account of its shape despite chemical evidence of an impact. It wasn’t until the late 1980s and 1990s that conclusive evidence of impact-shocked quartz, made very scarce by glacial scouring of the crater and its surroundings, was published.
Researchers conclude that the crater was formed in granite bedrock by a chondritic (stony, non-metallic) meteorite 1.4 million years ago. It is 3.4 kilometers in diameter and 400 meters deep. The rim of the crater is grooved from SW to NE by glaciers. Glacial deposits including a squiggly esker appear to the upper right of the crater. The lake within is 267 meters deep and has no sources other than rain and snow and no sinks other than evaporation. A closed system, its sediments record the history of the local climate since the last interglacial period.
Benjamin Grant, creator of the brilliant Daily Overview, explains:
A ‘scratch circle’ is a phenomenon that occurs when strong winds bend a stalk of dried dune grass and causes it to pivot around its axis. The result is a perfect circle in the sand. This photograph was taken on the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan of a scratch circle with a diameter of seven inches. Photograph by David Marvin
