Dinesh's photos

On the other side of the fence....

On a rainy, misty day scienceviews.com/islands/hawaiianrocks.html The black sand that makes up the famous Hawaiian black sand beaches is made out of basalt. These beaches can form rapidly when molten lava meets the cold ocean water in an explosive confrontation. The shattered volcanic rock is further broken down as it is smashed together by the waves. Black sand beaches can be relative short lived. This photo shows the black sand of Maui's Pa'iloa beach.

You ask for a poem. I offer you a blade of grass. You say it is not good enough You ask for a poem I say this blade grass will do. It has dressed itself in frost, It is more immediate Than any image of my making You say it is not a poem, It is a blade of grass and grass Is not quite good enough I offer you a blade of grass You are indignant You say it is too easy to offer grass. It is absurd. Anyone can offer a blade of grass. You ask for a poem. And so I write you a tragedy about How a blade of grass Becomes more and more difficult to offer. And about how as you grow older A blade of grass Becomes more difficult to accept ~ Brian Patten

My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt.” ― William Blake

Seventy four thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia, Homo sapiens had a very bad day, perhaps the worst day that we’ve ever experienced. On what is now the Indonesial Island of Sumatra, a mountain called Toba exploded -- though the word doesn’t do justice to the act of sheer geographical violence perpetrated that day. What happened to Toba was a destruction that scientists would eventually coin a term for volcanic disasters of its scale: supereruption. But the eruption was only the beginning. Toba’s aftereffects dimmed the sun and draped a volcanic winter around the world. It might have brought our species closer to the brink of extinction than ever or since. At a moment when Homo sapiens was far from the world-dominating force we are today, Toba was our ultimate trial. It was also a warning -- the most dangerous natural existential risk we face comes not from the skies above, but from the ground beneath our feet. ~ Excerpt “End Times” Author - Bryan Welsh

mnfi.anr.msu.edu/communities/description/10658/floodplain-forest As a result of the dynamic, local nature of natural disturbance along stream channels, a typical floodplain forest consists of many small patches of vegetation with different species composition, and successional stages often correlated with fluvial landforms. Within a single floodplain forest, vegetation changes along a gradient of flooding frequency and duration. In addition to local variation in species composition and structure within a site, there are major regional differences in species composition between floodplain forests in northern and southern Michigan. In both regions, dominant tree species nearly always include silver maple and green ash. Previously, American elm (Ulmus americana) was also a major dominant, but it has been largely eliminated from the canopy by Dutch elm disease. Numerous other species can be important, especially in the southernmost watersheds, resulting in complex patterns of species dominance.

Miracles of Earth Quake