Most of the year, southern Oklahoma’s Turner Falls spills Honey Creek 77 feet down a steep slope of travertine. Water rich in calcium carbonate has deposited the travertine atop Ordovician limestone bedrock throughout most of the Quaternary period. The waterfall ices over like this every time there’s an extended spell of below-freezing temperatures with shots of bitter cold embedded (single … [Read more...]
Lava Fountain Arch
In 2025 at Kilauea, the rocks went up, and the rocks went down. At 2,000 degrees, most still molten when they hit the ground, they lit up the sky and heated the air above and around. Tremendous pressure needs to underlie any reservoir of liquid to force it through a 50-foot-wide vent, Bernoulli-style, to heights topping 1,000 feet. That's especially true when the liquid is heavy as stone, … [Read more...]
Late-Season Looker
Up from late morning in Denver, on day 1 of a tour, we stabbed north across northern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming and the western Nebraska Panhandle. Almost to the South Dakota line we landed, to an uncertain but (given development) focused target area for conditional supercell potential near a boundary in marginal moisture, and ended up with the best-structured storm of the entire weeklong … [Read more...]
High Plains Western Sunset Sky
Doesn't it make sense that, on the opposite side of a "High Plains Eastern Sunset Sky," we get the "High Plains Western Sunset Sky" too? Yet somehow the two skies and landscapes, shot just four minutes apart from a few dozen feet across a country two-lane, looked greatly different. This view was more stark, ending on a treeless land that looks as if it could go on for infinity, and a sky nearly … [Read more...]
Dark Severe Surge
As messy and beset with precip and outflow as this complex supercell was, with this tremendous surge happening just to the south of one of a few embedded mesocyclones along US 277, I wouldn't have imagined that a couple of fortunate friends and scientific colleagues were seeing a legitimate tornado on this other side, and especially, able to see it in the darkness and rain. They somehow found an … [Read more...]
Addition by Division: Supercell Style
Homing in on a big, nasty (but nicely structured) HP supercell from the northeast, we didn't expect that it would divide into a multiple-mesocyclone complex as we got close enough for a look beneath. Yet it did. This was the northernmost of them, seemingly doomed for two reasons: 1) a dense cascade of precipitation already was plunging through the cloud base in the southern (nearest) part of … [Read more...]
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