Penitentes Rows Of Sparkling Snow Pinnacles Range Beside A High Andean Pass Between Chile And Argentina.

Penitentes Rows of sparkling snow pinnacles range beside a high Andean pass between Chile and Argentina. Silent and eerie, the Agua Negra Pass high in the remote Andes links La Serena in Chile with San Juan Province in Argentina. At an altitude of 15,633ft (4765m) it is one of the world’s highest motoring passes—a tough 12-hour drive with a high risk of plunging into a ravine or of being swept away by a landslide. The sky is dark in the thin air, and the shadowy ranks of the Penitentes—pinnacles of frozen snow 6-20ft (1.8-6m) tall—lining the steep slopes like white hooded figures, add to the spine-chilling atmosphere. In 1835, the British naturalist Charles Darwin thought that the pinnacles were formed by wind action. More recent studies show that these ice pinnacles form when ice is below the freezing temperature of water, but being bombarded with sunlight and undergoing sublimation. Tiny depressions begin forming as the ice sublimates, and sunlight is focused into these depressions, causing the ice to sublimate more rapidly at those spots. The end result is a field of spiky ice, that this photographer described as “hell to cross”. ~JM Image Credit: https://flic.kr/p/5W1xUZ More Info: Penitentes: http://bit.ly/1LUcEXv Video-Penitentes: http://bit.ly/1Fleb4K Betterton, M. D. (2000). Formation of structure in snowfields: Penitentes, suncups, and dirt cones. http://bit.ly/1KEd5b1 Sublimation: http://on.doi.gov/1HUN06X Luciano Roque Catalano. Book. “Snow Penitents” http://bit.ly/1FTnRr0

You Don’t Have to be a Rocket Scientist to Conduct Research in Microgravity

Putting your life’s work on top of a rocket may seem like a daunting task, but that’s exactly what scientists have been doing for decades as they launch their research to the International Space Station.

This season on #NASAExplorers, we’re exploring why we send science to space, and what it takes to get it there!

Watch this week’s episode to meet a team of researchers who are launching an experiment to space for the first time.

Follow NASA Explorers on Facebook to catch new episodes of season 4 every Wednesday!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

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Deep magma reservoir below Mt Rainier

Researchers from Norway and the US have mapped an 8 by 16 km magma chamber at 8 km depth below Washington State’s Mount Rainier. The detailed map was created by measuring the variations in the magnetic and electrical fields as well as seismic imaging. Researchers suggest that this map could help us predict when volcanoes will erupt.

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Big trays of fossil sea urchins

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The importance of a good and matching teacher or supervisor. You see, even birds can struggle with an inconvenient teaching style.

“It might be imagined that the most brilliant birds would be able to learn at any tempo, whereas others would learn well only when tutored at a slow tempo. But Mets and Brainards’ results demonstrate that this is not the case. Most remarkably, birds that were genetically tuned to sing slowly were not inherently worse learners. In fact, they often learnt better than the fast birds once the tutoring tempo ‘resonated’ with them.“

From the article: Tchernichovski and Conley. A genetically tailored education for birds, Nature 2019, 575. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03416-4

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In hopes of inspiring younger generations, NASA created this series of gorgeous retro travel posters that encourage you to imagine a future where common space travel is a legitimate possibility. Source