Tag Archives: earth science

Perpetual Ocean: hypnotic video of ocean surface currents

The Perpetual Ocean video by NASA is absolutely hypnotic, and lets the viewer appreciate large-scale and smaller-scale surface circulation patterns. The visualization was created using a model crunching satellite and in-situ data collected from June 2005 to December 2007. You can download the full-version at NASA's website.

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12 great intro to optical mineralogy resources [updated]

The following list contains the websites I visited most often when I studied optical mineralogy; these sites saved my butt on more than one occasion! A lot of the sites overlap in information, but sometimes a particular site had that key picture or explanation that was essential for me in understanding a concept. I've organized the sites into two groups depending on whether they focus on explaining mineralogy properties or identifying specific minerals. (Image from Geoffrey Clarke.)

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Very awesome animated map of current global wind conditions

Head on over to earth.nullschool.net to see animated global wind conditions and be prepared to spend a few minutes just staring; it's very hypnotic. How does it stack up to what you would expect wind patterns to look like? One thing that popped out to me was the clearly northward position of the ITCZ relative to the equator. Read more