Picture of icicles on a motel near Cincinnati, Ohio, 23 Dec 2010 by John S. Quarterman. Model: Gretchen Quarterman.
Icicles on a motel
People in Atlanta think they’ve got icicles?
These are icicles:
Category Archives: weather
Ice stalagmites
28 F at 5AM this morning; 29 at dawn.
In the dog watering tub, a layer of ice, some in my hand here.
Down by the dirt pit, ice pushing out of the ground:
And a tiny longleaf in a field of icy clay:
Pictures by John S. Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 7 Dec 2010.
Sweater and sandals
It’s October, so Gretchen is wearing sweater and sandals.
Hey, it was 70 degrees! Chilly! The dogs didn’t know what to think. Buy she’s Abby Normal: Continue reading
Clear-cutting led to flood disaster
Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty talks about a tree from Peru,
“huarango, a tree that lives in highly arid zones and stabilizes the soil with some of the deepest roots of any tree known-and can live up to 1000 years”:
“At the bottom of the profile, I found lots of huarango pollen. This indicates that large forests were originally growing in that area.Hm, around here we’ve only seen a 700-year flood last year. When it happens again in a year or so, what will we call it?Subsequently, I saw cotton pollen and other weeds, but still a lot of huarango pollen. It seems at this stage farming was in balance with the environment,” Chepstow-Lusty said.
Then, about 400 A.D., the Nazca apparently stopped growing cotton, switching to large crops of maize.
The researchers found a major reduction of huarango pollen, indicating that people started clearing the forests to plant more crops.
But the agricultural gain from clearing forests was short-lived. When a mega El Nino event hit the south coast of Peru in about 500 A.D., there were no huarango roots to anchor the landscape.
The fields and canal systems were washed away, leaving a desert environment. Today, only pollen from plants adapted to salty and arid conditions can be found, Chepstow-Lusty said.
“The bottom line is that the Nazca could have survived the devastating El Nino floods had they kept their forests alive. Basically, the huarango trees would have cushioned that major event,” Beresford-Jones said.
Windowfall
You don’t see this every day:
Rain pouring through window, Nashville, Tennessee, 2 May 2010.
Meanwhile, upmoat: Continue reading
Snow in Lowndes County
Now that it’s warm, let’s look back a couple of months to February:
Enough to make snowballs: Continue reading
Sprouting Longleaf
Thousands of these all over the woods:
Many people think it takes fire to make longleaf produce seeds. These pictured seedlings came from a tree that hasn’t had fire near it for more than ten years. So why so many seedlings this year? Continue reading
Frost
Frost on gallberries:
Picture by Gretchen Quarterman, 8 Feb 2010, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Swamp Ice
Yes, it’s cold! Our middle swamp froze over:
Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 6 Jan 2010.
Road Closings, Lowndes County, Georgia
Roads closed in Lowndes County, Georgia, as of 9:38 a.m April 6th, according to the Valdosta Daily Times. This map shows locations and terrain. It’s a Google map, so it’s interactive: you can zoom and pan and change to satellite view, street map, street view, etc. Some of the locations are guesstimates from the cryptic descriptions in the VDT article. The one green blob is the one reopening mentioned in the article: “North Valdosta Road Withlacoochee River Bridge opened at 10 p.m. Sunday.”