Rainbows Over Geology
Are you ready for some spectacularly beautiful images? It’s a tough time: of course you need some beauty in your life. Allow me to provide!
In between pandemic lockdown preparations, I’ve been spelunking the USGS website and watching the OG Knight Rider. K.I.T.T. is absolutely marvelous, but not quite as beautiful as some of these images I’m finding. USGS scientists are pretty talented photographers! And while most of the photos they take in the field are for strictly scientific purposes, they also turn their lenses to capture the ephemeral beauty that happens geology and meteorology combine.
I’ve lightly edited these photos to enhance their awesomeness. You can click the link in the titles to see the originals.
Rainbow over Halema’uma’u and the water lake. Credit: USGS
This gorgeous shot was taken by the KWcam on Kilauea’s summit. I just. I mean. This looks like a professional hauled up expensive equipment and lined up the perfect shot!
I love that you can see the fault blocks in the upper right. I love the fumarole deposits in the crater walls. I love the streaks left by rock slides. I love the baby crater lake hanging out beneath a perfect rainbow. Yeah, I do miss the lava lake, but this is pretty neat. Good web cam!
Indian Rock Great Falls. Credit: USGS
These vigorous falls testify to the power of an Ice Age to carve the land. The basalt that forms Paterson, NJ’s Great Falls was erupted 190 million years ago, when Pangea began breaking up. During the last Ice Age, glaciers carved the tough volcanic rock. And the river put some finishing touches on. The different processes combined to form shapes that look like faces. I love how this one seems to be marveling at the sliver of rainbow shining in the mist.
Rainbow in Canyonlands National Park. Credit: USGS
This scene reminds me of home. Some of the most formative years of my life were lived among the red and white sandstones on the Colorado Plateau. They preserve the stories of inland seas and vast dune fields, rapid (geologically speaking) uplift, and the astounding power of water to carve stone even in a desert. Wind does some work here, too, but the workhorses are the rivers, the flash floods, and the patient efforts of frost.
I never made it over to Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, but the same river runs through it that carved some of the most spectacular scenery of my youth. And these rocks look like my old dear friends. That stormlight, people – I spent a great many days enchanted by it. If you ever get a chance to see it yourselves, and smell the rain on slickrock, you will have experienced with me a profound variety of nature’s magic.
Double Rainbow on Kilauea Caldera
A double rainbow takes form as evening clouds move into Kilauea caldera. Credit: USGS
Travel to Kilauea’s past with me. It’s March 31st, 2008, and things are heating up at the summit. Increased seismicity and gas emissions during the previous few months had warned HVO staff that an eruption might be on the way. The National Park Service closed the Halema’uma’u Overlook and parts of Crater Rim Drive. Just about two weeks ago, a vent opened just below the overlook, and a vigorous plume of water vapor, sulfur trioxide, and sulfur dioxide roared into the sky. Then, on the 19th, the first explosive eruption since 1924 blasted a thirty-five meter wide crater, and pelted the overlook with ash and rocks up to a meter in diameter. Overlook Crater was born!
The plume started carrying ash over the next few weeks, changing color depending on which crater rocks were being pulverized at the time. Some fresh magma had been erupted by the time rainbows kissed the caldera. And if we leap forward to September, we’ll see a wee lava lake forming within Halema’uma’u. That lake will come to a spectacular end just about a decade later.
Midnight Rainbow at Atigun Gorge, Alaska. Credit: USGS
Highly allochthonous! We’re looking at a portion of the Brooks Range, Alaskan mountains formed by quite a lot of faulting. Low-angle thrust faulting has taken blocks of the Lisburne Group and shoved them out of their prior context. These lovely layers of limestone, dolomite, and shale, riddled with chert nodules and lenses, formed in Mississippian and Pennsylvanian-era seas. They’re bursting with marine fossils.
At some times of year, the sun never sets, and you can get a rainbow no matter how late the hour.
View of Castle Geyser, near Old Faithful, in eruption. Credit: USGS
We’re going to Yellowstone someday, my darlings, I promise. The geothermal features are just utterly magnificent. Look at this beauty! Castle Geyser is a world-class example of a cone geyser, which pile their sinter in a mound. It used to literally be shaped like a castle, but further deposition has changed its profile.
It’s not as prolific as Old Faithful, but it does erupt on a mostly twice-daily schedule. It often shoots water up to around a hundred feet, with its larger eruptions finishing with a steam phase and lasting around an hour. you have an excellent chance of catching rainbows here during its daytime eruptions!
Rainbow Over Yukon River, Eagle, Alaska, June 2002. Credit: USGS
The Yukon River is a magnificent giant that flows from Canada to the Bering Sea, a journey of over two thousand miles. It flowed even during the Ice Age.
The landscape the river flows through here, near Eagle and the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, was never heavily glaciated. We tend to picture the entire north end of the planet buried under a gigantic ice sheet when we think of the Ice Age, but here there were only alpine glaciers on the high mountains.
A strike-slip fault passes through the preserve all the way to Eagle. And if you travel along the river, you’ll see a remarkable, unbroken display of 600 million years of geological history.
Fissure 8 – 2 lava fountains, 2 cinder cones, 1 rainbow, 1 gas plume (with lots of sulfur dioxide) rising and drifting downwind. Credit: USGS
It looks like Fissure 8 is erupting rainbows!
I love how brand-new this all is. Kilauea’s Lower East Rift Zone was a hot location in 2018, and no fissure there was hotter than 8. Those fountains fed a channel that devoured a lake and a subdivision, and flowed to the sea, where lava created at least two miles of new coastline.
That cinder cone at the end of the rainbow is no pot of gold, but it was an absolutely golden opportunity for modern scientific instruments to monitor a rift zone eruption, and we’ll be mining that data for a long time to come!
There ye are, my darlings: rainbows and geology to feed your soul. Next week, we’ll probably go visit the medicinal spas of Tripergole. Geology provides some fantastic opportunities for great self-care!
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