Links: in which Earth is gorgeous and cool

I got back from a conference Tuesday night, and came home to the craziness of the semester's end. Part of me wants to blog about how cool undergraduate research is, after we had our big school-wide undergraduate research symposium, but I really should be grading the proposals for next year's senior thesis projects. (Which will be fantastic, too, though right now the students are a bit overwhelmed at the thought of the work they're planning to do.)

So here are some things that made me say "oh, WOW" when I skimmed through my rss reader & Twitter:

Guest photographer at Through the Sandglass. Photographer Larry Deemer shares some of his favorite photos of beach sand from New York City. Beautiful, abstract, really weird.

Gigapan of a huge rockslide that happened March 28 in Yosemite. You can zoom all the way in and see the individual blocks, then zoom out and see the whole landscape. Climbers need to see this. (H/T to @aboutgeology.)

A nice explanation of InSAR, a remote sensing technique that can be used to precisely map changes in surface elevation after an earthquake, from Berkeley Seismoblog. The example is the map of elevation changes after the Italy earthquake.

Sediment from the Atchafalaya River flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, from NASA's Earth Observatory. They're also taking votes for your favorite image. Amazing stuff.

(And yes, I've joined Twitter: @stressrelated. Mostly I post links to interesting things I read and ask geology questions that pop into my head. I'm still learning the medium.)

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