Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

It appears that snow has fallen in hell! At least it has along “The Devil’s Highway“. Let’s take a drive down former US Route 666 to see what kind of trouble we can get into.

Beginning in the mile high state of Colorado and running south through the Sonoran desert, the demonically-named road ends in Douglas, Arizona along the Mexican border.

This highway was of course named for bearing the Number of the Beast, but a high number of vehicular fatalities attached a stigma to the road that persists, despite it having been renamed in 2003. This may have been due in part to a serious bout of “chronic sign theft“.

Theft along the Devil’s Highway you say? To be expected for sure!

There’s definitely some sort of dark magic happening on the highway, as you can see in this aerial shot south of Gallup, New Mexico, where the road has been sliced into two parts, which run alongside but never into each other¹!

While the route number and nickname draw many tourists on their own, many often stop by to see another spectacular sight, the Shiprock rock formation (Wikipedia). It’s close enough to the road that even the Street View car got a good look!

“The day it snows in hell” appears to have arrived in this shot as well, as there is clearly snow on the ground right in the middle of America’s hottest desert.

Like Route 666, the Sonoran desert stretches from the Mexican border to Colorado; covering an impressive 311,000 square km. It’s home to dozens of mammal, fish and amphibian species, hundreds of bird species, and thousands of native bee and plant species; as well as America’s only population of Jaguars!

It is also the only place in the world the famous saguaro cactus grows, despite being an international symbol for deserts.²

Route 666 and the Sonoran desert are in an area of extremes. In the day the sun scorches down on all weary travellers. At night the heat dissipates to the point that there is often snow on the ground by morning. You fall asleep sweating, you wake up freezing.

So consider yourself warned. The desert is is desolate, rugged, and rough. But come on! If you’re going to travel the Devil’s Highway, you going to face some evils, right?

Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

While Canada is generally thought of as a land of ice and snow, it is home to one arid desert - the Osoyoos or Nk’Mip Desert of British Columbia.¹

Surrounding the community of Osoyoos, and the lake of the same name, this area of the Okanagan is home to desert plants and animals not found anywhere else in the country. It is one of the hottest and driest parts of Canada year-round, and some believe that Osoyoos Lake is the warmest in the world (though there are several competing claims for that title.)

The desert is characterised by barren hillsides and plains, bordered by lush green fields and orchards which survive with heavy irrigation.

For a small desert, it is surprisingly well endowed with visitor centres. The Osoyoos Desert Society has its Centre to the north-west of town, while the Nk’Mip Indian Band’s Desert Cultural Centre is “an architectural marvel sensitively constructed into a hillside” on the other side of the lake. At both, you can learn about the local flora and fauna through static displays and a network of trails

The Nk’Mip Band have also managed to carve a golf course out of the desert, with an associated resort and spa, while nearby is an estate of vineyards producing some of the wines for which the Okanagan is renowned.

Some distance out of town, the desert even has a salt lake, called - not surprisingly - Spotted Lake. The spots appear when water evaporates, leaving rich mineral deposits behind.

Panoramio has a good selection of pictures of Canada’s Desert.

In The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe, when the three Pevensie children (minus Edmund) arrived at Aslan’s camp, they were happening upon what we (of the other world) know as Elephant Rocks.

Looking from above, the boulders look like nothing more than a few pebbles to be picked up and stuffed in your pocket, but when looking straight on the boulders are just massive!

Named after the big, leathery mammals due to their shape and size, these naturally shaped limestone formations near Duntroon on the South Island of New Zealand were made world famous in the 2005 film, by Andrew Adamson.

Looking at these official production stills from the movie, you can clearly see the enormous size of the boulders.

The Streetview Squad did swing by the site when capturing images. However, it looks like a pretty foggy day as its difficult to make out the rock formations from the street.

The area is also a favorite of climbers, specifically known as a great place to do some bouldering. According to the The Crag, a rock climbing enthusiast’s social network, there have been at least 252 different routes mapped.

Update: Thanks to Ian Brodie for letting us know that the production stills from above are actually from Castle Rock. Check out Brodie’s website where he has first hand photography of the Narnia set!

The Jurassic Coast is a 153 km stretch of the English Channel coastline that is world renowned for the incredibly diverse nature of its geology – so much so that in 2001 it became only the second natural landmark in the UK to be granted protection as a World Heritage Site.

The site stretches from Orcombe Point near Exmouth all the way to to Old Harry Rocks near Swanage, and its entire length can be walked on the South West Coast Path, with some wonderful sights to see along the way.

Lulworth Cove

The coastline at Lulworth Cove is concordant, meaning that through movements in the earth’s crust layers of rock have been folded up parallel with the sea.

The entrance to the cove is through a limestone strata, that was widened through erosion by both the sea and glacial melt waters. As the entrance gradually increased in size the softer clay behind was eroded more quickly, giving rise to the spectacular cove we see today.

Just to the west is Stair Hole, which is one of the finest examples of limestone folding in the world, and which lets us see how Lulworth cove would have looked only a few hundred thousand years ago.

Durdle Door

A couple of miles further west is the spectacular limestone arch known as Durdle Door, which has featured in many music videos and several movies.

Here the limestone strata is thinner and has been more severely eroded - and where it is thinnest it has been eroded right through to form Durdle Door. Taking a more general overview of this area we can clearly see the remnants of the original course of the limestone.

Black Ven

Black Ven is one of the largest active landslips in Europe, parts of which continue to get lost to the sea, and it’s famous for the abundance of fossils that are revealed as the cliffs continue to crumble.

The fossil history here is incredibly rich - for example it was in the nearby town of Lyme Regis that the first complete Ichthyosaur fossil was discovered, and I have personally walked out onto the beach at Lyme, cracked open a rock, and found a fossil of my own.

Other history

For Geologists and Paelentologists the Jurassic coast really is a dream come true - we could go on for hours about places like Ballard Cliff, Chesil Beach and the Isle of Portland. We’ve not even touched upon human history here, like when during World War II several sections of the Jurassic Coast became property of the Ministry of War, leading to the abandonment of the village of Tyneham.

While there’s nothing quite like visiting somewhere like this in person, Wikipedia has enough about the Jurassic Coast to keep you clicking around for hours. Also, the official Jurassic Coast website has a wealth of information!

Thanks to many a BBC documentary, Laurence Madill, my high school geography teacher Mr. Woods, and several holidays of my own.

It’s Earth Day today, an event designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. To celebrate, we’re looking at the unlikely survival of a very tiny piece of nature in the heart of one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas.

From directly above, it appears that there is somehow a large tree growing on the roof of the Kayashima train station in Osaka.

However when we look at the Street View of the station, we can see that only the canopy of the huge tree protrudes from the roof¹, and in fact the entire station, platform and all, have been built around the tree so as to avoid damaging it.

This is a camphor tree which the locals believe to be sacred, so they appealed to the railway company to avoid chopping it down. One of the suggestions for celebrating Earth Day is to plant a tree, and here they found a way to avoid knocking one down in the first place.

It’s just one tree, but it might serve as an example of how much better we could incorporate the natural world into our environment.

Thanks to GEarth Hacks.