China is an amazing place - massive, beautiful, and so different to what we Westerners are used to. It is a wonderfully beautiful country and I have blogged about it before.

National Geographic has this short photo essay of aerial photographs of China - “China From Above“. Below are some of the better images.

This one shows limestone pinnacles along the Li River

Blooming fields of rapeseed weaving through the hills. I like the way these steep hills look as if they regularly pop out of a flat landscape.

This one is interesting. They have planted rows of vegetation alongside the roads to keep the desert sands back. The buildings dotting the roadside every few miles house the workers who maintain the greenbelt.

I don’t want to further confuse people about the concepts of evolution, but this is kinda funny…

This is really cool…

This is a pretty cool extreme close up of a grain of salt and a peppercorn. It was taken using an electron scanning microscope and the original was in black and white - it was coloured digitally. Still pretty cool. Source

Here is a weird and interesting page showing pictures from an exhibition of portraits of people before and after their deaths. It’s pretty haunting to see - one of those things that gets you to think about things differently. Clicking through to the pictures enhances the effect because there are little excerpts about the people before and after death.

This is the text from the guy on the left above:

Peter Kelling, 64
First portrait: November 29 2003
Peter Kelling had never been seriously ill in his life. He was a civil servant working for the health and safety executive, and didn’t allow himself any vices. And yet one day he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. By the time I met him, the cancer had spread to his lungs, his liver and his brain. “I’m only 64,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t be wasting away like this”

Second portrait: December 22 2003
At night he was restless, he told me, and kept turning things over in his mind. He cried a lot. But he didn’t talk about what was troubling him. In fact he hardly talked at all and his silence felt like a reproach to those around him. But there was one thing that Peter Kelling followed to the very last and that was the fortunes of the local football team. Until the day he died, every game was recorded on the chart on the door of his room

The associated blog says that a lot of people are offended by these pics. Bollocks… Death is a fact of life and these guys all consented to being part of the exhibition. Facing mortality might be distressing but instead of getting offended you should explore your feelings and thoughts. Hard thoughts should be faced not hidden behind outrage.

This is actually the philosophy of a remarkably high percentage of the world!

Link from Photo Basement

Here is a cool map showing the astronaut activity on the first lunar landing back in 1969 (yes it really happened - don’t be a daft conspiracy theorist). Produced by NASA it basically shows the activity of the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on that first landing.

The map has been superimposed on a soccer/football pitch to give an idea of scale - these guys didn’t walk very far.

There is quite a lot of news at the moment about a large piece (a little smaller than Swaziland) of ice shelf that recently broke off Antarctica. You can read about it here: National Geographic, Wired, BBC.

Ice shelves are made of ice already floating on the ocean so this incident won’t raise sea levels, but these shelves are holding back glaciers which will raise see levels. As the floating ice shelves break away there is nothing to hold back the land based glaciers which run faster and do raise sea levels.

These ice shelves are notoriously sensitive to warming (another one broke off during a brief warming period around 1920) so they do act as good early indicators of global warming happening - apparently “average Antarctic temperatures have risen 3 degrees (Celsius) over the past 50 years!”

If you are interested there is an busy debate going on in the comments section of the Wired article. Even if you aren’t that interested, I think you should be worried.

Here is an report about a dummy tourist in Australia who spotted a 4m saltwater croc approaching his boat. He wanted a good photo with the thing so he leaned out of his boat and started “teasing it”. Long story short, he got his good picture but almost lost an arm! Stupid…

This is an interesting gallery before and after satellite photos of mankind’s impact on the environment. They come from a new book called Fragile Earth and are pretty interesting. It can be quite sobering to see what a real impact we are having on our environments

This one shows a rainforest ecosystem around the Iguacu falls in South America getting nailed. Feb 1973 to May 2003

This is Lake Chad in Africa disappearing between 1972 and 1987 - largely due to irrigation projects. Things have actually gotten worse since the second photo was taken… I have blogged on this one before.

Finally, this is jungle in Bolivia getting turned into a major agricultural area.