Yearly Archives: 2007

Wow – bizarre!

From spaceweather.com:

“We’ve never seen anything like it on any other planet,” says atmospheric scientist Kevin Baines of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is a hexagon twice as wide as Earth encircling Saturn’s north pole. First observed by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s, the hexagon has been sighted anew by the Cassini probe.

In this infrared photo taken by Cassini’s VIMS camera, the blue color traces auroras at high altitudes in Saturn’s atmosphere. Red indicates the amount heat filtering up through clouds below. Researchers believe the auroras and the hexagon are unrelated.

The hexagon could be a distant cousin of Earth’s polar vortex, but while Earth’s vortex is a circle, Saturn’s may be molded into a hexagon by some strange pattern of atmospheric waves. “Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure,” says Baines. In short, it’s a mystery.

From npr.org:

Maintenance crews in Washington state spotted a snow doughnut last week on the North Cascades Highway. At first glance, a snow doughnut may look like a man-made creation. But Mike Stanford, who snapped this photo, assures Robert Siegel that snow doughnuts are real — but rare — natural occurences.

Stanford, who has worked as an avalanche forecaster and control technician at the Washington State Department of Transportation for more than 30 years, says he’s never seen a snow doughnut as large as the one in this photo. It’s roughly 26-inches tall with a 8-inch diameter hole.

“It’s formed by a clump of snow falling off of a cliff or a tree into the snow pack. And if the conditions and temperature are just right, as gravity takes over, it pulls the snow down, and it rolls back on itself,” Stanford says. “Usually the center collapses and it creates what we call a pinwheel.”

But when the hole stays open, it creates a shape that resembles a car tire covered with ice, or a gigantic, white Cheerio.