Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Africa'

April 4, 2024 • #

Zaghouan Aqueduct. South of Tunis, Tunisia.

Visited in 2014. Built by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago, and channeled water from the springs to the south to coastal Carthage.

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March 19, 2024 • #

The Richat Structure in the Saharan Desert of Mauritania.

An eroded geologic dome.

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March 7, 2024 • #

Temple des Eaux. Zaghouan, Tunisia.

Built by the Romans to supply the city of Carthage with water from its sacred spring. Visited in 2014.

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Places: Lake Natron

May 22, 2019 • #

Only geography nerds have NASA’s Earth Observatory feed set up in their RSS reader. On there a team from NASA share interesting images from around the world as they come in from the various earth observation satellite sensors in orbit.

I check out items as they come through the feed and will occasionally download my favorites to edit into wallpapers for my laptop or phone. One of the best ever that’s been the wallpaper-of-choice on my machine for the past year is this great shot of Tanzania’s Lake Natron:

Lake Natron

This one came from the Landsat 8 platform a couple of years ago. It’s a salt lake that sits in the East African Rift Valley and has a beautiful red tint that comes and goes with the blooms of “halophile” (I love that word, salt-loving) bacteria in the lake.

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Places: Richat Structure

May 10, 2019 • #

I browse maps all the time, panning around in Google Earth whenever I want to look something up, favoriting things along the way. I thought I’d start documenting some of those here.

The Richat Structure is a circular geologic dome formation in the Mauritanian Sahara. I actually saw this when I was panning around the desert looking at the striated mountains you can see going from east to west toward the Atlantic. The whole structure is about 20 miles in diameter, and looks completely alien and out of place in the desert.

Richat Structure

Richat Structure :: 21°07'26.4"N, 11°24'07.2"W

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