Physics Photo of the Week

  Physics Photo of the Week April 28, 2023 - A Volcano's Mouth A recent trip to Hawai'i Volcano's National Park on the Island of Hawaii gave me and Vicki a rare opportunity to look into the most active volcano on Earth - the crater of Kilauea Volcano.  (Pronounced "kilou-way-ah"). It's amazing that a national park lets visitors venture close to a volcano - a mountain that semi-periodically erupts red-hot molten lava of temperatures hovering 1000 deg Celsius.  Volcanoes have wreaked havoc and death on a number of major cities throughout the world with their highly destructive powers. The photo at right shows a close-up of the inner crater of the Kilauea crater.  This active caldera is called the Halema'uma'u crater (pronounced "hall-lay-ma-oo-ma-oo").  This last erupted earlier this year - January-February of 2023.  See photos the eruption including visitors watching from about the vantage point of the photo at right ( https://www.nps.gov/havo

Physics Photo of the Week April 7, 2023 Cumulus Cloud "Front" - photos by Donald Collins This looks like a normal spring day with scattered fair-weather clouds.  A nice day to enjoy the spring! However, this photo presents an odd appearance of the familiar fair-weather clouds.  The clouds fill only the right half of the image.  On closer examination, the clouds all seem to be lined up and form a line extending several miles into the distance.  This line of rising clouds represents a type of "weather front".  The photograph is looking east over the Great Craggy Mountains of North Carolina.  Warren Wilson College is close by, off the lower left side of the photo.     A time-lapse (highly sped-up) video of the clouds in the video at right shows another amazing fact about these clouds. The clouds are all forming along the frontal line that lines up between west and east. The tops of the clouds are being blown to the right (south) by the higher-level breeze out of the no