Free Republic

In a 5 - 4 majority opinion filed today, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the continued display of a lone cross in the Mojave Desert memorializing veterans of World War I. Read More Faith and Action, a Washington, DC-based Christian mission to government officials, had joined with other groups in support of the display located in a lonely stretch of desert near Barstow, California. In a legal brief filed with the Supreme Court, Faith and Action argued that the cross did not violate the First Amendment, as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had found. Rev....

Israel's Timna Valley and Timna Valley Park appears to be an interesting place for arid scenery. (Wikipedia entry) Copper was mined here back to the Stone Age through the Middle Ages. It's just a bit north of Eilat, the city at the end of the Gulf of Eilat (also known as the Gulf of Aqaba), the eastern bunny ear of the Red Sea. These pictures are of the Arches and the aptly named Mushroom. Click for full-size. Arch in Timna Valley, Israel Timna Park "The Mushroom" Distant shot of the Mushroom Brightly lighted Mushroom

The Mojave Desert—last seen on our virtual pages when the SpaceShipTwo was unveiled—has leapt into the news again today, thanks to Senator Dianne Feinstein's legislation which will stop 13 solar plants and wind turbines from moving in. It'll certainly be a hindrance to California's plans of generating a third of their electricity from the renewable energy made from the million acres that had been slated for the eco-friendly wind-traps. Feinstein's reason for blocking the move is due to the national monuments which were promised to the area a decade ago, the land having been donated by an environmental group. Sure,...

AMBOY, Calif. — Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region. But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy. Developers of...

While looking for something else, I stumbled across this guy's Panoramio collection. So I provide a sampling. He's got 17 pages worth, pretty good. He does some HDR (high dynamic range) -- I think I included one of those. Enjoy. (Click 'em for full-size.)

Herodotus wrote of a 50,000-man strong army that set out on foot into the Egyptian desert in 525 B.C. and was never heard from again ... until today.A pair of Italian archaeologists have uncovered bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert. Twin brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni are hopeful that they've finally found the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Cambyses II and his armied were buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C. He wrote, "a wind...

These Festive Fall deserts are perfect for Halloween or anytime you want a sweet treat. Mmmmmmmmm!

Reporting from El Centro, Calif. - Across the desert flatlands of southeastern California, dozens of companies have flooded federal offices with applications to place solar mirrors on more than a million acres of public land. But just as some of those projects appear headed toward fruition, environmental hurdles threaten to jeopardize efforts to further tap the region's renewable energy potential. The development of solar-power facilities in the desert has been a top priority of the Obama administration as it seeks to ease the nation's dependence on fossil fuels and curb global warming. In addition, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has urged that...

Since I probably won't be able to post next week (thought I might try to sneak one in Sunday) I'm putting up some colorful images. Hope you like. Another place I'm unlikely ever to visit: Akpatok Island, Ungava Bay, Canada: From space: Akpatok Island lies in Ungava Bay in northern Quebec, Canada. Accessible only by air, Akpatok Island rises out of the water as sheer cliffs that soar 500 to 800 feet (150 to 243 m) above the sea surface. The island is an important sanctuary for cliff-nesting seabirds. Numerous ice floes around the island attract walrus and whales, making...

<p>An 11-year-old Las Vegas boy died after his mother's car got stuck in sand for five days on their way to Death Valley for a camping trip, officials said Friday.</p> <p>Carlos Sanchez and his 28-year-old mother set out for an overnight trip to the area Aug. 1, but were stranded when their car got stuck about 20 miles east of Trona. The mother's name has not been released.</p>

Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear. Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago....

A plan to build a 6,000km-long wall across the Sahara Desert to stop the spread of the desert has been outlined. The barrier - formed by solidifying sand dunes - would stretch from Mauritania in the west of Africa to Djibouti in the east. The plan was put forward by architect Magnus Larsson at the TED Global conference in Oxford. A 2007 UN study described desertification as "the greatest environmental challenge of our times".

MELBOURNE (AFP) – The world’s longest golf course, stretching along 1,365 kilometers (848 miles) of desert highway with holes at 18 towns and service stations, is to open in Australia this year, organizers said Tuesday. The Nullarbor Links, which will span two time zones and measure more than the entire length of Britain, is expected to be completed next month and will host its inaugural tournament on October 22. “We’re very excited about it. It’s been a long time coming and a lot of effort,” project chairman Don Harrington told AFP. “This is the longest golf course in the world....

ANN ARBOR, MI – The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, announced today that it has filed a friend of the court brief opposing the ACLU’s campaign to tear down another war memorial cross.At issue is a small cross originally erected on Sunrise Rock in 1934 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars in memory of the dead of all wars.  The cross is located in California’s Mojave Desert, in a remote area where the only visible signs of human activity are off-road vehicles and trail hikers.  The ACLU succeeded in its...

If only they could pave highways with this stuff. Scientists have discovered a patch of the earth's surface that remains virtually the same as it was 1.8 million years ago - and it looks pretty good for its age. Researchers are calling an expanse of "desert pavement" in Israel's Negev Desert the oldest continuous surface on earth, the current issue of the journal GSA Bulletin reports.

Energy: The governor wants to carpet the desert with solar panels. The senator says it will destroy the ecosystem. The battle between environmentalists and conservationists is one of alternative energy's big drawbacks.We have commented frequently on how our energy needs have been thwarted repeatedly by the not-in-my-back-yard (Nimby) crowd and the new Banana (build-absolutely-nothing-anywhere-near-anybody) phenomenon. Environmentalists and conservationists have long fanned local fears to block oil and gas exploration from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Outer Continental Shelf. Even nonpolluting and carbon-free nuclear power plants have been stopped dead in their tracks. So it's delicious irony to watch...

When an asteroid was spotted heading towards our planet last October, researchers rushed to document a cosmic impact from start to finish for the first time. Roberta Kwok tells the tale.Around midnight on 6 October 2008, a white dot flitted across the screen of Richard Kowalski's computer at an observatory atop Mount Lemmon in Arizona. Kowalski had seen hundreds of such dots during three and a half years of scanning telescope images for asteroids that might hit Earth or come close. He followed the object through the night and submitted the coordinates, as usual, to the Minor Planet Center in...

WASHINGTON -- California's Mojave Desert may seem ideally suited for solar energy production, but concern over what several proposed projects might do to the aesthetics of the region and its tortoise population is setting up a potential clash between conservationists and companies seeking to develop renewable energy. Feinstein said Friday she intends to push legislation that would turn the land into a national monument, which would allow for existing uses to continue while preventing future development.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 500,000 acres in the Mojave Desert would be off-limits to wind or solar energy production under legislation Sen. Dianne Feinstein intends to introduce. The land is coveted by companies seeking to develop alternative energy, setting up a potential clash with one of the more powerful members of Congress. The land would seem ideally suited for solar energy production. Nineteen companies have submitted applications to build solar or wind facilities on the property, but such development would violate the spirit of what conservationists had intended when they donated much of the land to the public, said...

The discovery of Caucasoid mummies in China shows that East and West might have been meeting since the Bronze Age. Do they validate some of the ancient legends? Cherchen Man mummy Christopher Columbus is said to have been the first who broke down the barrier that was the Atlantic Ocean, that body of water that separated two continents. But no such barriers – whether natural or ideological – existed between Europe and the East – one could travel over land. Nevertheless, the discovery of Caucasoid mummies has provided not only indisputable evidence that Europeans travelled very far East, it has...