Derek Pickell

This is the South Pole Overland Traverse, day one, team of six, 78° South, a couple miles in, with many more to go…

“Welcome to the void” said one of the current crew…

Hurricane Laura prior to landing on the Texas/Louisiana Border. Laura passed overhead here in Puerto Rico as a tropical storm several days prior…

On the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), Okmok (the large caldera on the northeast corner of the island) rated as a 6 (of 8), or “Colossal”…

The upper slopes of Mount Baker are cloaked in glaciers, which themselves are often covered in snow. Here, crevasses are much more apparent, which give light to how the glacier flows and deforms. Seracs, shearing, transverse crevasses, etc. are very easy to identify...

The Drygalski Ice Tongue is a ~4000 year old floating extension of the David Glacier near McMurdo Station in the Antarctic Ross Sea…

More expansive than the state of Rhode Island (~4000 square kilometers), this is the largest glacier of its kind in North America, and the largest non-polar piedmont glacier in the world…

To get a true sense of size, view the above image at full screen and search for the three active airstrips located within the delta fan…

Here’s an image of an underwater landscape, with the shallow Bahama Banks fading away into the massive 2000m (6600ft) deep Tongue of the Ocean (TOTO) trench…

In the 1700s, Charles Messier, a French astronomer, spent countless hours scanning the sky in search for comets. Given the limited optical technology of the time, he occasionally came across blurry objects that appeared similar to comets, yet remained fixed in the sky…

These unusual islands change in number from 1000 to over 3000 as the rainy season fluctuates water levels around 12m (40 feet)…

It’s thought that the orientation of these parallel thermokarst (thaw) lakes near the shoreline is no coincidence. As winter turns to summer, the upper layers of ice melt, and areas that had particular weight in ice become depressed, allowing water to pool…

Closer to the California coast, this island has a designated population of two people, yet is California’s largest island (three times the size of Manhattan). The longest sea cave in North America can be found here, along with island foxes…

The feeling of having access to the data from a 4.7 billion dollar instrument that has produced (with the ongoing help from thousands of scientists and engineers) some of the most groundbreaking and beautiful images of the universe gives me the shivers, and it almost feels like theft getting free access to nearly all of it…

I might have gone a little overboard with this one. But I love the idea that one can track down satellite imagery to see Earth’s active volcanoes in action, especially when some of these remote or brief eruptions are barely captured on the ground…

London, Paris, Poland, Banana. These are the town names on Kiritimati Atoll in Kiribati…

The South Pacific is a truly special place that I got a bit carried away exploring, to the point that I may need several posts to cover things I’ve come across…

These depressions are thought to have once been lakes, with hippopotamus fossils, among others, found here. Today, the Empty Quarter contains the largest expanse of sand dunes in the world…