Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

In 1936, Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story called “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. The protagonist seems to me a thinly-veiled version of the author, but in this case steadily reflecting on his life while dying of an infected wound in a Tanzanian hunting camp. He dreams of rescue in a bush plane:

Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.

The alpine glaciers there covered about 10 square kilometers when Hemingway penned that story. Today they cover less than 2 square kilometers. They will likely be gone by 2050.

Lake Baikal, Russia

The impossible blue, captured under ruptured ice. Mind you, I’m colorblind, so it could be impossible purple, but I don’t think that’s likely.

As a grad student years ago, I taught a political geography course with a broad purview. My students - probably half of whom were international - were encouraged to tell us about their own experiences in the world. I had Russian students and I had Ukrainian students. The Orange Revolution had just concluded. I recall one class presentation when a group of my Russian students gave a slideshow of travels in Siberia, Kamchatka, the Arctic. They exuded real pride in the vastness and wildness of their country, in ways familiar to Americans. They also took the opportunity to embarass my Ukrainian students with bullying remarks.

These days, I frequently post the aerial images from the Atlas Miscellaneous series in internal company channels, and they’ll spark an occasional flurry of emoji reactions. I have Russian colleagues and I have Ukrainian colleagues. When my pre-scheduled post of this Baikal image landed, it was quickly decorated with 🇷🇺s. The night before, Russia had attacked Kiev with a record number of drones and missles. One of my Ukrainian colleagues posted a 😞 on the image.

Vienna, Austria

I was inspecting a railyard when I saw this, and I had an initial sense that it was a real gigantic kite, hovering several stories off the ground. The imagery is a bit washed out, so it was hard to tell, but the kite . . . was casting proportionate shadows! The tail was as well! On closer inspection I saw that the tail shadow wasn’t quite aligned, and that the shadow direction was different than that cast by the building nearby, but damn, what a wonderful illusion! And who was it for? Drone pilots? Inbound plane passengers? Was it meant to delight the forklift drivers who share the space (as indicated by the “Stapler-verkehr” markings on the same stretch of pavement)?

Absent the help of a local, I can’t figure this one out. However I did learn that there is an arts and performance organization called Brut based in an adjacent warehouse. I’m pleased to make their aerial acquaintance, if this was their doing.