As I've said many times before, one of the best parts about doing field work -- geology or otherwise -- is getting outside to experience all aspects of nature. This week's Friday Field Photo is from a trip I took to southern Chile just a couple weeks ago. While spending some time investigating 80 million year old deep-marine sedimentary deposits now exposed in the Patagonian Andes, we witnessed this avalanche on a nearby mountain called Paine Grande in Torres del Paine National Park.
It was an unusually calm day and we could hear small ice falls coming off the glacier that caps this mountain most of the morning. All of the sudden we heard a much bigger rumble and we all did a 180 to see this avalanche flowing down the side of the mountain. Luckily I had just snapped another photo so my camera was ready.
There's a lot of depth in this shot -- the people in the lower right are a few hundred meters away from me and we were all about six kilometers away from the avalanche.
Get out there and have your camera ready, you never know what you'll see. Happy Friday!
Image: Avalanche on Paine Grande / Brian Romans / Flickr
