While randomly perusing Google Earth to find an image suitable for Where on (Google) Earth #182, I became re-enamored with the staggering array of complex and bizarre assemblages of landforms and landscapes on our planet. In particular, I find that the world's deserts are rife with landscapes and landform assemblages that approach the pathological* in their patterns and characteristics. But pathological landscapes are not the sole domain of the desert, they are azonal phenomena that occur across the planetary surface.

*pathological in the sense of being developed or expressed in such a degree that is extreme, excessive, or markedly abnormal.

The point of this blog is to develop an image catalog of such landscapes as well as constituent landforms, deposits, and processes that comprise and underlie them. Thus, the images can be derived from screen captures drawn from Google Earth, Flash Earth, Bing Maps, Google Maps, or your favorite GIS program. Field photographs of notably 'pathological' deposits or landforms are certainly appropriate as well.

We have all seen and, likely purchased, atlases of satellite imagery that emphasize the sheer beauty as well as weirdness of landscapes as seen from space. Now, with virtual globes, geobrowsers, and various GIS programs, we can break the constraints provided by the selection of images in those books and look anywhere we want to find intriguing visions of the Earth's surface.

Ideally, this blog will become a group effort with several contributors. In reality it may just stay one of my many side projects. I truly hope for the former, but won't mind the latter.

The only rules: provide the coordinates of the approximate center of the image; tag it by process[es] or deposit type[s]. Provide an extremely brief description of what is going on...not treatises here, just a brief description. Leave it to the interested viewer to explore the area of the image and come to terms with its scale...or provide a scale. The idea, however, is to not dwell too long on posting an image.

Here are some obvious tags: fluvial, aeolian, glacial, coastal, karst, thermal, mass wasting, erosion, anthro, tectonic, etc. Note that too many tags compromises clarity to some extent.