Flying back from California last Sunday I had a window seat on the south side of the plane.  Over Arizona I noticed a pockmark on the landscape.  Gee, that looks like a meteor crater.  Well, it is.

Arizona’s Meteor Crater is the first place where scientists recognized that an impact from outer space had made a crater on earth.  It’s also called the Barringer Crater because Daniel Barringer hypothesized it was made by an iron-rich meteor.  He bought the crater in 1903 but found no iron at all (it had vaporized on impact).  The family still owns the crater.

From the outside on the ground, the crater looks like a hill.  At the rim it’s a deep hole.  But to me it’s most impressive from the air.  Here’s a closer in-flight look from Scott Manley on YouTube.

Earth has other meteor craters but they’re usually eroded and obscured by vegetation.  Here’s one I saw in Canada while on a flight from Europe.

The Manicouagan Crater in northern Quebec (45 miles wide!) is revealed by the Manicouagan Reservoir it now contains.  In 1998 geophysicist David Rowley hypothesized it’s one of a chain of five impact craters caused by a comet or asteroid that “bounced” over North America and Europe as it hit our planet.

From the airplane window I can see what hit us from the air.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the images to see the original. Video from Scott Manley on YouTube)

Two weeks ago my husband and I returned from a visit with friends in Finland.  Today I’ll share some of the beautiful scenery and tell you a bit about the country.

Finland is a Nordic country located between Scandinavia and Russia.  For centuries it was alternately ruled by its two powerful neighbors, Sweden and Russia.  This year Finland celebrates 100 years of independence, released by Russia in 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Though it’s the eighth largest country in Europe, Finland is the most sparsely populated in the European Union.  One quarter of its 5.5 million people live in metro Helsinki with the rest spread out among towns and country, mostly in the south.

We stayed with our friends Erkki and Helena at their summer cottage on Lake Rikkavesi (very sparsely populated; located at blue arrow) and at their home in Joensuu, a town of 58,000.

Their summer cottage consists of three buildings — sleeping space, living space, and an outhouse.  It’s semi-rugged with electricity, a wood burning sauna (everyone has a sauna in Finland!), lake water for washing not drinking, and a composting toilet.  Middle of the night bathroom visits required walking outdoors, but no problem. It is never dark in July.

Most of my photos below were taken at Lake Rikkavesi (check the captions for more information).  Click on any photo to see a larger version of the slideshow.

Beautiful Finland. The land of 188,000 lakes.

(photos by Kate St. John)

During my recent trip to England and Finland I was happy to see lots of new Life Birds but was amazed at how many birds were the same at home and abroad.

Some are on both continents because they were introduced — rock pigeons, house sparrows, starlings, ring-necked pheasants and mute swans. But many in the duck, gull and tern families occur in both places because they flew there on their own. There are usually different subspecies on each continent(*) but in a few cases the exact same species is everywhere.

Here are four such birds, easily found in North America and Europe. There are no subspecies so if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

Above, I saw northern shovelers (Anas clypeata) in England where they’re simply called “shovelers.” I was amazed to learn they’re the same bird everywhere though I should have known. They breed across northern America and Eurasia.

Red-breasted mergansers (Mergus serrator) breed in northern America and Eurasia and travel far on migration (for a merganser). They spend the winter at both salt and fresh water so it’s no wonder they can change continents.

Caspian terns (Hydroprogne caspia) are the largest tern on earth and found on every continent except Antarctica, though their distribution is scattered on coasts and in the interior. In western Pennsylvania they’re at Presque Isle in the spring.

And finally, great black-backed gulls (Larus marinus) are coastal and Great Lakes birds found on both sides of the North Atlantic. As the largest member of the gull family this bird is so powerful that it eats smaller gulls, even adults!

When you see a great black-backed gull at the beach this summer, consider this:  It’s the same bird everywhere.

(Great black-backed gull photo by shellgame on Flickr, Creative Commons license; click on the image to see the original. All other photos by Steve Gosser)

(*) p.s. A few examples of different subspecies between North America and Europe: green-winged teal, sandwich tern, barn swallow, barn owl, peregrine falcon.