Category: Comparisons & Contrasts

Historical Bits

Posted on by MC2 · Leave a comment

One of the things I find fascinating about the Indiana Dunes is the interplay between the natural beauty and incredible biodiversity of the park, and the heavily developed industrial and residential aspect of the area. Indeed much if not most of the park land was once used for industrial and residential purposes. As a result there is a lot of work which has gone into restoring the land, which has been reclaimed from other uses, to its natural state. However there are many reminders of how the land was once used, scattered throughout the park. When I first began exploring the Indiana Dunes I would wonder about the occasional remains of a cinderblock wall, or the sudden appearance of Daffodils along the trail. Little bits of the history of the land.

This section of the Great Marsh trail illustrates how it runs in straight lines as it follows abandoned roads.

The Great Marsh trail in the Indiana Dunes National Park (IDNP) is one where its past use as a residential area is obvious once you look at the area on Google Maps in satellite view, as seen in the image at the top of this post. This area of the park is part of the town of Beverly Shores, which donated the land to the park. In the satellite image the road structure of the area clearly shows up. I have marked the Great Marsh trail in blue. One thing which is not immediately apparent from the ground is how the trail itself follows the old road network. But once you realize that this is the case, you notice that the trail is raised slightly above the level of the ground. Looking at the satellite image you can clearly see how the raised roads broke the land up into rectangular low lying parcels, the effect on the flow of water is readily apparent as well.

The following photographs show some of the interesting features I have come across and are keyed to the satellite image at the top of this post.

(1) Here you come across stone and concrete rubble from a residence which once stood at this location on the trail.
(1) Just off the trail nearby, lies a pile of rubble which is easy to miss in the spring and summer when it is well hidden in the foliage. It is pretty clear that a building once occupied this spot.
(1) Not too far from the rubble shown above, you come across a patch of Daffodils. The first time I saw these obviously non-native flowers concentrated in this one spot, I thought someone must have planted them here as a joke. It was not until later, when I understood the former residential history here, that I realized this is where someones garden once stood.

(2) In this area of the satellite image you may have to zoom in but the ground is covered by tracks from heavy equipment which had been used to clear out non-native plants and trees. These two images show how this area looked at right about the time the satellite image must have been taken, and how it looks about 2 years later.

I have noticed that the early stages of restoration work are often ugly. But it is amazing how fast the land recovers.

(3) On the satellite image you can clearly see how one of the former road beds formed one leg of a rectangular enclosure which had trapped water within it. This image shows what that former road looks like today from the trail, looking across the enclosed basin.

(3) Although it is a little hard to make out, the diagonal line of trees starting from the middle of the left side of the image marks an abandoned raised roadbed which is now so overgrown that it is no longer passable.

(4) The last find I’d like to share is located at the far left edge of the satellite image. This area has yet to see the same level of restoration effort, and there are no maintained trails. Most of the abandoned roads which are visible in the satellite photo are now so overgrown that they have ceased to exist for all practical purposes. There is one road however which is still passable, and I followed it one day all the way till it disappeared in the marsh where I found another interesting bit of history.

(4) When I come across something like this I always wonder how did it get here? Was this once someone’s back yard which they simply filled with junk that has not yet been hauled out by the park service? Or did someone come along more recently, when the area was more accessible, and dump a truck load of crap. I will probably never know, but it is interesting to speculate.

Whenever I come across a scene such as this dump site in the middle of a nature area under restoration, I am always filled with curiosity about its history. I expect that scenes like this one generate feelings of sadness or disgust in many people who unexpectedly stumble across them. I find however that they add interest and provide a spark of mystery about the park as a whole, how it came to be and how it is evolving as the result of hard restoration work being done by a many people. The historical context which these little “easter eggs” provide really makes for a compelling story which unfolds as you spend more time on the trails, you never know what you are going to uncover next. And as you can see in the final image in this post, nature will eventually reclaim even a toilet, given enough time. And this is a beautiful thing.

(5) At the upper left corner of the satellite image there is a junction where an abandoned section of Beverly Drive connects to another set of maintained trails in Beverly Shores which connects to the IDNP’s Dune Ridge trail. Although not an official “trail” in the park, it is possible to start at the Great Marsh trail and walk to the Dune Ridge trail. Along the way you will encounter a number of other interesting historical tidbits, but that is the subject for another post.

Physics and Photography – Scaling

Posted on by MC2 · Leave a comment

I do nature photography as a hobby, it is something which I really enjoy.  I make my living  teaching experimental physics.  As a photographer I am drawn to close up (i.e. macro) images of the flora and fauna in the Indiana Dunes.  By removing the context which is usually associated with common things like a spider web or a leaf, you can see them in a completely different way.  Physics can be described as the art of noticing the patterns which exist in the world around us, and then trying to tease out the underlying mathematical relations which describe them.  Scaling is a concept that describes how some patterns in nature appear repeatedly, in different phenomena and at vastly different size scales.

On the surface you might not think that there is much overlap between the two disciplines of nature photography and physics.  But the more time I spend out on the trails, taking photographs and observing the world around me, the more I see the “physics” in these common everyday things.  In particular, the concept of Scaling in physics is becoming ever more apparent in the subjects I choose to photograph out on the trails.

Spider Webs and Galactic Voids

These two images represent two completely different things.  The top image is a close up view of a spider web.  The bottom image is a scientific representation of how galaxies are distributed throughout the universe.  I see a remarkable similarity between these two different phenomena.  Both exhibit the same filamentary structure surrounding empty voids.  Even more striking is the difference in size scale.  In the image of the spider web, the empty voids are a centimeter or so across, whereas the galactic voids are on the scale of  hundreds of mega-parsecs across.  That works out to a factor of  100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 in terms of size difference!

Close up photograph of the filaments of a spider web along the Tolleston Dunes trail in the Indiana Dunes National Park.

A computer simulation of large scale structures called voids and filaments which have been observed to exist at the largest scales in the universe. Each dot in this image represents a single galaxy. Image taken from a paper by Gaite, Jose. (2013). Halo Models of Large Scale Structure and Reliability of Cosmological N-Body Simulations. Galaxies, vol. 1, issue 1, pp. 31-43. 1. 10.3390/galaxies1010031.

Autumn Leaves and Satellite Maps

Another example of the same patterns and structure appearing in very different phenomena at different size scales is illustrated in these next two images.  One is a close up photograph of a leaf as it begins to decay and change colors in early Autumn.  The second image is a screenshot from a Google Maps satellite view of central Europe.  Notice the similarities in how the veins in the leaf connect the dark spots of decay much like how the roads in the satellite image connect cities.  Both the veins in the leaves and the roads on the map divide into smaller and smaller segments, dividing up the surrounding areas into finer and finer chunks.  This remarkably similar behavior is present on scales of a few centimeters in the one case and over many kilometers in the other.

Close up photograph of an Autumn leaf taken along the Tolleston Dunes trail in the Indiana Dunes National Park.

A screenshot of the network of towns, roads and fields in central Europe taken from Google Maps.

Noticing these connections between such disparate subjects is incredibly rewarding.  It also keeps me coming back over and over to these same trails, the more familiar I get with them the more they reveal.  Nature Rocks!