Quite a few people seem to be photo-blogging these days, and I sometimes wish I had the capacity to do so too. That's quite a ways off for me though, so take my advice in the meantime and browse through the USGS' Earth as Art gallery. It's all satellite photos of natural features, from all over the world, most of them very cool and abstract. Here's one of sand blowing through rock outcroppoings near Terkezi Oasis in Chad, which I like especially. And here's some fascinating and rather sinister cubism from Northern Kazakhstan.

I drive around the American West quite a bit every summer, and I find myself increasingly fascinated by imagining geology on a very large scale. If you drive, for instance, from Vernal, Utah to Green River, Wyoming, you will pass through high mountains of blood red quartzite then descend through a series of alternating long valleys and hogbacks of sedimentary rock. These features are plain to the eye, but one must mentally assemble a large-scale picture to see the Uinta mountains thrusting from the continent's basement to 13,000 feet, with giant slabs of the overlying sedimentary layers sloughing off the sides. Geological phenomena of this size sometimes seem half noumenal objects, in that, despite their physicality, you cannot point to them or directly view them. They are experienced by seeing, remembering, and mentally synthesizing their parts.

The USGS also has an image of one of my favorite large landscapes and summer haunts, Utah's Desolation Canyon.