Nebraska as Art

When Grampa was here last time, he said that he had read a story in National Geographic about a meteor crater here in Nebraska. It's called Merna Crater and is located in Custer County right next to BFE. It looks like it's probably not an actual crater, just a nice round depression.

Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up downloading digital elevation models (huge text files) of the state from UNL and wrote a LabView program to process the data into images. I posted Adams thru Gage Counties in a web album. I used different colormaps to represent elevations. In the image above, blue is the highest and black is the lowest. Some of the county images could pass for art.

Carolina Bays in Nebraksa: Before moving to Nebraska, I was entertaining thoughts of moving to South Carolina and working for a big forklift company. While doing research on S. Carolina, I found some information on the Carolina Bays, some oval depressions that line the east coast. They are called bays because many of them are filled with Bay trees. There's quite a bit of internet stuff out there about them and some believe that they are impact craters from a big slushy comet, as their central axes all sort of point to a central origin. It makes for spectacular sci-fi reading.

When I started browsing through my first attempts at visualizing the DEM's, I was shocked to see some large oval depressions in some of the counties. Turns out that these are the same as the Carolina Bays, but located here on the prairie in Nebraska. Most lie south of the current Platte River and are oriented perpendicular to the continuous winds. Filmore and Clay counties are full of them.