Artist Taylor Seamount reimagines Santa Cruz as an eco-utopia

In their new solar punk series, Santa Cruz painter Taylor Seamount reimagines local scenes as eco-utopias. Watch rush-hour traffic on Highway 1 vanish under their brush, replaced by a high-speed rail line. Video filmed with Sony a7rIII and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. Published by Lookout Santa Cruz.

Getting to the bottom of the deepest lake in the United States

Crater Lake in Oregon is nearly 2,000 feet deep, which is about the height of the Freedom Tower in New York, or twice the depth of Lake Michigan. But contrary to its name, Crater Lake didn’t form by a space rock crashing into Earth. It was formed by an ancient volcano, Mount Mazama, estimated to have stood at 12,000 feet tall. When Mount Mazama erupted 7,700 years ago, the violent explosion created a pyroclastic flow, which is the same kind of eruption we saw at Mount Saint Helens in 1980. Mazama created the largest volcanic eruption North America had seen in half a million years, sending ash as far away as Alberta, Canada. It was so powerful, in fact, that the mountain spat out every ounce of lava from deep within its magma chamber. The mountain collapsed inward on itself, creating a giant hole in the ground known as a caldera.

So we know this both because of geology, but also because of oral tradition. The Klamath people who live in the area recalled how the mountain blasted red rocks as large as the hills through the air and blazed the surrounding forests. What other ancient geology do you wanna dig into?

Researched and scripted this TikTok for Scientific American.