Acquadance

— Recently I spent some time around our backyard in Austin looking at things and discovering hidden gems. What that meant is that I was walking around with my macro lens and finding things we normally do not look at or see with the naked eye. When we focus on small details, we often discover a new world right under our noses.

One of the features we added to the backyard was a water fountain. I have spent a few hours sitting on the patio and simply listening to the water bubbling nearby. On this particular late afternoon, the fall sunlight was reflecting gently on the water basin creating a myriad of abstract shapes and colors. I took over a dozen photos from various angles. Each one revealed details I could not have predicted. I have selected these two for this post because of the golden hour reflection on the water bubbles above the surface. They look like golden nuggets or crystal pieces.

Spending time watching water can be very calming, especially when it’s done during the golden hour. The forms and colors change with each bubble that breaks above the surface. When I was looking at this small water fountain in our backyard, I saw the effects of hydropower on a small scale. This made me think of a couple of articles I recently read about rain having fallen for the first time on record on the Greenland Ice Sheet. In that article by Christian Thorsberg, the author points out that rain is not what one would expect in one of the “most reliably frozen regions” on the planet. Furthermore, the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC) pointed out that rain fell for “several hours, and air temperatures remained above freezing for about nine hours.” The result from that rain caused 7 billion tons of water to flood the summit, Thorsberg wrote. Going back to my small backyard fountain, I see how just a few bubbles above the surface cause an overflow and spill water over the fountain base. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine the global impact of that Greenland rainfall on the planet.