Kaleidoscopic, Vertiginous Dubai

A selection of dizzying stills from Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011) shot in Dubai at Burj Khalifa, the tallest man made structure in the world. These scenes literally took my breath my away. The silvery, reflective palettes are beautiful and slick, altogether crystal clear and hazily atmospheric. Dubai a concrete playground below; the maze-like carpets of garden and spaghetti junctions laid out as crazy crop circles in the desert.

Worth watching this enjoyable popcorn action flick if only for this particular scene, and the one that follows, when Cruise's character pursues the baddie through the eerily deserted, sand-storm blanketed streets of Dubai. Amazing.

Fast water carries sediment while slow water deposits it

A satellite image from September 1999 of the Mississippi river, showing its many channels and many ox-bow lakes. 'Soft riverbanks are continuously eroded. Floods occasionally spread across the wide, shallow valley that flanks the river, and new channels are left behind when the water recedes. This history of change is recorded in the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944.'

'The delta switching has occurred every 1,000 years or so in the past. As sediment accumulates in the main channel, the elevation increases, and the channel becomes more shallow and meandering. Eventually the river finds a shorter, steeper descent to the Gulf. In the 1950s, engineers noticed that the river’s present channel was on the verge of shifting westward to the Atchafalaya River, which would have become the new route to the Gulf. Because of the industry and other development that depended on the present river course, the U.S. Congress authorized the construction of the Old River Control Structure to prevent the shift from happening.' - 'Mississippi Meanders', August 31, 2006 Earth Observatory, Nasa

More 'aerial slices' of rivers: here and of islands: here

Lessons of Darkness | Lektionen in Finsternis: Part III

Swirling helicopter footage of the cataclysmic, post-apocalyptic and ravaged, oil-soaked Kuwait landscape, with Herzog's sparse and poetic narrative which provides no geopolitical context whatsoever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness

View Part I and Part II

Interestingly in early 2006 while Herzog was giving an interview to Mark Kermode for the BBC, an unknown individual shot Herzog with an air rifle during filming. Herzog continued the interview and later when showing his wound on camera, and calmly remarked, "It is not a significant bullet." [1]

Lessons of Darkness | Lektionen in Finsternis: Part II

Lessons of Darkness, 1992. Directed by Werner Herzog. View Part I here