Abstract: Our Dynamic Earth--View from Skylab

William R. Muehlberger

Skylab missions, particularly the last mission of 84 day's duration, have had crews trained to study many of the dynamic phenomena of the earth and of the sun. As a result, their observations and photographs constitute a wealth of new data to be integrated into present concepts of these features.

The talk describes and illustrates some of the results of the Skylab Visual Observations Experiment Team: distribution of plumes of smoke (volcanoes, fires, contrails); sand-dune arrays; drouth-areas analysis; agricultural analyses; land- and sea-ice distribution; atmospheric patterns; ocean eddies, currents and plankton blooms; and atmosphere-ocean interaction.

Global tectonics is the major theme of the talk (because it was the writer's part of the Skylab project). Many Skylab hand-held photographs clearly show the distribution and pattern of structures associated with many of the plate boundaries of the world: Red Sea-Dead Sea rift zone; San Andreas fault system; New Zealand; Atacama fault, Chile; Caribbean-American plate boundary structures across Guatemala and southern Mexico; Alpine-Zagros-Himalaya Ranges. Other topics of regional interest are added as appropriate or desired.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90977©1975-1976 Distinguished Lectures