Cells and extending perception: some tools of biology - 2

 Both field work and laboratory exercises involve imaging, especially if there's a blog involved. Fortunately, modern smartphones provide several camera options.

My smartphone is a Motorola Moto g Power with three cameras. There are two back cameras (the ones on the side opposite the screen), and one front camera (the one used for selfies).

My field kit (fits nicely into my backpack)

Life happens across all scales of a biome and imaging has to keep up with the scale 

The molecules that make up the basis of life are just regular compounds like salt (sodium chloride) and water extending up to huge molecules like proteins and genetic molecules. They exist at the nanometer scale. A nanometer is a thousandth of a micrometer, which is a thousandth of a millimeter, which is a thousandth of a meter. It's smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so we can't use a light microscope to see it. 

Electron wavelengths are on the order of 20 nanometers down to (under acceleration) picometers (a picometer is a thousandth of a nanometer). We can use electrons in electron microscopes to see molecules.

Pleolipoviral virion (HRPV-6)

Tatiana A. Demina, Hanna M. Oksanen

From Electron Microscope, Wikipedia article 

But electron microscopes are expensive and absolutely not portable so any image at the nanoscale here will be from public domain images.

I catch up at the micrometer scale. 

My smartphone, a Motorola Moto g Power, has three built in cameras. For most of my past photography, point-and-shoot did pretty much what I wanted but biology is requiring a little more ... finesse. So I'm taking a course in photography, a series of lectures by Marc Levoy, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. (Digital Photography )  Early on he recommends avoiding phone cameras but for reasons of expense and portability, I ain't gonna. 

Actually, I am very impressed with the advances in phone cameras from my last to my current phone. 

There are many (!) camera apps available to optimize the cameras in smartphones. They work some different from professional cameras. To approximate the same control over images, they have to use some advanced algorithms to simulate them.

In addition to the camera app that came with the phone, a fairly no frills point-and-shoot digital camera with options in the settings menu, I selected three other general purpose apps and two for managing exterior cameras like camcorders and a bore scope.

Why collect camera apps? Because they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Don't feel limited by my selection, but the ones I use are:

OpenCamera. By Mark Harman. A fairly unassuming camera, with a lot under the hood including a choice of metadata to a display as stamps on the photographs.

Proton, by Hinnka. This is a strong simulation of a professional DSLR down to dial selectors. Both it and the next offer extensive control of exposure, color, special effects, and style with in-camera editing of images 

ProShot, by Rise Up Games, is also an excellent simulation of a pro DSLR camera  I used ProShot for most of the photo micrographs in the first part of this blog (this is part 2).

Microscopy and photomicroscopy operate in the micrometer range, perfectly doable for visible light. Most small organisms, bacteria, protozoa, many medical parasites, molds and yeasts, fall into that range.

The micrometer is such a common unit in biology that it's often just shortened to "micron" and the nanometer is sometimes called a "millimicron" (less so than in the past).

Single cells are usually colorless which makes them hard to see with visible light so stains and other tricks (polarized light, fluorescence, dark field microscopy, etc ) are used to make them visible. Stains are dyes that attach to or dissolve in or react with certain parts of cells. For instance, lipid soluble dyes will preferentially color the lipid membranes of cells while water soluble dyes will go to the watery interiors. The indicators commonly used in analytical chemistry may dye different parts of cells that have different chemical properties differently. For instance, a pH indicator will dye acid and base elements different colors 

Even food colors will bring out the nuclei in cells.

Cheek epithelium cells

I have two clip-on microscopes as featured in the last part of this blog. The more powerful one will resolve cells but isn't quite strong enough to clearly view structures within the cells smaller than a nucleus or large vacuole.

The less powerful microscope is more portable and easier to use in the field but is fine for tiny details like grains of sand, small crystals, tiny flowers, small insects and other invertebrates.

The camera apps have functions that can sharpen microscopic images and enhance contrast.

Macrophotography involves close up photographs of detail, and usually operates in the millimeter range. Most smartphones today have at least a standard back camera and a camera with a macro lens. Some have wide field cameras. Mine doesn't but I do have a clip-on wide field kens 

On one of my treks into town, I noticed a mossy looking (actually not a moss but a succulent) plant covered spot of the ground. Interested in the tiny white flecks, I switched to my micro camera, got close and took this photograph.

Rattlesnake weed (Euphorbia albomarginata)

These tiny, exquisite blossoms were barely a millimeter across.

The first exposure I had to the idea of "bellyflowers" was from a documentary long ago by the Moody Institute of Science about researchers in Death Valley. In the desert (like where I now live), it's often a good survival trait to be small and close to the ground, so many desert flowers are produced by ground covers and are tiny 

"Standard" photography is also important in biology because the centimeter to decameter range is where we live. I saw this fellow on a trip back from town one day and he stayed long enough for me to get a picture.

Osprey

 The advantage of "regular" photography is that I almost always have my smartphone with me but I only have my photographic paraphernalia if I plan to have it.

I'm also impressed by the stabilization offered by current phone cameras. The trick of waiting until the shutter button has been poked and the camera motion has settled down is good, but my newest phone has OIS, "optical image stabilization". If I twitch in one direction when I press the shitter release, the camera senses it and twitches the camera kens in the opposite direction, canceling the blur 

Telephotography carries my photography into the range from here to as far as my eyes can see. Capturing images of skittish or dangerous animals from afar or surveying ecosystems is valuable in ecology and conservation 

Jupiter

Grackle in the tree top

Clip-on telephoto lenses are not expensive and are of fairly good quality. Mine is a Pusokei 22x telephoto lens .

The bird came out great.....Jupiter, not so much. Telephoto can only go so far in capturing astronomical images. For that, you need a telescope and that is outside my range for this blog. Biology, in general, though, goes on to the stars in it's search for answers to the questions of where life on Earth came from and if there might be other life in other parts of the universe and what it might be like. That is the purview of exobiology.

I was excited when I noticed that my last phone had "night vision". I figured "infrared camera" but was a little disappointed when I found that it wasn't. On the other hand, I've started fooling around with it on my new camera and am changing my mind.

Night vision has to have some light to work. I tried it in our pitch black garage and couldn't see anything, but given half a chance, it can use what light is available to produce some pretty awesome images 

It's a software adaptation of digital cameras. They take several quick photographs, superimpose them, and then clean up blurry edges. 

As macular degeneration has pretty much destroyed my night vision, I have found that I can use my phone's night vision to navigate dark dates.

It seems that most phone cameras are now equipped with night vision.

The banner for this blog was hand stitched but modern digital cameras have a feature called "panorama". You stand in one spot and rotate and your camera will nicely stitch the whole scene together for you.

Bitter Lakes National Wildlife Refuge

The Chihuahuan desert 

The other side of the smartphone camera is the video. Most phone cameras are also video cameras and, what's more, they have video editors 

I went out on a stormy night to capture about 2 minutes of distant lightning. The result was too long to insert into a Blogger blog so I trimmed it down some to get this.

Now, it's difficult to catch action precisely in a photograph. You can use apps like motion detectors to trigger a camera. Some cameras even come with motion detectors, but there is an easier way ....just make a video and extract what you want.

When reviewing the video above, I spotted a strike that I wanted a photograph of so I cut the following out and cleaned it up some.

This is the extracted scene but I felt like the blue made details a little harder to see so I shifted it a little more to the red to get this.

The most common admonition I've seen in courses on photography is "take lots of pictures". Much of photography is feeling. Volume gives you a chance to learn the features of your camera and a feeling for composition and, generally, what works 

I don't have Professor Levoy's objection to smartphone cameras so, whether you have a film or digital camera or a smartphone, go out and take lots of pictures!

 

Cells and extending perception: some tools of biology

 Two items need to be added to our list of what constitutes life for biology 

All life that we know about is carbon based and all living things are composed of cells. In essence, living things are composed of little bags of chemicals.

1. All living things that we know about are composed of cells.

2. The cell is the smallest thing that we know that can perform all the functions we recognize as life. As such, the cell is the smallest unit of life.

3. All cells come from pre-existing cells.

 But I'm getting ahead of myself. Cells exist on the order of micrometers. A micrometer is a thousandth of a millimeter and that's way too small to observe with just my eyes. I need help with that so let's talk about microscopes first.

When we moved from Denver to Roswell, we moved lightly. Most of our stuff, we left behind, so I've been replacing some things and reorganizing since the move. In a way, that's good because I was collecting way too much stuff. This blog is about experiencing the world out there and that means inexpensively and portably.

There is also the issue of me dumping my phone into the washing machine. Now I have a new phone. Beside the expense, moving and destroying my phone was a good thing and, to some degree, enjoyable. It let me evaluate what I have, what I need, and what I want. I've spent some time reorganizing and getting to know my set-up.

So now I have two clip-on microscopes to try out. I have my old clip-on that I brought with me. It's not terribly powerful but very portable. I keep it in the phone wallet I carry on my belt on technical hikes. The other is the much more powerful clip-on from ScienceWiz. It's a little more fiddly but the magnification is considerably more. It's still not strong enough to show a lot of very important cell structures but it's fine for field observations.

The top left is my old clip-on. The magnification wasn't expressed when I bought it and I'm still not sure how powerful it is. The other photos are of my new ScienceWiz. It's a replacement. The magnification for that microscope was expressed in the package insert and on the website. It's a fascinating piece of technology that I will discuss later in the blog.

Of course, the best thing about both in my case is that imaging is done through my smartphone so that all the functions of the phone are available, including my blog editor.

The differences between the scopes are important 

The old clip-on is a reflection microscope. It shines a light onto the specimen which returns it's image to the scope to be magnified. It uses the back camera with its better magnification and resolution. 

The rear camera actually has two cameras. One has a resolution of 50 megapixels and the other has a resolution of 8 megapixels. The front camera (selfies and mirror) has a resolution of 32 megapixels.

Resolution is an important limit which I will explain (and demonstrate) later. It is the total number of pixels that the camera captures in a single picture.

The main camera has an aperture of f/1.8. f stops are related to the size of the opening. In general, the smaller the number, the larger the opening, the more light is gathered, the sharper (and closer) the focus, and the shallower the depth of field, (the subject is in sharp focus but the background is more out of focus.) f/1.8 is about as low as it gets for digital cameras. Electronically, higher f stops can be simulated. T

he pixels for the primary camera are 0.61 micrometers across. That provides for decent resolution (it can resolve details in the tens of micrometers). A micrometer is a thousandth of a millimeter.

The secondary camera has an aperture of f/2.2 and a pixel size of 1.12 micrometers. It's intended for macrophotography.

The front camera is located at the top of my camera screen as a 4 millimeter wide black dot. It's used by the ScienceWiz microscope and the image is right there on the phone screen beneath the microscope. That camera has a f/2.4 aperture with 1 micrometer pixels.

It may have struck you that, maybe, the better rear cameras could be used by the stronger microscope, but then the screen would be face down. That would be practical with an add-on monitor, which is available for phones. I may consider it later. The ScienceWiz clamp-on is illuminated from above so that what you see is light after it has passed through the subject. That makes the other microscope better for opaque subjects.

The cameras on my phone (I have several) will provide up to 4x magnification. That may sound good but that is where resolution comes in. You can improve the size of an image but resolution caps clarity and detail. Optical magnification can give you sharper images. Digital magnification can not.

So, the ScienceWiz microscope provides from 200 to 400 X magnification according to the phone optics. With 4x zoom, that expands to 800 to 1600 X power. Again, zooming (digital magnification) doesn't improve resolution.

Above is a slide with a print of the letter "e" on a slide. The other two images used my old clip-on microscope. This shows the forte of this clip-on. The magnification isn't great but I can focus on small things, even opaque things like minerals or small flowers. 

To get rid of the walls of the microscope shown in the bottom left, I can zoom in. The zoomed image in the lower right shows the color dots that make up the image.

As for the magnification power....

The two lines above are two millimeters apart on the ruler. In the left photo, the lines are four millimeters apart, indicating a magnification of 2x. The zoomed image makes the lines 24 millimeters apart indicating a magnification of 12x.

The top photo was taken through my old microscope. The center left is zoomed twelve times. It's a splinter carved off an old stump in the front yard. The other two images were taken with the ScienceWiz microscope and is probably similar to what Robert Hooke saw when he named cells "cells".

Several folks were said to have invented the microscope including the inventor of the telescope, Hans Lippershey, around 1600. When Robert Hooke named cells, he wasn't looking at anything alive. His specimen was a fragment of cork, which is the dead outer layer of the bark of a cork tree (a species of oak).Being dead, the cells were not doing anything and were, in fact, empty and they looked to Hooke like the cells (private rooms) of a monastery.

I have mentioned that I have several camera apps and they all have strengths and weaknesses. The one used here, the standard camera for Motorola phones will not zoom with the front camera. I have since found that a couple of my other phones will, so I'm still learning.

The resolution problem that I have repeatedly mentioned is a problem and should be kept in mind, but it's perhaps not as much of a problem as I've indicated because the phone itself has algorithms to clean up blurry photos, to an extent, and photo apps such as cameras and Google Photos give you tools to clean up and modify photos. The edges of the image in the large photo at the bottom has been sharpened.

This is my second try at a stained slide since biology labs back in the 70s. The first was bad....

These are all a classic first slide, onion skin stained with iodine. The bottom photo was made using my old microscope so it didn't surprise me that I couldn't see cells.

Cells are tiny objects in the micrometer (micron) range. Even the more powerful microscope would be hard put to see much of cells but the two photos above are a good try. The left was stained with pH indicator and, for the right, I used Betadine. Iodine stains starch blue or black and cell walls brown 

If you want to try, strip the fine onion skin out from between two layers of an onion (I was frying onions and peppers for hotdogs that night). Put a drop of water on a microscope slide and place the onion skin in the drop. Add a drop of stain (food color will work, too). Slowly lay a cover slip over the specimen and if fluid seeps out, lay a piece of paper towel or tissue paper along side of the cover slip to draw the excess out.

Although you can't see the detail within the cells, you can see how the cells are lined up in rows.

There is another classic "first slide", the cheek epithelium scraping slide.

To create that, place a drop of saline on a slide (animal cells without rigid cell walls are more vulnerable to bloating than plant cells). The saline can be mixed by dissolving  1/4 teaspoon (1.5 grams) salt in 166 milliliters water. Using a toothpick, scrape the inside of your cheek repeatedly and then rub the toothpick into the saline drop. Add a drop of stain (I used blue and red food coloring for the microphotographs below.) Gently lay a cover slip over the drop 

The top left photo is not zoomed. Unlike the Android camera, my other camera apps will zoom the front camera, so the second one is zoomed  The blue food color worked well and I'm pleased that the nuclei showed up clearly. The other photos were zoomed about 3x. The left center, right center, and lower left photos include the red dye. The lower right photo shows what happens at maximum zoom 

Optical magnification exposes detail in a photo microgram but digital zooming does not add detail. It just makes the image larger. The result is blurring.

Phone cameras have algorithms to conserve details in zoomed photos. For instance, they can take several images and layer them, sharpening edges. But even the tricks that digital cameras use can only deal with so much zoom  4x is about the limit and anything above 6x is currently useless.

With the equipment I use to keep cost low (the ScienceWiz microscope is outstanding at less than $50) and portability high, I won't be able to delve too deeply into the inner workings of the cell.

The microscope is special because it uses a spherical lens with a short focal length to augment the cell phone's camera lenses. This design has been used to provide third world countries with inexpensive, accessible, 3d printable medical equipment 

For deep explorations of cell biology, I use cell models and there are three exceptional ones that I keep around:

The 3d tour of the cell video at ScienceWiz

https://sciencewiz.com/portals/cells/tour-inside-the-cell/a-tour-of-the-cell-more-advanced/

Tour of the Cell

The Cell Biology Wikibook

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cell_Biology

And Kahn Academy's College and AP biology sections 

Those will carry you as deeply as you could want to go into cell biology.

Some people suggest that you look at a cell like a city. I've worked in a lot of factories, so I prefer seeing a cell as a factory, a very automated factory 

The walls of the factory is a membrane made of fat and phosphate that likes to align itself with the phosphate heads pointing outward into the watery environment, and the fatty tails pointing inward. It's a phospholipid bilayer because both the outer and inner environments are watery. In other words, the walls of the cell factory are fluid with things stuck in and through them (like doors and windows that only let certain things through.) Plant cells have more sturdy cell walls around the membranes that are made of stuff like cellulose. Fungus cell walls gave chitin, similar to the stuff that makes up insect bodies  Bacteria can have some strange stuff.

The control center is the nucleus in eukaryotic cells. In prokaryotic cells like bacteria, everything just pretty much floats around  The cell's business is programmed on long tapes (actually spirals or helixes with two outer rails that the program units are arranged between.) A complex mechanism unzips the two parts of the tape, composed of desoxyrhibonucleic acid (DNA) and use one as a template for instructions to be carried out to the rest of the cell. The mechanism has to be complex because errors in the instruction can be disastrous. The process is called "transcription". The result is a strand of ribonucleic acid (RNA) that makes it's way out of the nucleus through pores in the nuclear membrane into a series of corridors called the "endoplasmic reticulum".

What the DNA codes for is proteins. The endoplasmic reticulum, specifically the part called the rough endoplasmic reticulum, is studded with machines called ribosomes (there are also ribosomes floating around free in the gooey cell center, called the cytoplasm). Ribosomes read the RNA instructions and create proteins. Those are carried down the hall to an organelle called the Golgi Apparatus. It looks like a stack of pancakes, but the pancakes are hollow. They check the big molecules to makes sure there are no errors and then package them into neat bundles called "vacuoles" that are sent down fibers (like little railways or monorails) to their destination. That can either be to places in the cell to help produce chemicals other than proteins or to break down sugar for energy, or they can be sent outside the cell where they might act as hormones......messengers to other parts of the body.

That breaking down sugars....... that's how the cell gets energy to do things and it takes place in organelles called "mitochondria". There are complicated chains of chemical reactions that break down sugar to water and carbon dioxide and in the process add phosphate groups to ADP (adenosine diphosphate) to form adenosine triphosphate.

The machines in cells don't use electricity to operate

 When a phosphate group break off ATP it releases a jolt of energy and that's what cells use for power. It's a lot safer in tiny machines than electricity or fire 

Plant cells have installed an extra source of energy. They don't need to transport sugar into the cell for energy. They create their own in organelles called "chloroplasts". That's what makes plant cells green because chloroplasts use a green pigment, chlorophyll, to combine carbon dioxide and water to create sugar.

I've read that microbes can form cysts that can last in soil for a long time, so I wanted to check that out. I collected some of our desert soil in a test tube, added water, and let it sit over night. Then I took some microphotographs.

Nothing was moving but I circled some suspects. They definitely have nuclei so they're eukaryotes. That would indicate that they're protozoans but the images are too small to identify. The upper right photo shows the same scene stained differently without the marks  most of the small dots are dirt particles.

I wanted to see if I could catch some of the fast division and growth of yeast cells. After 45 minutes (1 tablespoon sugar and a package of active baker's yeast in warm water) it looked like this:

But I think I waited too long. Division had slowed down. Here's a video of the action 

Yeast

There is some motion but it's primarily due to gravity. The slide was slanted.

But what I primarily wanted to see was if polarized light could be used as a "stain" and I was pleased at how it brought the chromosomal materials out in the cells 

For those slides, I placed a polarizing filter under the microscope stage, between the lens and the front camera. Most of the cells are in interphase and the chromatids are not visible, but some of the cells are getting ready to divide and you can see the chromosomes.

Later, when I look at cell division and reproduction, I'll try this again but catch the cells earlier.

Even though I absolutely recommend that you play around with making your own slides if you're going to study biology......

Pretty pictures caught when I zoomed out and saw what the glass slide was doing with the polarized light 

but you're not stuck with homebrew. Many suppliers of lab equipments also sell prepared slides. Both Home Science Tools and ScienceWiz sell sets of prepared slides. These are from the ScienceWiz animal slides collection.

And there are several sites online that provide microscopic images, including Wikimedia.

And, of course, if you want to study biology, you'll need some sources. I'm working through the Khan Academy biology sections and reading the Wikibooks in their biology section. I am very impressed with both!

But the bottomline is that there are two kinds of cells.

A prokaryotic cell is a bag of chemicals in a gelatinous goo.

A eukaryotic cell is a bag of bags of chemicals in gelatinous goo.

If you're reading this blog, you are composed of eukaryotic cells.

You might want to learn how to take care of those cells 

.

Roswell: Highway 285 to Berrendo Road -Econony

 

Pecan orchard on Montana Road

When Mr. Jaffa drilled his deep well in his back yard at Richardson Avenue, he set the stage for what Roswell would become, an agricultural community.

On my 1.7 mile hike from home into town, I pass the large pecan orchard above (There's another about two miles away) and one ranch with cows and sheep. There are a handful of ranches with horses. I think that some of the farms I see on my hikes are raising forage.

Farm field with irrigation

It's a mistake to think that all desert areas are barren. I've said before that Roswell is an oasis, so there is water available from the deep aquifer, but the soil is also rich in some areas. Those pecan orchards are in places where Berrendo Creek has laid down a layer of soil and the soil it's laid down is from areas of past volcanic activity. Volcanic soil tend to contain significant amounts of potassium and phosphorus with trace elements, like sulfur and magnesium. It's fairly easy to add nitrogen.

For the same reason, the Pecos River Valley has rich soils 

Pecans are popular crops in the area. So are pistachios. We have a pistachio tree in our year that bears voluminously in the spring.

Surprisingly, one of the largest producers of mozzarella cheese in the world is in Roswell. That's the Leprino Foods factory, established around 1996.

Of course, after the UFO crash in 1947, Roswell had another source of revenue.....aliens  Roswell is not at all an expensive vacation destination and it has gotten out that there are other reasons to visit here but you really can't forget the aliens.

Main Street is packed with hotels, motels, and places to eat....including some surprisingly good places to eat 

Aliens

Another reason to come to Roswell is to go to school. Both the New Mexico Military Institute and the Eastern New Mexico University, Roswell campus are here.

And, of course, Roswell is a considerable distance from anywhere, so people living here and in outlying areas across a wide range come here to shop.

What are the reasons for people to visit your area?

Roswell: Highway 285 to Berrendo Road - More about the people

 I haven't seen a Freedom Gallery since leaving the South but visiting Roswell Mall I see.....a Freedom Gallery, several displays on the wall of the gallery dedicated to local heroes and values.

I approve.

Elmer Davis was a journalist and Director of the United States Office of War Information during World War II.

The other quote is from British academic, jurist, historian, and Liberal politician, James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce. As British ambassador to the United States, he was very influential in liberal American politics and wrote The American Commonwealth in 1888.

As for religion, there are churches all over Roswell. I counted 85 on the church directory of the Roswell website. They're all Christian of some denomination. I've heard a lot of "God bless you" and "have a blessed day". And I've had some folks think I need help and offer it in a way that refers back to their religion.

On the other hand, the town doesn't shut down on Sunday.....things go on about the same as the rest of the week.

Churches here, the ones that I've seen are small to moderate sized. I haven't seen anything that could be called a megachurch.

Here are a couple in my home territory 

I know of one other church, a Baptist Church, between Pine Lodge Road and Berrendo Road.

What does Roswell think about itself.......or what does Roswell government think about itself........or, maybe, what does Roswell government want others to think about Roswell. I made a word cloud from the About Us page of the Roswell City website using wordclouds.com. This is what resulted.

The larger the word in the word cloud, the more prevalent the word is in the text.

"School" and "military" jump out. School is understandable. "Military" is too when one considers the importance of the New Mexico Military Institute. "Housing" and "home" also stand out.

What do the people in your community consider important? There are many ways to find out and you might want to look deeper into that 

Roswell: Highway 285 to Berrendo Road - The Land

 Roswell is situated in the northern region of the Chihuahuan desert. Roswell is on the Great Plains. Roswell is grasslands. Roswell isn't obviously karst but it's karst nevertheless  Roswell is flat but not perfectly so. Roswell is dry but Roswell is an oasis.

Roswell is at 33° 23' 39" N 104° 31' 22" W. Selma, Alabama, where I used to live is at coordinates  32° 24' 59", about one degree latitude difference. So why is the environment so different. Selma is forested..... Roswell is desert. We'll get to that later.

The city is at 3,615 feet altitude. People are surprised by that after seeing how flat it is around here 

The Pecos River flows 7 miles to the east of the city. The highlands that rise to Sierra Blanca begins about 40 miles to the west. The Rockies are about 70 miles to the west. In Denver, I had the requisite photo of the Rockies in my blogs. Here, it will be Sierra Blanco. 

The city has an area of 29.776 square miles (according to the United States Census Bureau). Chaves County, of which Roswell is the largest city, has 6,075 square miles. 

There are actually natural streams in Roswell. Some are dry now because the springs that fed them have been repurposed for industry and agriculture, but Spring River in South Roswell still flows (I think. I haven't made it that far yet.)

The land between Berrendo Road and Pine Lodge is primarily landscaped by Berrendo Creek and the Pecos River.

Pine Lodge from my house

It's flat around here. On my 1.7 mile walk into town, I get an elevation gain of 13 feet (according to measurements made by my AllTrails app.)

There is a blog discussing Berrendo Creek and I'll be posting a blog about Bitter Lakes Wildlife Refuge soon. That park is nestled beneath the Comanche Bluffs in the flood plains of the Pecos River  Berrendo Creek meets the Pecos River a little south of this section.

I say that the land is flat here but there is a little topography 

A draw on highway 285 North truck route north of my house.

Road cut on highway 285

The largest incline I'm aware of is the ravine that Berrendo Creek has cut through town, now dry, something between 20 and 30 feet deep.

Berrendo Creek 

Like the Denver area, the Chihuahuan desert was once an inland sea and many layers of sand, lime, and gypsum have been laid down to make up the rock under my feet. The ground outside looks like ceramic but is actually soft.

Desert soil

It is limestone, or at least dust blown in from limestone. That's evident when it's mixed with vinegar.

If you want to know if a substance contains a carbonate, just add acid. Vinegar is a weak acid but it will make calcite (calcium carbonate) fizz quite nicely, giving off carbon dioxide and leaving calcium acetate behind in solution. Dolomite (magnesium carbonate) may need a little warming to effervesce.

The main bedrocks in the area are limestone and shale but there have been a lot of diverse layers laid down over a long time. My primary source is the strategraphic column provided by the Rockd geology app. (Childs, O.E. (1985) Correlation of strategraphic units of North America, COSUNA.AAPG Bulletin 69:173-180).

The top layer is very recent Ogallala formation deposited by area streams. It's mostly sandstone and gravel. Beneath that is a later of volcanic material from 63 to 19 million years ago. We're just east of the Rio Grande Rift where North America tried to pull itself apart. There has been a lot of recent (geologically speaking) vulcanism in the area. That big mountain on the horizon, Sierra Blanca, is an extinct stratovolcano.

About a thousand meters down is the Grayberg and San Andreas formation limestones overlaid by about 300 meters of impermeable sandstone and shale. The limestone layer is interlaced with cracks that allow storage of a lot of groundwater. The shale cap keeps the water under pressure so that when it finds a channel to the surface it forms the many artesian springs in the area. It also feeds the Roswell water wells.

The Ogallala formation is also an aquifer but, here, it's recharge rate is slow and it can be emptied quickly. Most of Roswell's water comes from the deep aquifer. According to the city website, there are 20 deep wells that draw water up, chlorinates it, and distributes it out to the city. 

Roswell takes samples of treated wastewater daily, 60 samples a month, to test for bacterial contaminants and tests drinking water quarterly for chemical contaminants.

I bought a test kit (H2O OK Plus) to check our tap water. Most of the tests are on three test strips although the coliform test requires a tube of water plus reagent to sit a while.

The tests were easy and I was very happy with the results  

The water is hard but 247 parts per million is far below EPA requirements.

Hard water is water with high mineral content, usually calcium and magnesium carbonates. It happens when water is stored in a limestone or gypsum aquifer. Roswell's aquifer is mostly limestone but there is still plenty of gypsum and even some interesting evaporates.....minerals that form when landlocked lakes evaporate. They're touchy for mineral collectors because they tend to draw humidity out of the air and then dissolve in it.

Hard water might have some health benefits (except for kidney stones for people predisposed to it) but it can play havoc with pipes and laundry. Calcium carbonate tends to precipitate out in cakes. Also, the calcium ions will combine with the sodium stearate (soap) to firm an insoluble, slimy, scummy precipitate of calcium stearate. The best way to tell if the water from your tap is too hard is that you can't get soap to lather. We get scum but the soap will lather. And unlike some folks, I like the mouth feel of coffee creamer in hard water 

Roswell gets it's water from the deep aquifer but there are three major streams and a few intermittent tributaries that run through town. I explore Berrendo Creek in an earlier blog. Most of its length is usually dry but when it's wet, there's a flood.

I haven't seen the other two yet.....they are Spring River and Hondo Rio. All of these streams are tributaries of the Pacos River that flows 7 miles east of Main Street  I'll talk about the others when I get to explore them.

The Pacos River at Bitter Lakes 

Most of the natural water here is green. The green isn't pollution..... it's calcium. Here's another calcium loaded stream in Alabama 

Brushy Lake, Northwestern Alabama

The climate here is hot and dry with occasional cold (night and winter) and rare rain, which is sometimes devastatingly torrential.

My family moved down from Denver late in October of last year (2025). The days were warm and cool. It was a good time to move into the desert. The nights, as is normal year round, was cool. By December, the days were cooling down. The vegetation which plagued me on my trips to town for supplies was dying down to stubble. We had some cold days and one snow between January and March. I think it has rained three times since we moved, never hard. Wet ground evaporates quickly. The sunsets are always gorgeous given the capacity for the dry air to hold dust suspended and the frequent hard winds that whip it up. The skies are vast and blue.

The following is from the Wikipedia article about Roswell.

We have a cool, semi arid climate and four distinct seasons. Winter is cool and there is occasional snow that doesn't hang around long. Spring oscillates between warm and cool but there can be cold snaps.  There can be fierce winds. I clocked one gust last week at around 40 mph. I had to fight to walk against it. Summer is hot. Roswell experiences around 30 days out of the year above100° F. The North American monsoon season occurs during the summer and can bring torrential downpours and disastrous flash floods. The three streams that run through town can become raging rivers. The Berrendo ravine can fill up quickly.  Autumn brings relief. Things cool off although there can still be hot days, and snow is possible from October to March 

Since humidity is generally low and humidity causes changes to be more gradual, shade is considerably cooler than sun.

The record low: -24° F. (January 11, 1962, February 8, 1933)

The record high: 114°F. (June 27, 1994)

But the ground is that pretty cream color with glossy ground cover.....high albedo! This is a solar furnace. Hot anywhere else is HOT here.

So, the weather report for today (I'm taking a day off!):

Air Quality Index is fair at 45

No precipitation expected

Wind at 5.9 miles per hour from the west (prevailing winds here are mild breezes from the mountains (west) and brutal winds from the south in the leading edges of fronts and from the north after the front passes - beware the tumbleweeds. They're cute but vicious!

Ultraviolet index is high ( as usual, at altitude, there isn't a lot of filtering from the atmosphere)

Humidity is 17%

Barometric pressure is 30.17 inches of mercury. (About 1.02 bar, practically sea level.)

Why is Roswell so different from Selma? 

The strip of land bordering the Rocky Mountains to the east used to be a vast, shallow inland sea. Over millions of years, plankton died, sank to the bottom, and left a thick layer (several thick layers, actually, interspersed with mud) of their calcium carbonate skeletons and shells. That turned into limestone....highly reflective limestone that baked and efficiently reflected heat back up into the air when the sea dried up 

But more importantly, New Mexico is in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains. As humid air flows in from the Pacific Ocean, it rises up over the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Rockies into cooler heights where most of the humidity precipitates out. This is the air that Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Mexico gets. The eastern United States gets humidity pumped in constantly from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. It's dry and there's nothing to buffer the heat 

So my journey to adapt to desert life continues. This Arctic wolf is going to have fun. It's not like I can lock myself in an air conditioned house and never come out. My heart condition requires real activity.

Well, adventure might be painful, but it's fun. No pain.....no gain!

:)

So.....land, air, and water. It's where you live. How is your world? What kind of rock is under your feet? Is there plentiful water or is it dry? Are there caves near you? That's a part of karst geology. Do you have seasons or is it summer one day and.....suddenly winter! Have you tested the water from your tap? Water testing kits are easy to come by, usually from local hardware or home supply stores.