Here’s a very average photograph of the forest floor in Panama. Do you notice anything out of the ordinary? There is a splash of red color towards the bottom left of the image – look closer. This is the midsection of a coral snake (Micrurus sp.), a species which moves underneath the leaf litter and…

I took my third trip through the Panama Canal earlier this week. Our lab is here for research, so we are heavily laden with equipment and materials for tree measurements. Here you can see us wrestling our luggage onto a small boat in Gamboa, preparing for our journey through the canal Our boat navigated past…

From the foothills of Tucson, Arizona, a 4200 foot climb will bring you to the summit of Mt. Kimball. From the peak there are good views to the north and east of Cathedral Rock, looming over the Wilderness of Rocks, and further still, the steep south face of Mt. Lemmon. But look to the west,…

The world we think of as the earth is a very small fragment of its true extent. Vegetation and oceans sit at the top, a thin layer over a deep bed of solid rock that itself becomes molten and penetrates thousands of kilometers further down. Rarely do we get to experience this subterranean world, though…