If I must have a title, make it some pithy comment about the Yukon's Menstruation, I suppose.

August 18, 2008 2:02 AM

What is this? 60°24'37.66"N 130°48'59.78"W. View it in satellite on Google Maps or Earth.

This has been bugging me for a couple of months. Forest fire? Maybe. But it seems to go much higher than the tree line (yeah, I get that the heat could possibly distort the sat pic) and shows up in a few sources (though, this area is probably not photographed much). I'm sure its not beetle kill. Might it be a huge copper deposit or some such?

posted by converge to Science & Nature (15 answers total)

Here is a Google Maps link to the spot coverage is talking about.
posted by rongorongo at 2:15 AM on August 18, 2008

Fire weed? Or color distortion.
posted by hjo3 at 2:21 AM on August 18, 2008

Don't have an answer, but these are all over the Yukon, Northwest Territory, and Alaska if you zoom out from your location and look for similar red splotches at the same latitudes. Fireweed is also the floral emblem of Yukon.
posted by mdonley at 2:28 AM on August 18, 2008

Best answer: Hey I know this one! I believe it to be a forest fire scar. This even backs it up!
I analyzed satellite imagery at my last job
posted by troika at 3:20 AM on August 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

Thankfully, satellite imagery doesn't require periods at the end of sentences.
posted by troika at 3:21 AM on August 18, 2008

I seriously doubt it is fireweed. More likely it is forest fire, and the colour is false/distorted in the low-res views. Compare this area which has the grey look of dead trees -- then zoom out and when it flips to low-res it is that orangey colour.

There is a slight chance it might be pine beetle kill rather than fire but I don't recall much beetle that far north, yet.
posted by Rumple at 7:44 AM on August 18, 2008

that is fire retardant as dropped by an aircraft.
posted by krautland at 8:24 AM on August 18, 2008

"that is fire retardant as dropped by an aircraft."

8 square miles of it?
posted by 517 at 9:41 AM on August 18, 2008

Peat bogs show up like that (similar colouration in Ireland).
posted by Iteki at 12:22 PM on August 18, 2008

I'm pretty certain it's iron rich soil. Yukon geology seems to be mostly comprised of all sorts of chunks of various accreted rocks, which is why it's such a mining El Dorado. So far, none of the geologic maps I've found online have wanted to open for me, or are too complicated to easily understand.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:30 PM on August 18, 2008

Response by poster: I think troika's right. Find it odd the scar would show up as red, though (think it'd be black). Fire scars don't look anything like that on the ground, especially in the mountains. But examining others from the Yukon, BC, and Alberta (like the ones nearish to Slave Lake), they are clearly red. Thanks guys.
posted by converge at 4:45 PM on August 18, 2008

Response by poster: So, if you don't mind, what's this grey, huge highway-looking mark across Lake Baikal?
posted by converge at 4:55 PM on August 18, 2008

Best answer: The thing on Baikal looks like an image artifact: a place where two satellite sweeps should have overlapped, but didn't, so there's a strip with no data. The way it peters out in the mountains to the east and the lake to the west doesn't look like a picture of anything physical.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:37 PM on August 18, 2008

Seconding fantabulous timewaster - that's definitely an error in processing, not something on the ground.
posted by troika at 5:07 AM on August 19, 2008

8 square miles of it?

possible. tanker 910 is quite capable and making a few drops within a day is not unheard of.
posted by krautland at 1:38 PM on August 19, 2008