When Brigham Young and his wagontrain full of underage brides arrived at the west edge of the Wasatch Mountains, he arrived at a unique strip of land with tall Rockies to the east and a big smelly lake to the west. He proclaimed, "This is the place!" and settled, to the chagrin of us alcohol abusers ever since.
This is where I live. The unique geography causes what is called an "inversion layer" when conditions are right: No wind, cold, with hot air above. The pollution starts collecting, has nowhere to go, and at times (as in, right now) the SLC valley is the most polluted area of the country. Know what it smells like when you walk thru a vehicle's exhaust? That's what it smelled like, stepping out my door yesterday:
Yeah, the bottom of that haze is the Salt Lake City valley. LA is covered with "smog", which is a mix of smoke and fog; we rarely have fog here, that's pure smoke/pollution. This shot was taken from the easterly Wasatch Mountains, towards SLC and the Great Salt Lake, with the Oquirre Mountains in the background.
Okay, last night around 9:00, there was a huge boom and several aftershocks that shook the windows of my house. This morning everyone was talking about it at work, but no news source could tell us what'd happened. Hill AFB, with its big munitions depot, has an accident every so often and that's shaken my house before, but nothing last night. Thiokol (where I worked two years on the Space Shuttle boosters), 75 miles to the NW, also didn't report any accidents (and I've felt at least one from there in the past, too).
They finally figured it out this afternoon. A B-52 bomber did a practice run at the Utah Test & Training Range (UTTR), 150 miles from here, and because of the odd way the inversion layer bends/reflects sound waves, the concussion reached us with a lot of force (the aftershocks were reflections/echoes from the mountains). Wow!
This is where I live. The unique geography causes what is called an "inversion layer" when conditions are right: No wind, cold, with hot air above. The pollution starts collecting, has nowhere to go, and at times (as in, right now) the SLC valley is the most polluted area of the country. Know what it smells like when you walk thru a vehicle's exhaust? That's what it smelled like, stepping out my door yesterday:
Yeah, the bottom of that haze is the Salt Lake City valley. LA is covered with "smog", which is a mix of smoke and fog; we rarely have fog here, that's pure smoke/pollution. This shot was taken from the easterly Wasatch Mountains, towards SLC and the Great Salt Lake, with the Oquirre Mountains in the background.
Okay, last night around 9:00, there was a huge boom and several aftershocks that shook the windows of my house. This morning everyone was talking about it at work, but no news source could tell us what'd happened. Hill AFB, with its big munitions depot, has an accident every so often and that's shaken my house before, but nothing last night. Thiokol (where I worked two years on the Space Shuttle boosters), 75 miles to the NW, also didn't report any accidents (and I've felt at least one from there in the past, too).
They finally figured it out this afternoon. A B-52 bomber did a practice run at the Utah Test & Training Range (UTTR), 150 miles from here, and because of the odd way the inversion layer bends/reflects sound waves, the concussion reached us with a lot of force (the aftershocks were reflections/echoes from the mountains). Wow!
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was it bombs going off that echoed or was just the sound of the engines?
