Phenomenal Wonders Of The Natural World
WebEcoist and Environmental Oddities
Sailing Stones
The mysterious moving stones of the packed-mud desert of Death Valley
have been a center of scientific controversy for decades.
Rocks weighing up to hundreds of pounds have been known to move up to
hundreds of yards at a time.
Some scientists have proposed that a combination of strong winds and
surface ice account for these movements.
However, this theory does not explain evidence of different rocks starting
side by side and moving at different rates and in disparate directions.
Moreover, the physics calculations do not fully support this theory
as wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour
would be needed to move some of the stones..
Columnar Basalt
When a thick lava flow cools, it contracts vertically but cracks
perpendicular to its directional flow with remarkable geometric regularity
- in most cases forming a regular grid of remarkable hexagonal extrusions
that almost appear to be made by man.
One of the most famous such examples is the Giants Causeway on the coast
of Ireland (shown above), though the largest and most widely recognized
would be Devils Tower in Wyoming.
Basalt also forms different but equally fascinating ways when eruptions
are exposed to air or water.
Blue Holes
Blue holes are giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation that
gettheir name from the dark and foreboding blue tone they exhibit
when viewed from above in relationship to surrounding waters.
They can be hundreds of feet deep and while divers are able to explore
some of them they are largely devoid of oxygen that would support sea life
due to poor water circulation - leaving them eerily empty.
Some blue holes, however, contain ancient fossil remains that have been
discovered, preserved in their depths.
Red Tides
Red tides are also known as algal blooms - sudden influxes of massive
amounts of colored single-cell algae that can convert entire areas of an ocean
or beach into a blood red color.
While some of these can be relatively harmless, others can be harbingers
of deadly toxins that cause the deaths of fish, birds and marine mammals.
In some cases, even humans have been harmed by red tides though no human
exposure are known to have been fatal.
While they can be fatal, the constituent phytoplankton in ride tides are
not harmful in small numbers.
Ice Circles
While many see these apparently perfect ice circles as worthy of
conspiracy theorizing, scientists generally accept that they are formed by eddies in
the water that spin a sizable piece of ice in a circular motion.
As a result of this rotation, other pieces of ice and flotsam wear
relatively evenly at the edges of the ice until it slowly forms into an
essentially ideal circle.
Ice circles have been seen with diameters of over 500 feet and can also at
times be found in clusters and groups of different sizes as shown above.
Mammatus Clouds
True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of
a coming storm or other extreme weather system.
Typically composed primarily of ice, they can extend for hundreds of miles
in each direction and individual formations can remain visibly static for
ten to fifteen minutes at a time.
While they may appear foreboding they are merely the messengers -
appearing around, before or even after severe weather.
Fire Rainbows
A circumhorizontal fire rainbow arc occurs at a rare confluence of right
time and right place for the sun and certain clouds.
Crystals within the clouds refract light into the various visible waves of
the spectrum but only if they are arrayed correctly relative to the ground
below.
Due to the rarity with which all of these events happen in conjunction
with one another, there are relatively few remarkable photos of this
phenomena.
Sinkholes
Sinkholes are one of the worlds scariest natural phenomena.
Over time, water erodes the soil under the planets surface until in some
cases, quite suddenly,the land above gives way and collapses into the
earth.
Many sinkholes occur naturally while others are the result of human
intervention.
Displacing groundwater can open cavities while broken pipes can erode
otherwise stable subterranean sediments.
Urban sinkholes, up to hundreds of feet deep have formed and consumed
parts of city blocks, sidewalks and even entire buildings.
Penitentes
Named after peak-hooded New Mexican monks (lower right above), penitentes
are dazzling naturally-forming ice blades that stick up at sharp angles
toward the sun.
Rarely found except at high altitudes, they can grow up taller than a
human and form in vast fields.
As ice melts in particular patterns, valleys formed by initial melts leave
mountains in their wake.
Strangely, these formations ultimately slow the melting process as the
peaks cast shadows on the deeper surfaces below and allow for winds to blow
over the peaks, cooling them.
Lenticular Clouds
Ever wonder the truth about UFOs?
Avoided by traditional pilots but loved by sailplane aviators, lenticular
clouds are masses of cloud with strong internal uplift that can drive a
motorless flyer to high elevations.
Their shape is quite often mistaken for a mysterious flying object or the
artificial cover for one.
Generally, lenticular clouds are formed as wind speeds up while moving
around a large land object such as a mountain..
Light Pillars
Light pillars appear as eerily upright luminous columns in the sky,
beacons cast into the air above without an apparent source.
These are visible when light reflects just right off of ice crystals from
either the sun (as in the two top images above) or from artificial ground
sources such as street or park lights.
Despite their appearance as near-solid columns of light, the effect is
entirely created by our own relative viewpoint.
Sundogs
Like light pillars, sundogs are the product of light passing through
crystals.
The particular shape and orientation of the crystals can have a drastic
visual impact for the viewer, producing a longer tail and changing the range
of colors one sees.
The relative height of the sun in the sky shifts the distance the sundogs
appear to be on either side of the sun.
Varying climactic conditions on other planets in our solar system produce
halos with up to four sundogs from those planets perspectives.
Sundogs have been speculated about and discussed since ancient times and
written records describing the various attributes of our sun date back the
Egyptians and Greeks.
Fire Whirls
Fire whirls (also known as fire devils or tornadoes) appear in or around
raging fires when the right combination of climactic conditions is present.
Fire whirls can be spawned by other natural events such as earthquakes and
thunderstorms, and can be incredibly dangerous, in some cases spinning
well out of the zone of a fire itself to cause devastation and death in a
radius not even reached by heat or flame.
Fire whirls have been known to be nearly a mile high, have wind speeds of
over 100 miles per hour and to last for 20 or more minutes.
Orange Moons
This last phenomena is something most people have seen before
- beautiful orange moon hanging low in the sky.
But what causes this phenomena
- and, for that matter, does the moon have a color at all?
When the moon appears lower on the horizon,rays of light bouncing off it
have to pass through a great deal more of our atmosphere which slowly
strips away everything but yellows, oranges and reds.
The bottommost image above is true to the hues of the moon but has
enhanced colors to more clearly show the differences in shade that illustrate the
mixed topography and minerology that tell the story of the moons surface.
Looking at the colors in combination with the craters one can start to
trace the history of impacts and consequent material movements across the face
of our mysterious moon.
