Mysterious wonders of the world

WebEcoist And Environmental Oddities

The 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 proceed 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.

The Sailing Stones

Columnar Basalt

When a thick 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 example is the Giant’s Causeway on the coast of Ireland (Shown below), though the larget and most widely recognized would be Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.

Basalt also forms different but equally fascinating ways when eruptions are exposed to air or water

Columnar Basalt

Blue Holes

Blue Holes are giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation that get their name from the dark and foreboding blue tome they exhibit when viewed from above in relationship to surronding waters.

They can be hundreds of feet deep and while divers 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.

Blue Holes

Red Tides

Red Tides are also known as algal blooms – sudden influxes of massive amounts of colored single – cell alage 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.

Red Tides

Ice Circles

While many see these apparently perfect ice circles as worthy of conspirancy 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 below.

Ice Circles

Mammatus Clouds

True to their ominous apperance, 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 visibly static for tne to fifteen minutes at a time.

While they may appear foreboding ther are merely messengers – appearing  around, before or even after severe weather.

Mammatus Clouds

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 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.

Fire Rainbows

Sink Holes

Sink Holes are one of the world’s scariest natural phenomena.

Over Time, water erodes the soil under the planet’s surface until in some cases, quite suddenly, the land above gives way and collapses into the earth.

many Sink holes occue naturally while others are the result of human intervention.

Displacing groundwatre can open cavities while broken pipes can erode otherwise stable subterranean sediments.

urbam sink holes, up tp hundreds of feet deep have formed and comsumed parts of city blocks, side walks and even entire buildings.

Sink Holes

Penitentes

Named after peak-hooded New Mexican Monks (lower right),  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 have ‘mountains’ in their wake.

strangely, these formations ultimately slow the melting process as the peaks case, shadows on the deeper surfaces below and allow for winds to blow over the peaks, cooling them.

Penitentes

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 motor less flyer to high elevations.

Their shape is quite often mistaken for a mystreious flying object or the artifical cover for one.

Generally, Lenticular Clouds are formed as wind speeds up while moving around a large land object such as mountain.

Lenticular Clouds

Light Pillars

Light Pillars appear as eerily upright luminious 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 artifical ground sources such as street or park lights.

Despite their apperance as near – solid columns of light, the effect is entirely created by our own relative viewpoint.

Light Pillars

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 these planets’ perspectives.

Sundogs have been speculated about and discussed since ancient times and written records decribing the various attributes of our sun date back the Egyptians and Greeks.

Sundogs

Fire Whirls

Fire Whirls (also known as Fire Devils or Tornadoes) appear in or around raging fires when the right combination of climatic conditions is present.

Fire Whirls can be spawned by other natural events such as earthquakes and thunderstorms, and can be incredidbly dangerous, in some cases spinning well out of the zone of a fire itself to case 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.

Fire Whirls

Orange Moons

This last phenomena is something most people have seen before – beautifuly 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 bottom most image is true to the hues of the moon but has enhanced colors to more clearly show the differences in shade that illustratre the mixed topography and minerology that tell the story of the moon’s 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.

Orange Moons