WORLD'S MOST AWESOME NATURAL PHENOMENA

My previous post wrote about one of the most beautiful events to occur in our world, the Aurora, also known as the Northern Lights. It is however not the only natural phenomenon; they are others that deserve equal mention. We may never witness them with our own eyes or in our life time, but there are written reports, pictures and videos that can help us learn about these awesome occurrences.

The following natural phenomena represent a compilation from different sources and is not meant to be ranked in the order listed.

1. PINK AND WHITE TERRACES

New Zealand’s Pink and White Terraces, were considered a natural wonder until they were destroyed by a violent volcanic eruption in 1886. The Pink and White terraces have been dubbed by a number of people as “The Eighth Wonder of the World”. Unfortunately they were completely destroyed by a volcanic eruption on the 10th June 1886, at 3:00 am by Mt Tarawera, which violently erupted, belching out hot mud, red hot boulders and immense clouds of black ash. Several hours later, the bed of Lake Rotomahana blew out, burying the Maori villages of Moura and Te Ariki under a deep layer of liquid mud, stones and ash. The Mount Tarawera eruption was New Zealand’s most violent and destructive volcanic eruption in recent history. Mount Tarawera is 30 kilometres from Rotorua amidst the North Island’s volcanic-thermal region. This eruption caused approximately 153 deaths.

2. CAVE OF THE CRYSTALS

Cave of the Crystals or Giant Crystal Cave is a cave connected to the Naica Mine 300 metres deep in Chihuahua, Mexico. The main chamber contains giant selenite crystals, some of the largest natural crystals ever found. The cave’s largest crystal found to date is 11 m in length, 4 m in diameter and 55 tons in weight. The cave is 27 m in length and 9 m in width. The cave is extremely hot with air temperatures reaching up to 58°C with 90 to 100 percent humidity. The cave is relatively unexplored due to the extreme temperatures and high humidity. Without proper protection people can only endure approximately ten minutes of exposure at a time.

3. CATATUMBO LIGHTNING

The Catatumbo Lightning is an atmospheric phenomenon in Venezuela. It occurs strictly in an area located over the mouth of the Catatumbo River where it empties into Maracaibo Lake. The frequent, powerful flashes of lightning over this relatively small area are considered by some to be the world’s largest single generator of tropospheric ozone. It originates from a mass of storm clouds that create a voltaic arc at more than 5 km of height, during 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours per day and up to 280 times per hour. It occurs over and around Lake Maracaibo, typically over a bog area that forms where the Catatumbo River flows into the Venezuelan lake.

After appearing continually for centuries, the lightning was not seen for several months in January – April 2010, apparently due to a drought, raising fears that it may have been extinguished permanently.

4. LIGHT PILLARS

A light pillar is a visual phenomenon created by the reflection of light from ice crystals with near horizontal parallel planar surfaces. The light can come from the sun (usually at or low to the horizon) in which case the phenomenon is called a sun pillar or solar pillar. It can also come from the moon or from terrestrial sources such as streetlights.

5. THE MAELSTROM

When you hear a name like maelstrom, you just know it’s about something wicked. Introduced in English by Edgar Allan Poe from the Nordic languages, from which it came from the Dutch word maelstrom (maalstroom in modern spelling), it literally means crushing current, which is quite a very good description.

Digital representation of a maelstrom

A maelstom is basically a very big and powerful whirlpool, a free vortex; a free vortex with quite a downdraft. The original maelstrom was Moskstraumen, which is caused by a very powerful tidal current. Both Poe and Jules Verne depict it as a giant vortex that leads to the bottom of the ocean where it is in fact a crossroad of underwater currents. Well.. they were a bit off, but still, it’s quite a view to catch.

6. FIRE RAINBOW

The term ‘fire rainbow’ is really misleading; the correct term is circumhorizon arc. It’s basically an ice halo formed by ice crystals located very high, in the cirrus clouds. This huge flamboyant lovely display of colours is really not as rare as you might think, and how often it appears depends mostly on location, and especially latitude. For example, in the US it can be seen several times a summer in each year in the same place, but in Central or Northern Europe it’s very rare.

Of course, this rainbow is not formed the way ‘classic’ rainbows are formed. Light passes through the hexagonal ice crystals via a vertical side and leaves through the nearest horizontal bottom face. If there alignment is just right, it makes the whole cloud shine rainbow-coloured.

7. WATERSPOUTS

Waterspouts seem to be taken out of the Captain Planet series. You know, earth, wind, fire, all that? Well, here it’s all about wind and water actually, because a waterspout is in fact a really intense columnar vortex that takes place over a mass of water and links it to a cumuliform cloud.

Most of the time, they are weaker than land tornadoes, but some are extremely big and bring the water upward with immense speed and power.

They can actually be tornadic or non-tornadic. The non-tornadic ones are way more common and less dangerous with winds being slower than 70 mph (30 m/s). Tornadic waterspouts are similar at their core to a tornado, but they add huge masses of water to the show, making it a scenery hard to forget.

The even rarer ‘cousin’ of the waterspout is the snowspout (or icespout). They are basically a very rare form of waterspouts that form at the base of a snow squall. There have only been six (!) pictures taken of such an event, so there’s not really much we can give you here.

8. MOERAKI BOULDERS

The Moeraki Boulders are a number of huge spherical stones, found strewn along a stretch of Koekohe Beach near Moeraki, a small settlement just south of Hampden on New Zealand’s Otago coast. These boulders are grey-coloured septarian concretions which have been exposed through shoreline erosion from black mudstone coastal cliffs that back the beach. They originally formed in ancient sea floor sediments during the early Paleocene some 60 million years ago. The boulders weigh several tonnes and are up to three metres in diameter.

9. SUN DOGS

A sun dog or sundog is an atmospheric phenomenon that creates bright spots of light in the sky, often on a luminous ring or halo on either side of the sun. Sundogs may appear as a coloured patch of light to the left or right of the sun, 22° distant and at the same distance above the horizon as the sun, and in ice halos. They can be seen anywhere in the world during any season, but they are not always obvious or bright. Sundogs are best seen and are most conspicuous when the sun is low.

10. COLUMNAR BASALT

Giant lava flows covered much of Eastern Washington and parts of Idaho and Oregon 17 to 12 million years ago. Unlike volcanic eruptions such as Mt. St. Helens, lava erupted out of cracks in the earth’s crust and flowed for long distances. This type of volcano is called a basalt flood. It is estimated that around 300 floods occurred on the Columbia Plateau. The basalt cooled from the top of the lava flow, and also from the bottom up. As the basalt cooled it shrunk 5 to 10 percent and cracked, forming columns. As the basalt crystallized the cracks grew, but the bottom cracks did not match those at the top and created an area between the cooling layers that is chaotic compared to the uniform top and bottom layers. The in-between layer is called the entablature. The long columns that are obvious in the photo to the left is the lower portion of a basalt flow; the upper columns of this flow have been subjected to significant erosion, and only the entablature between the layers remains.

11. RED TIDES

Red tide is a naturally-occurring, higher-than-normal concentration of the microscopic algae Karenia brevis. This organism produces a toxin that affects the central nervous system of fish so that they are paralyzed and cannot breathe. As a result, red tide blooms often result in dead fish washing up on Gulf beaches. When red tide algae reproduce in dense concentrations or “blooms,” they are visible as discoloured patches of ocean water, often reddish in colour. Red tide is a natural phenomenon not caused by human beings. When temperature, salinity, and nutrients reach certain levels, a massive increase in Karenia brevis algae occurs. No one knows the exact combination of factors that causes red tide, but some experts believe high temperatures combined with a lack of wind and rainfall are usually at the root of red tide blooms.

12. SUPERCELLS

Supercells are rotating updrafts within severe thunderstorms; they’re big, and bloody scary.

They can appear anywhere in the world given the right meteorological conditions, but most of the times they appear in the Great Plains of the US, last generally 2-3 hours and they sometimes split in 2, with the two resulting storms going in opposite directions.

The supercells usually produce huge amounts of hail, torrential rainfall, strong winds, and substantial downbursts and they are often carriers of giant hail. There are a whole lot of technical details left to be said, but I’m not gonna stress that here (maybe in a future post), find the anatomy of a supercell here. Scientists have given quite an interest in supercells, because, as you could have guessed from the pictures, they’re really dangerous. Really.

13. THE HONDURAN RAIN OF FISH

Oh this one’s good. We’ve all probably heard about this in one form of another, but most just chalk it up to folklore. Well, this isn’t the case! The department of Yoro is host of one of the most bizarre and amazing phenomena to ever take place: the rain of fish, that takes place every year for more than a century now.

Each year, between the months of May and July a dark clouds appears in the sky, followed by a massive thunderstorm, it rains a lot, the whole nine yards. It all lasts 2-3 hours, at the end of which people go out on the street where they find hundreds of living fish on the ground; yeah, they eat them.

There aren’t any clear conclusions, but a theory that’s accepted sometimes is that the strong winds and waterspouts take the fish from 200 km away. However, a significant number of scientists claim they are not sea water fish, but fresh water fish that swim from a nearby river to an underwater current, and some fish stray from the current and appear on the ground. But here’s the good part: National Geographic sent a team to investigate this, and they found that the fish aren’t found in any surrounding bodies of water, and also they’re all blind, so they came up with their own theory: they live in underground rivers, because they are blind. Anyway, if you ever visit Honduras in the summer, this is something you really should see.

14. MOONBOWS

We’ve all (probably) seen rainbows, at day. But how many of us have seen rainbows at night? Yeah, this can actually happen, due to the light produced by the moon (thus moonbow, or lunar rainbow or white rainbow). Of course the light emitted by the moon is much much fainter than that of the sun, so as a result, so is the formed rainbow; most of the time, it’s even hard for the human eye to separate the colours there.

The biggest chance you have of ever seeing a moonbow is when the moon is full (or near to full), when it’s the brightest, but there are other conditions required. The sky has to be very dark (close to black), and, of course, there must bee rain falling opposite to the moon.

15. PENITENTES

These sharp ice spikes can only be found at high altitudes. Ice (or snow) formations that take the form of blades or spikes varying from a few centimetres to 2 meters (or even more) have fascinated researchers since Darwin’s time, as he was the first to ever describe them.

He had to squeeze his way through such a field and was the first to notice they generally follow the direction of the sun? But how are they formed? The mechanism of their ‘birth’ is a bit complicated, and it relies on differential ablation. Basically, for penitentes to form, the dew point has to be below freezing. As a result, the snow will sublimate, which requires more energy than melting. The geometry of the surface provides a positive feedback mechanism for radiation, which is trapped by multiple reflections, creating hollows. These hollows, combined with wind that increases the dew point temperatures provide the right conditions for the sublimation to create the steep walls and peaks.

16. ICE CIRCLES

Ice Circles are pretty much what you’d expect from them.

However, they’re very rare, appearing only in slow moving waters from cold climates such as Northern Europe or America, but some have also been spotted in Britain, including a huge one bigger than 3 meters. There are two types of ice circles. Here’s the general necessary conditions for the first type to form.

No rain and temperatures below 0 Celsius for several days near a slow river bend. Thus, the water creates a force that is called ‘rotational shear’ and breaks a chunk of ice, twisting it around and grinding it to the surrounding ice, turning it into a perfect circle.

The second type is perhaps even more spectacular. Also called ice pans, these formations are basically surface slabs of ice that form in the middle of the river, and not on its side. They’re explained by sudden shifts of temperature. As the water cools off, it gives away heat that creates frazil ice (randomly oriented ice needles loose in the water). These ice particles can of course form an ice pan, and if the lake has enough frazil ice and the current is slow enough, the ice pan can reach the sizes that baffle people and even become a hanging dam.

Source: YouTube

17. MAMMATUS CLOUDS

Also known as mammatocumulus, meaning "bumpy clouds", they are a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud. Composed primarily of ice, Mammatus Clouds can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction, while individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system.

18. 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.

19. FIRE WHIRLS

A fire whirl, also known as fire devil or fire tornado, is a rare phenomenon in which a fire, under certain conditions - depending on air temperature and currents - acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. Fire whirls often occur during bush fires. Vertical rotating columns of fire form when the air currents and temperature are just right, creating a tornado-like effect. They can be as high as 30 to 200 ft tall and up to 10 ft wide but only last a few minutes, although some can last for longer if the winds are strong.

20. GRAVITY WAVES

The undulating pattern of a Gravity Wave is caused by air displaced in the vertical plain, usually as a result of updrafts coming off the mountains or during thunderstorms. A wave pattern will only be generated when the updraft air is forced into a stable air pocket. The upward momentum of the draft triggers into the air pocket causes changes in the atmosphere, altering the fluid dynamics. Nature then tries to restore the fluid changes within the atmosphere, which present in a visible oscillating pattern within the cloud. (Photo by: NASA)

21. HUMS

Source: YouTube

"The Hum" is the common name of a series of phenomena involving a persistent and invasive low-frequency humming noise not audible to all people. Hums have been reported in various geographical locations. In some cases a source has been located. A well-known case was reported in Taos, New Mexico, and thus the Hum is sometimes called the Taos Hum. They have been reported all over the world, especially in Europe: a Hum on the Big Island of Hawaii, typically related to volcanic action, is heard in locations dozens of miles apart. The Hum is most often described as sounding somewhat like a distant idling diesel engine. Difficult to detect with microphones, its source and nature are unknown.

Source:
1. Top 10 Awesome Natural Phenomenon In The World
2. 8 totally awesome natural phenomena you probably didn’t know about
3. 10 Most Fascinating Natural Phenomena