What occurrence would you call rare?
A one in a million chance?
A once in a lifetime moment?
Nah, that’s child’s play!
What about something that happened only once or twice in history?
That’s a challenge worthy of a true wonder seeker.
So check out my list: 1) The Mississippi running backward
Starting with something not quite as rare as you might think, let’s examine one of
the most famous rivers in the US.
This fame comes from the sheer size and power of the Mighty Mississippi.
It goes through 10 states and more than 900,000 gallons of water pass through it every second.
Rivers can’t naturally turn back at all!
Well, it looks like they can, and even the Mississippi River has been spotted running
backward not once, but three times.
The first time it happened, in 1812, the river stood still and then went backward because
of a so-called ‘fluvial tsunami’, which originated from an earthquake nearby.
The other two times were relatively recent, in 2005 and 2012, the Mississippi turned its
flow back because of monstrous hurricanes.
The 2nd one, caused by Hurricane Isaac, made it go backward for 24 hours at an even faster
pace than usual.
2) Catching a real-life Kraken Once a horror from ancient myths and legends,
this colossal creature is no longer part of a dream world, but a fact of reality.
Some time ago, even its lesser sibling, the giant squid, was nothing more than just a
tale you’d hear about from an old sailor or fishermen.
But since more and more giant-sized beaks were found in the stomachs of sperm whales
known to fight and eat these huge creatures, scientists considered giant and colossal squids
to be a real deal.
Yet, until 2007 there was no other evidence of their existence except beaks.
On February 22nd, 2007, fishermen on the San Aspiring ship became the first and only to
capture a thousand pound squid alive.
They were able to catch the sea monster in nets and freeze it for further study.
Funny thing is that this colossal squid appeared to be a small one, even at 15 feet total length.
The beaks that were found before were much larger than its beak, so we can assume for
sure that the mythical Kraken is out there somewhere in the deep.
Oh let’s go on a cruise!
3) Going to the borders of the Solar System and beyond
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are two of the greatest achievements in any space programs ever conducted
on the Earth.
Both of these spacecraft are research vessels aimed at going as far out in our Solar System
as they can, (far out!) and the results are stunning.
Voyager 1 is the first space probe to go beyond the borders of our sun’s magnetic field
and gravity pull.
And the following one, Voyager 2, was the first to pass by the farthest planets we know
to exist in our proximity – the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.
Voyager 2 discovered 11 moons around Uranus that were never seen before.
It also took a close look at its rings and the higher layers of its atmosphere.
Three years later, in 1989, it also found rings and 6 new moons around Neptune.
Now the probe is in interstellar space and its mission is finally accomplished.
We’ll keep receiving weak radio signals from Voyager 2 until 2020, and then it’ll
fly towards other stars on its own.
4) River Piracy Stealing is bad enough as it is, but stealing
a whole river with all of its water which is crucial for the environment – that’s
some super-villain level of crime here!
Good thing it happened only once for as long as humanity can remember, and it wasn’t
actually an intentional action.
Instead, it was the result of the Kaskawulsh Glacier in Canada melting, opening a way for
water to go on a course from the Slims River to the flow of the Alsek River.
It took only 4 days in 2016 for the Slims River to almost completely dry out because
of this event, which is certainly one of the rarest occurrences ever.
5) The ‘Wow!’
Signal Let’s face it, if there’s one unique event
we’d all want to witness, it’s to meet some real aliens!
Unfortunately, we’re as far from this moment as ever; we still haven’t found any tangible
proof of their existence.
Except for one single moment in our history.
On August 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman was going through his normal routine at the
Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University.
But then he caught a strange radio-sequence in a usually unintelligible wall of radio
noise.
But this signal was 72-seconds long, and powerful.
It provided no information, and scientists couldn’t decode anything, but the source
of the signal was never figured out.
One thing is for sure: it has no natural explanation, nor can it be explained as a part of human
interaction or a malfunction of a radio telescope.
This is the only probable clue we ever got that points to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations.
6) Tunguska Meteorite Explosion Meteorites didn’t just fall to the Earth
once or twice.
We all know how it went with the dinosaurs, I guess.
But this one is really special because it happened not so long ago and in close range
to human settlements.
On June 30th, 1908, in Russia’s Central Siberia, an object went through the atmosphere
of the planet and then exploded right over the tops of the trees.
The echo was heard over 500mi away from the explosion itself, which wiped out more than
800mi2 of the forest.
Strangely enough, there was no crater and no other major destruction caused by this
event.
It left scientists scratching their heads over the question of what this meteor really
was.
7) Niagara Falls dried out The crown of American Falls may well be a
symbol of reliance.
Other nearby waterfalls go frozen or dry regularly, but finding one day that Niagara Falls itself
was gone, was probably the scariest event in someone’s life.
No wonder this image gave birth to quite a few superstitions and prophecies about the
end of the world happening in the near future.
It happened in 1848, when a particularly powerful ice-cold wind led to a build-up of snow and
ice up the river from Niagara Falls.
This eventually led to the formation of a huge ice dam that blocked the water entirely
for a little more than a day and left the riverbed dry.
In 1964, an ice boom was installed in Lake Erie to prevent something like that from happening
again, so we can be sure that this was the one and only time Niagara Falls would ever
dry out.
8) The Carrington Event Auroras, also called northern lights, are
a miracle specific to only the Northern regions of the world, except on the 1st day of September
1859.
That day, auroras of all shapes, sizes, and colors filled the sky in half of the world,
going as far south as Jamaica, Hawaii, and Cuba.
The first to witness it, and theorize about why this happened, was astronomer Richard
Carrington.
He was inspecting sunspots on the surface of the sun and noticed two big spots that
produced an immense light.
He suggested that those spots were the reason why the auroras were so intense, and he was
right.
This event was a super solar flare – one of the rarest occurrences in our relationship
with the sun.
And that scarcity is good for us.
Maybe it didn’t do much damage back in the 19th century, but today a similar flare would
damage a lot of electronic equipment.
Let’s hope we’ll be ready for the next one, and will just enjoy the view!
9) Observing the rarest thing possible Everything else will be more frequently occurring
than this one, because I’m talking about the recorded moment of the radioactive decay
of the most stable element in the Universe.
Xenon-124, the sturdiest tiny brick in the fabric of reality.
It takes more time for an atom of xenon-124 to fall apart than has passed since the Big
Bang – a trillion times more time, to be fair.
Xenon is so stable, that it won’t react with any other element, and it’ll ignore
almost any kind of radiation.
It’s the perfect candidate to make a unique sensor to find an entirely different mystery
of reality: elusive dark matter.
What else would you use to find a form of matter that won’t react with anything, if
not the most inert and stable element in the world?
But instead of dark matter, they saw the very process of xenon-124’s decay.
Maybe it’s not the result scientists were looking for, but at least their sensors won’t
fail them ever again.
Hey, I think we’d all like to decay a little slower, don’t you thnk?
Now, if you learned something new today, then give the video a like and share it with a
friend!
And here are some other cool videos I think you'll enjoy.
Just click to the left or right, and stay on the Bright Side of life!