• From oceans of blood to colossal blue holes filling the ocean floor, we count 15
of the most mysterious and beautiful natural phenomena ever to grace our planet
15 - Penitentes • Narrow ice formations in the Andes mountains
- curiously they mostly point towards the sun ranging between 2 and 5 meters height
• They've been known about since the early 1800s, and though they were initially thought
to have been formed by the wind, they are in fact created from dimples in the snow surface
that sunlight reflects off, increasing the localised sublimation, which forms troughs,
which forms these ice scupltures • They've even been known to form on dirt
and rugged land 14 - Fire Whirls
• These are tornadoes, but covered in fire - they get that way because they might pick
up heat from a destroyed building which heats up the tornadoes centre, leading to a vortex
of fire to ignite • These are especially dangerous when they
pick up debris, light them on fire and shoot them off in all directions leading to forest
fires and the like • There was a big fire whirl in Tokyo, 1920s,
and it lead nearly 40,000 people to tragically burn to death
13 - Brinicles • Known widely as the "ice finger of death"
and discovered only 3 years ago, it's a flow of cold salty water that freezes at the bottom
of deep ocean, which forms a white trail • Any sea creature that touches this trail
gets frozen in a web of ice, leading to corpses strewn everywhere
• The phenomenon is caused by cold sinking brine, more dense than the rest of the sea
water • The one discovered was underneath the
Mount Erebus volcano 12 - Snow Rollers
• These are found in North America and the UK - chunks of snow that have broken off a
hill and started rolling • As they roll like tumbleweeds, just like
any other snowball they collect ice and get bigger, but the inner section is so weak and
less compact than the rest that the wind blows a hole through it - forming a type of donut
• They're pretty rare to find though since the conditions are so hard to produce and
they usually make headlines when found
11 - Lucid Dreaming • Made popular by the film Inception, it's
the idea of becoming self-aware while asleep to be able to control your dream - like you'd
control objects in a VR simulation • Greek philosopher Aristotle observed:
"often when one is asleep, there is something in the consciousness which declares that what
then presents itself is but a dream" • A lot of people have experienced this
one, and there are even guides on google about how to achieve it, though it may take a while
10 - Morocco's Goat Trees • It's been said the reason these goats
only climb these specific trees in Morocco is because of a certain type of fruit, said
to be similar to an olive • Farmers intentionally take the goats along
tree paths not for curiosity, but because the goats spit up a nut from inside the fruit-
nuts used to make argan oil in cooking and cosmetics
• Sadly though, the trees and fruit are disappearing because too many goats are climbing
too many of these trees 9 - Aurora Borealis
• Or more commonly known as "The Northern Lights"
• It's caused by the sun giving off high-energy charged particles that travel into outer space
at around 1000 kilometers per second - this gives off a particle discharge known as "plasma"
• This plasma streaming from the sun is known as the solar wind, and when it interacts
with the earth's magnetic field, the particles get trapped and follow the magnetic field
through the ionosphere • And it's only when earthly particles collide
with the solar wind that we finally get our northern and southern lights
8 - Sand Storms • Very common in deserts, and their cause
isn't much of a mystery • The wind simply picks up a good deal of
dust, and it flies away - but if enough sand billows up at once, it turns into a devastating
force of nature capable of wiping out agriculture and even killing people
• In fact the sandstorms get so big that they can be viewed from space
7 - Blue Holes • Though they mostly come in a circle shape,
these gargantuan water sink-holes can be found in all shapes and sizes
• Primarily though they're created when a cave underground extends in a huge chasm,
the deeper the hole, the bluer the sinkhole • You'll find these in Belize, the Red Sea
of Egypt and the Caribbbean, though the deepest of all is in the Bahamas, and its name is
"Dean"
6 - Foxfire • It's only during late summer that you'll
find these glowing mushrooms on moist, rotting bark in the tropics
• But they're only visibly widespread during the wettest season far from any artificial
light sources that you or I might be used to
• The newest variations of these glow-in-the-dark mushrooms only appeared in the last few years
following collection from tourist state parks near Sao Paulo, Brazil
5 - The Taos Hum • A low-frequency humming noise in Taos,
New Mexico, but also heard in other parts of the world
• Most hums are attributed to machines and industrial-related things, but nobody has
ever been able to identify Taos hum's source • Since only 2% of the population can hear
it, even inside buildings where the sound is intensified, it makes it difficult to track
down what might be causing it • If you'd like to listen to it, there's
a link below this video http://www.eskimo.com/~bilb/freenrg/taos.wav 4 - The Fire Rainbow
• An atmospheric phenomenon only appearing when the sun is high in the sky, with light
passing through clear, high-altitude clouds specifically made of hexagonal plate crystals
• The sunlight entering the verticle side shining THROUGH the clouds gets split into
various prism colours and displayed over a large area in a brilliant spectrum reminiscent
of a rainbow • Though we now know the true reason these
cloud rainbows exist, they must've been quite a sight back in the stone age
3 - Mammatus Clouds • Though sometimes referred to as the "boob
clouds", these are cellular patterns of pouches hanging underneath clouds, and they're mostly
composed of ice • They extend for hundreds of miles, and
to the naked eye they appear static, menacing - and for good reason
• Seeing one of these clouds is a warning that soon there'll be a storm or extreme weather
situation, maybe even a fire tornado 2 - Monarch Butterfly Migration
• These orange and black butterflies travel through a large area of North America
• The reason they migrate en-masse is due to weather conditions; the colder in the year,
the farther south they travel to stay in the warmth
• This trek across such a vast distance is so lengthy that not a single butterfly
can survive the entire trip - it's up to their descendents and offspring to complete the
task, and there are so many of them, covering entire trees in a swarm, that their trips
are rather successful 1 - Red Tide
• It's not blood covering the ocean, it's algae and plankton
• They reproduce in such vast numbers that it fills the water and, in some cases, turns
it bright red from all the clumped up microscopic life
• Some are harmless, but others can be dangerous to marine life due to toxins and the China
Sea is notorious for it