Green Countries - Through Clean Power & Recycling

El Nicho, Cuba

Austria

Columbia

Costa Rica

France

Iceland

Morne Brabant, Mauritius

Switzerland

Sweden

Abandoned Places; Christmas Lights

Belgium

Hong Kong

Clifton Mill, Little Miami River, Ohio

Iceland

Italy

London, England

Christmas Market, Ludwigsburg, Germany

Strange Natural Wonders - III

The Eye of the Sahara (a Richat Structure), Mauritania:  This enormous depression, circular in shape and stretching 25 miles wide, is like a bull’s-eye mark in the middle of an otherwise flat and featureless area of Mauritania desert. Visible from space, it has been a landmark for astronauts since the earliest missions. The Eye isn’t the result of any target practice by aliens; rather, it formed as winds eroded the different layers of sediment, quartzite, and other rocks at varying depths.

 

Sailing Stones on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley, California, USA:  No one has ever seen one of the “sailing stones” on Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa move, but evidence of their travels is visible in the long track marks that trail behind them in the dusty ground. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how the rocks—which can weigh hundreds of pounds—make their way across the dry lake bed. The prevailing theory is that when the rocks are wet or icy, they’re pushed along the flat playa by strong winds. The deep groove marks they leave behind indicate they may travel up to 700 feet from their point of origin.

 

The Stone Forest (Shilin) in Yunnan Province, China:  Many of the trees within the forest in China’s remote Yunnan Province are rock hard, literally. The area, which spans nearly 200 square miles, was underwater 270 million years ago, and the sea floor was covered with limestone sediment. Gradually, the seabed rose and the water dried up. As rain and wind eroded the weaker rock, the stronger limestone spires began to take shape. Now they rise skyward, surrounded by leafy trees.

 

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia:  When a prehistoric lake dried up about 30,000 years ago, it left an endless expanse of white hexagonal tiles that stretch to the horizon. Welcome to the world’s largest salt flat, stretching for 4,000 square miles—25 times the size of Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. The site provides more than 25,000 tons of salt per year to local miners, supports a thriving community of thousands of flamingos, and attracts tourists who can check into the Palacio de Sal, a 16-room hotel made entirely from salt blocks.

 

Spotted Lake, British Columbia, Canada:  It looks almost as if you could play Twister on Spotted Lake near Osoyoos, less than a mile from the Washington State border. Each summer, most of the water in this mineral-rich lake evaporates, leaving behind large concentrations of salt, titanium, calcium, sulfates, and other minerals that form a polka-dot pattern in shades of green, yellow, and brown circles of varying size. The lake is a sacred site to the First Nations of the Okanagan Valley, and the land on which it sits is private property owned by the Indian Affairs Department. You won’t actually be able to get up close to the lake, but you can get a good look from the nearby road.

 

The Silfa Rift at Thingvellir National Park, Iceland:  The shifting of the tectonic plates that fit together like puzzle pieces on the earth’s crust (a.k.a. continental drift) is more visible in southwest Iceland’s Þingvellir National Park than anywhere else. In the park’s ever-widening Almannagjá canyon, you can walk in the seam of the Eurasian and North American plates as they slowly move apart—or you can dive into the crack between continents in the Silfra Rift in Lake Þingvellir. It takes nearly a century for glacier ice to melt and filter through lava into the lake, but once the water gets there, it’s so clear that visibility underwater is nearly 1,000 feet.

Strange Natural Wonders - I

Blood Falls, Antarctica:  A shockingly macabre shade of what looks like blood cascades down the pale face of Taylor Glacier. When scientists first discovered these falls in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in 1911, they thought algae colored the dark red water that spewed from a crack in the glacier. It turns out the hue comes from high iron levels in the falls’ source, a pool buried 1,300 feet below the ice. In a sinister twist, the landscape is so arid that when seals and penguins wander inland and get lost, they never decompose; their remains are left strewn about.

 

Asbyrgi Canyon, Iceland:  Legend has it that the Asbyrgi Canyon in northern Iceland was created when the hoof of a Norse god’s horse touched the earth, slicing through 300-foot-tall cliffs and flattening an area just over two miles long and more than a half mile wide. The likelier scientific explanation is that two periods of glacial flooding carved the canyon between 3,000 and 10,000 years ago. But standing atop the cliffs, with the green carpet of the horseshoe-shaped canyon spread before you, it’s fun to imagine otherwise.

 

Cano Cristales River, Columbia:  Folks make the journey into central Colombia’s Serranéa de la Macarena national park to see why Caño Cristales has inspired nicknames like the River of Five Colors, the Liquid Rainbow, and even the Most Beautiful River in the World. It’s important to get the timing right: when the water reaches the perfect levels (usually between July and December), it becomes a kaleidoscope of pink, green, blue, and yellow as a plant called the Macarenia clavigera, which lives on the river floor, gets the sun it needs to bloom into an explosion of colors.

 

The Cave of the Crystals, Naica, Mexico:  It looks like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude come to life. A thousand feet underground in a working lead and silver mine in Chihuahua, Mexico, opaque crystals of gypsum—some as large as four feet wide and 50 feet long—sprout at all angles from the volcanically heated water below. Temperatures in the cave, which was discovered only in 2000, can reach 150 degrees with nearly 100 percent humidity, conditions that only a superhuman could survive in for long. Any more than 10 minutes in a cave without proper gear can lead to heatstroke.

 

The Giant's Causeway, Ireland:  One of Northern Ireland’s most popular tourist attractions, Giant’s Causeway earned its name from the 40,000 basalt columns that interlock to form what looks like a walkway fit for a colossus. The stones, mostly hexagonal in shape, formed 60 million years ago when underground lava flows cooled into formations as tall as 39 feet high and 18 inches in diameter. It was comparatively recently—about 15,000 years ago—that the soil around the seaside stones eroded and they became visible above ground.

 

Lake Retba, Senegal:  It looks as if someone poured a giant bottle of Pepto-Bismol into Lake Retba—that’s how deeply pink these waters are. The color is actually caused by a particular kind of algae called Dunaliella salina that produces a pigment. The salt content is extremely high, reaching 40 percent in some spots and allowing the algae to thrive (and swimmers to float effortlessly on the surface of the 10-foot-deep lake). Blinding white piles of salt line the shores, and locals work several hours a day harvesting salt from the bright pink water.

 

Various Photos

Violet-ear hummingbird

 

Aurora borealis above Icelandic horses

 

A bar for real cowboys...

 

Foxes in snow