8 Unusual Rock Islets Around the World

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Usually, a rock islet is a landform composed of rock, lying offshore, uninhabited, and having a minimal vegetation. But sometimes, rock islets don't look exactly like this - some are naturally strange looking, and some of them people have adapted to their own needs and made them pretty unusual. Uniqueness makes these small islands very popular among local visitors, foreign tourists and photographers from around the world.

(thanks Bosko)

World's 100 Most Endangered Species Listed

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The spoon-billed sandpiper (photo above), a small, dull-coloured bird that breeds in Russia and migrates to south-east Asia is an endangered species, one of 100 threatened species placed on a list by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

10 Oldest Trees In The World

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Imagine having been alive for centuries, since before the time the ancient Babylonians started to measure time as we understand it today. Not only having been alive then, but carrying on through the developments of the Greek and Roman empires, the births of religions like Christianity and Islam, and right up to the present day, still bearing witness.

10 Oldest Trees In The World.

A Berry So Shiny, It's Irresistible

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That fake fruit in the wooden bowls that hotels love to decorate their lobbies with never looks quite right. No, apparently it takes nature to make a fake that looks even better than the real thing.

That turns out to be the case with the amazing berry of the Pollia condensata. A physicist in the UK was looking at the reflectivity of tulips and buttercups when a colleague at Cambridge University told him to check out the berry from a tropical plant called Pollia condensata.

Ascendance

Shot in Joshua Tree National Park and the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest during the Perseid meteor shower. Features ancient trees, lightning, rainbows, meteors, the Milky Way, and lots of stars. Filmed by Henry Jun Wah Lee.



Vimeo link

The Mesmerizing Beauty Of Nature's Fractals

image from Google Earth

Google Earth: source of information, source of wonder, source of art. In 2010, Paul Bourke, a research associate professor at the University of Western Australia, began using the service to capture images for his ongoing Google Earth Fractals series.

Since then, he's amassed an amazing collection of space-based photographs that are equal parts science and beauty: Each intoxicating image on the project's website is accompanied by a KMZ file that lets users pinpoint the photos' locations on their own Google Earth viewers, putting them in geographic as well as aesthetic context.

One Year In 40 Seconds

Short film by Eirik Solheim. Images from the same spot through one year.
Details on how this video was made here.



Vimeo link

Purely Pacific Northwest

John Eklund is a photographer from Portland, Oregon. In this time-lapse video he shares the beautiful Northwest region of the USA. Various locations include Mount Shuksan, Crater Lake, Mount Bachelor, Mount St. Helens, Oregon's Badlands, Painted Hills, Cape Kiwanda, Mt. Hood, Lost lake, and Cannon Beach.



Vimeo link

(thanks Cora)

Yosemite's Horsetail Fall

Horsetail Fall is a small, ephemeral waterfall that flows over the eastern edge of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. For two weeks in February, the setting sun striking the waterfall creates a deep orange glow that resembles Yosemite's historic 'Firefall.'



YouTube link

(thanks Miss Rare)

Why All Hurricanes Look The Same From Space

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Every satellite photo of a hurricane looks a lot like the last one. The striking similarity has to do with how hurricanes form. Hurricanes are a type of tropical cyclone, a rotating system of thunderstorms and heavy winds. They form over warm ocean water near the equator.

When warm, moist air rises, it creates a low-pressure area in its place, which sucks in more warm air from nearby. The moist air cools as it ascends, condensing to form clouds. The warm air keeps cycling upward like a giant chimney, coiling the clouds into a swirling mega-storm.

Hitachi Seaside Park - Tsunami Survivor

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The Miharashi No Oka hill offers visitors the sight of the panoramic splendor of the Pacific Ocean. Yet it is not the sea views that people come to see in Hitachinaka, a small city on the east coast of Japan. It is the Hitachi Seaside Park, devastated by the tsunami of 2011 but now restored to its former, somewhat bizarre, glory.

The Hitachi Seaside Park is not large, it covers only 3.5 hectares yet the flowers draw people from all over the Ibaraki prefecture and beyond. There is something on offer all seasons. It is truly famous for the nemophilas which wash the whole area in to a blue hue.

A Labor Day Hike To Loon Lake

photo used with permission

A popular loop leads from the Chinook Campground in the Payette National Forest, along the banks of the Sesech River to the majestic Loon Lake in Idaho, USA. In February of 1943, a B-23 Bomber got lost in the snowy mountain wilderness of Idaho. Short of fuel, the crew realized that they’d have to land soon, and searched desperately for a place to touch down. Everyone survived the rough landing.

The wreckage from the Chinook Bomber is still in the woods. After 69 years, it's still pretty intact. It's probably too remote to effect a clean-up, and anyway it serves as a remarkable memorial to humanity's will to survive.

(thanks Juergen)

Are Solar Storms Dangerous To Us?

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Throughout 2012, the sun has been in an active part of its 11-year cycle of activity. Dark spots have been seen at sun's surface. Space observatories have been detecting short-lived but brilliant and powerful solar flares - intense bursts of radiation and our solar system's largest explosive events.

Occasional, powerful coronal mass ejections - giant bubbles of gas and magnetic fields from the sun, containing up to a billion tons of charged particles that can travel up to several million miles per hour - have been released into the interplanetary medium. This solar material has streamed out through space, and sometimes has struck Earth. Is this dangerous? Should we be worried?

12 Wonderful Water Castles

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A water castle is a castle or stately home whose site is entirely surrounded by moats or natural water bodies. The water that surrounds the castle was used as an obstacle to hinder an attacker. In many places in Europe, castles that had formerly been fortified changed their role or were converted over the course of time so that they became largely representational and residential buildings.

(thanks Bosko)

Red Dust Devil

A man in Brazil captures an incredible orange dust devil. The funnel's hue was caused by clay in the area's soil.



YouTube link

(thanks Miss Rare)

Lago Maggiore Timelapse

Timelapse sequences shot at the Lago Maggiore in Italy by Belgian videographer Matthew Vandeputte, during the first week of august 2012.



Vimeo link

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The Alps At Night

Why Is The Night Sky Turning Red?

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The idea of a red sky at night used to invoke beautiful images of vibrant sunsets, the product of warm sunlight bathing the sky near the horizon. The adage of 'red sky at night, sailor's delight' refers to a calm night ahead; a red sunset suggests a high-pressure system in the west is bringing calm weather.

But red skies at night have taken on a new meaning in recent decades. As outdoor lighting become increasingly prominent, our night skies are gradually turning from black to red.

Amazing Buildings Devoured By Sand

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The deserts and sands are the best landscapes for finding old and abandoned buildings. The arid climate lends itself to preservation, and there is little danger of serious decay or damage from flooding.

At the same time, the sand is an ever-shifting geographic feature that can swallow whole towns both quickly or slowly. This article deals with the partially buried buildings in sand, some of which were abandoned for hundreds of years, and some only a few years.

(thanks Bosko)

The Bodélé Depression

The Amazon rainforest with all its plant and animal life, and all its astounding biodiversity could not exist as we know it without a patch of African desert. The soil the rainforest is producing isn't very nutrient rich. All the minerals and nutrients that fertilize the rainforest have to come from someplace else.

Scientists have known for a while that this natural fertilizer is crossing the Atlantic in the form of dust storms, but science writer Colin Schultz ran across a 2006 paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters that not only produces evidence for a much larger trans-oceanic transfer of dust than was previously assumed... it also pinpoints the exact (and astoundingly small) location where all the fertilizer in the Amazon is coming from.

The Avenue Of The Baobabs

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The Avenue or Alley of the Baobabs is a prominent group of baobab trees lining the dirt road between Morondava and Belon'i Tsiribihina in the Menabe region in western Madagascar. Its striking landscape draws travelers from around the world, making it one of the most visited locations in the region.

The Avenue of the Baobabs has been a center of local conservation efforts, and was granted temporary protected status in July 2007 by the Ministry of Environment, Water and Forests, the first step toward making it Madagascar's first natural monument.