Nature

Salar de Uyuni

Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat. It is located in southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes, and is elevated 3,656 meters above the mean sea level. It is covered by a few meters of salt crust, which has an extraordinary flatness with the average altitude variations within one meter over the entire area of the Salar. The crust serves as a source of salt and covers a pool of brine, which is exceptionally rich in lithium. It contains 50 to 70% of the world's lithium reserves, which has yet to be extracted.

Tessellated pavement

A tessellated pavement is a rare erosional feature formed in flat sedimentary rock formations lying on some ocean shores. The pavement bears this name because the rock has fractured into polygonal blocks that resemble tiles, or tessellations. The cracks (or joints) were formed when the rock fractured through the action of stress on the Earth's crust and subsequently were modified by sand and wave action.

Caño Cristales

Caño Cristales is a Colombian river. The bed of the river from the end of July through November is variously coloured yellow, green, blue, black, and especially red.

Angel Falls

The height of the fall is so great that before getting anywhere near the ground, much of the water is evaporated or carried away as a fine mist by the strong wind.

Red rain

From July 25 to September 23, 2001, red rain sporadically fell on the southern Indian state of Kerala. Heavy downpours occurred in which the rain was colored red, staining clothes pink. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. Colored rain had been reported in Kerala in as early as 1896 and several times since then. Following a light-microscopy examination in 2001, it was initially thought that the rains were coloured by fallout from a hypothetical meteor burst, but a study commissioned by the Government of India concluded that the rains had been coloured by airborne spores from a locally prolific terrestrial green alga from the genus Trentepohlia.

1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami

A megatsunami is defined as a wave reaching more than 100 meters in the deep ocean. The highest wave ever recorded occurred on July 9, 1958 in Lituya Bay, Alaska reaching a height of 524 meters, 470 feet taller than the Empire State Building.

Lake Nyos

Lake Nyos is a crater lake in Cameroon. On August 21, 1986, a limnic eruption occurred at Lake Nyos which triggered the sudden release of about 1.6 million tonnes of CO2; this cloud rose at nearly 100 kilometres per hour. The gas spilled over the northern lip of the lake into a valley running roughly east-west from Cha to Subum, and then rushed down two valleys branching off it to the north, displacing all the air and suffocating some 1,700 people within 25 kilometres of the lake, mostly rural villagers, as well as 3,500 livestock. The worst affected villages were Cha, Nyos, and Subum. Scientists concluded from evidence that a 91-meter fountain of water and foam formed at the surface of the lake.

Avshalom Cave

Avshalom Cave is a 5,000 sq m cave in Israel, unique for its dense concentration of stalactites. Some of the stalactites found in the cave are four meters long, and some have been dated as 300,000 years old.

Elephant Foot Glacier

Pour batter onto a griddle and watch the mixture spread out into a round-shaped pancake. The movement is similar to the flow of piedmont glaciers, which form when ice spills from a steep valley onto a relatively flat plain. These glaciers are known for their nearly symmetric, fan-shaped lobes. The shape of Greenland’s Elephant Foot Glacier is so distinct that it stands out dramatically from its surroundings when viewed from space.

Penitentes

Penitentes are a snow formation found at high altitudes. They take the form of tall thin blades of hardened snow or ice closely spaced with the blades oriented towards the general direction of the sun. Penitentes can be as tall as a person.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime