These dramatic natural wonders prove that Mother Nature can wow the most seasoned travelers.
Yvon Maurice
Ever played the game of Twister on water? The green, yellow, and
brown polka dots that form on British Columbia’s Spotted Lake each
summer make it look like you could.
It’s a far cry from the stereotypical landscapes of clear blue lakes,
rolling green hills, and white-sand beaches that inspire most
travelers—and that’s part of what makes strange natural wonders like
Spotted Lake so thrilling. A recently discovered cave that grows
crystals the size of four-story buildings, a lake the color of a
strawberry milkshake, and a glacier that seems to bleed sound like
they’re from another planet, but can be seen right here on earth, and
they remind us that there’s plenty of mystery left to explore.
For billions of years, our planet has been a work in progress. Wind,
water, pressure, minerals, heat, and lesser-understood forces mold and
shape our environment, carving out caves and canyons, flooding and
drying lakes, shaping mountains, shifting shorelines, moving the ground
beneath our feet, and creating all manner of strange formations.
Long before scientists were able to offer explanations for the
world’s more curious natural achievements, locals have been coming up
with their own ideas. Māori legend says the enormous boulders found on
New Zealand’s Moeraki Beach are the washed-ashore gourds and sweet
potatoes from the wreck of a mythological canoe, while Irish folklore
attributes the creation of the Giant’s Causeway to a quarrel that
spanned across the sea to Scotland.
Such bizarre formations are, in fact, the result of time and pressure
working against soil and rock, an often slow and methodical process
that yields showstopping results. Others are the result of a sudden
dramatic shift in conditions. Together, they caution us, as author Will
Durant wrote in the January 1946 edition of Ladies Home Journal, that “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”
Seeing is believing, so take our tour of the strangest natural
wonders—and keep an eye out for what the powerful planetary forces may
do next.
2. Marble Caves, Chile
Robert O'Duill
Six thousand years of wave erosion created the undulating patterns that
give these caves their marbleized effect, enhanced by the reflection of
the blue and green water of Carrera Lake, near Chile’s border with
Argentina. Although the area is threatened by a plan to build a dam
nearby, for now, visitors can kayak throughout the caves on days when
the waters are calm.
3. 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.
4.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.
5. 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.
6. Travertine Pools at Pamukkale, Turkey
People have sought the reputed healing effects of bathing here for
thousands of years. The water that flows from 17 subterranean hot
springs into the pools has an extremely high concentration of calcium
carbonate, which forms soft deposits when it hits the surface. Those
viscous white deposits harden over time until the springs resemble a
fountain made of chalk or, as indicated by the poetic translation of
Pamukkale, a “cotton castle” visible from more than 10 miles away.
7. Sailing Stones, Racetrack Playa, Death Valley, CA
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.
8. White Desert (Sahara el Beyda), Egypt
Bulbous white rocks in strange shapes and sizes rise from the desert
about 28 miles north of the town of Farafra in western Egypt—a cluster
of mushrooms here, a herd of half-melted snowmen over there. Their
appearance isn’t due to some avant-garde stone sculptor, but rather
thanks to the wind. When the ancient sea that once covered the land
dried up, the remaining sediment layer began to break down. The softer
spots crumbled away, and over time, powerful sandstorms shaped the
harder rocks into their current forms.
The spherical stones that line New Zealand’s Moeraki Beach reach up to
seven feet in diameter and have been compared to everything from the
marbles of giants to colossal dinosaur eggs to half-submerged
prehistoric turtles, ready to stand up and shake off the sand at any
moment. They’re actually concretions, masses of compacted sediment
formed below ground more than 50 million years ago. As the sand that
surrounds them erodes, they seem to rise to the surface as if pushed up
from the center of the earth. The stones are also found on Bowling Ball Beach in Mendocino, CA, as well as elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada and Russia.
10. Caño Cristales River, Colombia
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.
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.
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