1. AURORA BOREALIS
The Aurora Borealis, more commonly known as the Northern Lights, is a natural light display caused by collisions between gaseous particles in the Earth’s atmosphere with charged particles released from the sun’s atmosphere.
2. CATATUMBO LIGHTNING, VENEZUELA
This ‘eternal storm’ of lightning occurs on 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours per day and up to 280 times per hour over Lake Maracaibo, usually over the area where the Catatumbo River flows into the lake.
3. HORSETAIL FALL, USA
Every February, Horsetail Fall in Yosemite National Park is illuminated by the setting sun. If conditions are right, it creates the illusion of a ‘firefall’ where the waterfall glows orange and red, giving the impression of fire.
4. CLOUD FORMATIONS
The British tend to nurse an aversion to clouds. You see, we rarely get that wispy, brilliant-white, cotton candy cloud that glides through warmer climes. No, ours are grey, bulging and ominous. They threaten to burst over July barbecues and preside over weddings like harbingers of doom. What no one told us is that it doesn’t have to be this way…
5. LAKE BUBBLES, CANADA
These formations beneath Abraham Lake in Alberta, Canada, look picturesque but are actually frozen pockets of methane, a highly flammable gas.
6. LIGHT PILLARS
Light pillars are an optical phenomenon in which narrow beams of light seem to extend from the sky to the ground.
7. WATERSPOUTS
Waterspouts are like tornadoes but occur over water and are usually accompanied by high winds and seas, large hail and frequent dangerous lightning.
8. TURQUOISE ICE, RUSSIA
Lake Baikal, located in eastern Siberia in Russia, is one of the largest and deepest lakes in the world, holding an enormous one-fifth of the world’s freshwater.
9. SNOW CHIMNEYS
Snow chimneys are a type of fumarole; vents in the Earth’s crust which allow steam and gases to escape from volcanoes.
10. SAILING STONES
Death Valley National Park in California, USA, is one of the hottest places on Earth. On 10th July 1913, Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley registered a sizzling 56.7°C (134°F)! The Valley is also home to picture-perfect sand dunes, water-sculpted canyons and extinct volcanic craters.
11. PINK LAKES
Pink lakes are found in many places around the world. The natural phenomena are usually created when there is an unusually high salt concentration – much higher than seawater – in the lake. The pinkish hue is created when there is a salt-tolerant algae present, such as the green algae Dunaliella salina.
