THE WORDERS WORLD

Showing posts with label Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World. Show all posts

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Metéora

The Metéora (“suspended rocks”) is one of the largest and most important complexes of Eastern Orthodox monasteries in Greece, second only to Mount Athos. The six monasteries are built on natural sandstone rock pillars, at the northwestern edge of the Plain of Thessaly near the Pineios river and Pindus Mountains, in central Greece. Access to the monasteries was originally (and deliberately) difficult, requiring either long ladders lashed together or large nets used to haul up both goods and people. This required quite a leap of faith – the ropes were replaced, so the story goes, only “when the Lord let them break”.

Valley of Flowers India

Valley of Flowers

India

The Valley of Flowers is an outstandingly beautiful high-altitude Himalayan valley that has been acknowledged as such by renowned mountaineers and botanists in literature for over a century and in Hindu mythology for much longer. Its ‘gentle’ landscape, breathtakingly beautiful meadows of alpine flowers and ease of access complement the rugged, mountain wilderness for which the inner basin of Nanda Devi National Park is renowned. Valley of flower is splashed with colour as it bloomed with hundreds different beautiful flowers, taking on various shades of colours as time progressed. Valley was declared a national park in 1982, and now it is a World Heritage Site. The locals, of course, always knew of the existence of the valley, and believed that it was inhabited by fairies.

Sigiriya Sri Lanka

Sigiriya

Sri Lanka

Sigiriya (Lion’s rock) is an ancient rock fortress and palace ruin situated in the central Matale District of Sri Lanka, surrounded by the remains of an extensive network of gardens, reservoirs, and other structures. A popular tourist destination, Sigiriya is also renowned for its ancient paintings (frescos), which are reminiscent of the Ajanta Caves of India. The Sigiriya was built during the reign of King Kassapa I (AD 477 – 495), and it is one of the seven World Heritage Sites of Sri Lanka. Sigiriya may have been inhabited through prehistoric times. It was used as a rock-shelter mountain monastery from about the 5th century BC, with caves prepared and donated by devotees to the Buddhist Sangha.

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

This is one of the most venerated marvels among the seven wonders of world.

Location:
This wonder of the world was located in the east bank of Euphrates, South of Baghdad in Iraq.

Description:
The King Hammurabi is the most famous king of the Babylonian kingdom. The whole kingdom flourished under his rule. His son Nebuchadnezzar is the one who built the Hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven wonders of world.
Nebuchadnezzar ruled the country for 43 years from 605 BC. He constructed impressive array of temples, palaces and streets. It is being told that he built this garden to please his wife, Amyitis. Amyitis, daughter of the king Medes seems to have had a passion for mountainous surroundings. There are some other accounts which say that this wonder of the world was actually built by the Assyrian Queen Semiramis.
The ancient accounts of this hanging gardens (one of the seven wonders of the world) describes the structure to be a stairs like one. The Greek geographer Strabo, describes it as , "the garden consists of vaulted terraces raised one above another, and resting upon cube-shaped pillars. These are hollow and filled with earth to allow trees of the largest size to be planted. The pillars, the vaults, and terraces are constructed of baked brick and asphalt."
The irrigation system was supposedly the complex part built on this gardens. This region had very scarce rains. Slaves were used to push the water upwards using some ancient method of irrigation. Of course there must be some exploitation of slave labor to maintain one among the seven wonders of the world. The gardens did not really hang on the roof using cables or ropes. But this name from the sense that it was built on the roof top. Some accounts state that the gardens are 400 by 400 feet and 80 feet high.

Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World, - Sinkholes

Sinkholes

(Images via: Dagbladet, Stevekluge and Wikipedia)

Sinkholes are one of the world’s scariest natural phenomena. Over time, water erodes the soil under the planet’s surface until – in some cases quite suddenly – the land above gives way and collapses into the earth. Many sinkholes occur naturally while others are the result of human intervention. Displacing groundwater can open cavities while broken pipes can erode otherwise stable subterranean sediments. Urban sinkholes – up to hundreds of feet deep – have formed and consumed parts of city blocks, sidewalks and even entire buildings.

Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World, - Penitentes

Penitentes

(Images via Webshots, Diffendal and 8020internet)

Named after peak-hooded New Mexican monks (lower right above), penitentes are dazzling naturally-forming ice blades that stick up at sharp angles toward the sun. Rarely found except at high altitudes, they can grow up taller than a human and form in vast fields. As ice melts in particular patterns, ‘valleys’ formed by initial melts leave ‘mountains’ in their wake. Strangely, these formations ultimately slow the melting process as the peaks cast shadows on the deeper surfaces below and allow for winds to blow over the peaks, cooling them.

Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World, - Lenticular Clouds

(Images via: NationalGeographic, Photodb and Eheart)

Ever wonder the truth about UFOs? Avoided by traditional pilots but loved by sailplane aviators, lenticular clouds are masses of cloud with strong internal uplift that can drive a motorless flyer to high elevations. Their shape is quite often mistaken for a mysterious flying object or the artificial cover for one. Generally, lenticular clouds are formed as wind speeds up while moving around a large land object such as a mountain.

Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World, - Light Pillars

Light Pillars

(Images via: Apod, Kulgun, Arborsci, Wikipedia and Wikipedia)

Light pillars appear as eerily upright luminous columns in the sky, beacons cast into the air above without an apparent source. These are visible when light reflects just right off of ice crystals from either the sun (as in the two top images above) or from artificial ground sources such as street or park lights. Despite their appearance as near-solid columns of light, the effect is entirely created by our own relative viewpoint.

Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World, - Sundogs

Sundogs

(Images via: Icecube, Reflectiveimages, Wunderground, Andrill and Freewebs)

Like light pillars, sundogs are the product of light passing through crystals. The particular shape and orientation of the crystals can have a drastic visual impact for the viewer, producing a longer tail and changing the range of colors one sees. The relative height of the sun in the sky shifts the distance the sundogs appear to be on either side of the sun. Varying climactic conditions on other planets in our solar system produce halos with up to four sundogs from those planets’ perspectives. Sundogs have been speculated about and discussed since ancient times and written records describing the various attributes of our sun date back the Egyptians and Greeks.

Fire Whirls

(Images via: Squidoo, USAToday, Fed and Humboldt)

Fire whirls (also known as fire devils or tornadoes) appear in or around raging fires when the right combination of climactic conditions is present. Fire whirls can be spawned by other natural events such as earthquakes and thunderstorms – and can be incredibly dangerous, in some cases spinning well out of the zone of a fire itself to cause devastation and death in a radius not even reached by heat or flame. Fire whirls have been known to be nearly a mile high, have wind speeds of over 100 miles per hour and to last for 20 or more minutes.

Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World,

Orange Moons

(Images via: Wikipedia, Pbase, NowPublic, Flickr and RC-Astro)

This last phenomena is something most people have seen before – beautiful orange moon hanging low in the sky. But what causes this phenomena – and, for that matter, does the moon have a color at all? When the moon appears lower on the horizon, rays of light bouncing off it have to pass through a great deal more of our atmosophere which slowly strips away everything but yellows, oranges and reds. The bottommost image above is true to the hues of the moon but has enhanced colors to more clearly show the differences in shade that illustrate the mixed topography and minerology that tell the story of the moon’s surface. Looking at the colors in combination with the craters one can start to trace the history of impacts and consequent material movements across the face of our mysterios moon.

Phenomenal Wonders of the Natural World