Stories about giant waves have been circulating among sailors for centuries, but skeptical scientists believe they were not as unusual as mermaids. Then, in 1995, an oil rig in the North Sea was hit by a giant storm, and had the apparatus on hand to realize that the wave had reached a giant height of 84 feet. A few years later, a 95-foot wave was measured through a study ship in the west of Scotland. Oceanographers learned that not only were these giant waves real, but also unexpectedly not unusual. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, unauthorized waves are more than twice the length of surrounding waves (often up to 30 meters), come from unexpected instructions and occur only in the upper seas. If you think those facts on Earth are unexpected, wait to read the strangest mysteries of planet Earth.
Giant waves aren’t the only giant secret the oceans have kept: the world’s longest mountainous diversity is underwater. It is called Mid-Ocean Ridge and stretches for more than 40,000 miles, descending in the middle of the Atlantic, eastwards across the Indian Ocean and then climbing across the Pacific, along the west coast of the Americas. (Compare this to the Andes, the longest continental mountain diversity, which is only 4350 miles long). The Middle Ocean Range is an uninterrupted chain of underwater volcanoes located along the assembly problems of the Earth’s tectonic plate, as the plates separate. , the magma infiltrates continuously, creating a new bark. Here are some other ocean mysteries that science still can’t explain.
Mount Everest in the Himalayas sometimes takes this honor, more than 29,000 feet above sea level; However, if we come with mountains that are not completely above sea level, Hawaii’s Mauna Kea is the winner. Only thirteen, 706 feet rises above the water, however, if it calculates its height from its base at the rear of the Pacific Ocean, Mauna Kea is 30,610 feet tall, surpassing Everest through approximately 1640 feet. Where Everest was formed through the collision of two tectonic plates (and continues to grow), Mauna Kea evolved due to the volcanic activity that shaped the Hawaiian islands; it is now inactive, according to the Hawaii Center for Vulcanology. Discover the thirteen active volcanoes you can visit.
Nine out of ten earthquakes worldwide and 75% of its volcanoes occur as a result of tectonic activity in the so-called Pacific Fire Ring, a circle of volcanic and seismically active hot spots that mark the assembly problems of various plates surrounding the wonderful Pacific Plate. The tectonic plates collide and slide on each other, one on the most sensitive of the other and under the other, causing eruptions and earthquakes. The circle measures approximately 25,000 miles in circumference and is the cause of recent eruptions in Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as earthquakes in Mexico, Taiwan and Alaska. Discover the volcanoes that can erupt at that time.
It’s one of the facts on Earth that all of its tectonic plates are moving, yet Australia is moving so fast that it wants to update maps and GPS systems: it moved approximately 1.50 meters between 1994 and 2016, according to National Geographic. Northwestern University geologist Christopher Scotese told the BBC that in about 50 million years Australia would clash with Southeast Asia. In about 250 million years, continents can merge back into an unmarried supercontinent, like Pangée. Be sure to get to Australia’s most popular tourist destinations before the mainland disappears!
Volcanic islands are quite simple to identify, however, some of the tactics in which volcanic activity shaped the land in its early days are not so easy to detect. One of the facts on Earth you probably wouldn’t know is that it was only in the 1960s that geologists learned that the 44-mile-wide depression on the floor of Yellowstone National Park was a volcanic caldera. Instead of a lava flow that shaped a mountain, such as Hawaii’s Mauna Kea and Mount St. Helens in Washington State, the eruptions in Yellowstone took the form of large explosions that actually caused the sinking of mountains and other topography. The volcano is still active, in fact, there is a liquid magma chamber below that feeds the geysers and hot springs of the park as Old Faithful. But the last primary eruption was about 630,000 years ago, and while lately there is no smart way to expect volcanic eruptions, scientists are also concerned about some other primary eruption. In fact, Ilya Bindeman, a geochemist at the University of Oregon, told The Washington Post that Yellowstone may also be “near the end of its evolution.” Check out those 20 amazing wildlife images at Yellowstone.
About three hundred million years ago, long before the formation of the Yellowstone volcano, an eruption in what is now China left a thick layer of ash over a swampy forest. The plants and trees of the Permian era have been fossilized and preserved. At that time, the continents were still united in a land mass; over the next few millennia, they separated into their existing positions and plants and animal life on Earth were immeasurably replaced. That’s why, when scientists noticed the fossilized forest a few years ago, they called it Pompeii Permian: they can see how the plants were distributed and noticed trees up to 80 feet high. (There were no conifers or flowering plants, all the plants were reproduced through spores, such as ferns, which were abundant.) “It’s beautifully preserved,” the university paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn told Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo. “We can stand there and locate a branch with the leaves attached, and then locate the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. If you enjoy these facts on Earth, look at the 14 terrifying prehistoric animals you’ll be glad to be missing.
There is a river in the Peruvian Amazon where the water temperature can cook unfortunate animals that fall into the water. Geophysicist Andrés Ruzo, whose Peruvian grandfather told him about the boiling river as a child, he continued to search for the mysterious site even though his teachers told him it would have to be a myth. When he discovered it, he was involved in the extraction of oil and fuel through the earth, but we decided it was an herbal feature: it is “a non-volcanic geothermal feature that flows at abnormally high rates,” he told National Geographic. This means that it is only very hot water (reaching about two hundred degrees Fahrenheit) that comes from very deep below the surface of the earth fast enough that it does not cool down before flowing into the river. Discover other herbal wonders in the world you’ve never heard of.
In one place in Ethiopia where 3 tectonic plates join, there is less than 8 inches of rain each year and the average daily temperature is 94 degrees Fahrenheit, the landscape looks like a view of another planet. The Danakil Depression is a component of the East African Rift Valley that, like the oceanic dorsal, is a position where tectonic plates are separated, allowing magma to leak onto the earth’s surface. Volcanic activity causes bubbling lava lakes, hot springs and small geysers. Heated groundwater brings dissolved mineral salts to the surface and, when water evaporates, there are multicolored deposit fields left. These 11 genuine positions look like optical illusions.
One of the most unexpected facts that Earth scientists discovered during the Danakil Depression, and in other regions with very hot hydrothermal vents, where a chemical-rich fluid escapes from the Earth’s surface, is that specialized organisms call them home. When this happens in the depths of the ocean, especially where sunlight cannot penetrate to allow image synthesis, microbes use chemo-ethnic processes to create biological matter from hydrogen sulfide, methane and other chemicals. Tubular worms and other animals that live near the vents harbor those microbes in their bodies. These are 20 of the most incredible underwater images ever taken.
Scientists have also been surprised by other vital bureaucracies in recent decades, especially the fungus Armillaria, a fungus that has proven to be a gigantic wonder. A scientist from Michigan discovered one in the early 1990s that weighed about 22,000 pounds and stretched over 37 acres; when scientists began competitively hunting the giant Armillaria, an Oregon pattern covering more than 2,400 acres was discovered. Researchers estimate his age at 8,650 years. This specific fungus becomes so giant (and escapes so effectively) because it develops root-shaped structures called rhizomorphs that get larger underground for miles. It grows in trees from below and can kill large tracts of forest, biologist Lszlo Nagy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences told The Atlantic. “Essentially, you can see total hills razed,” he said. Discover the strangest animal in each state.
Another example of life that seems where you least expect it is when living creatures fall from the sky into a typhoon, and yes, it actually happens. “The rains of frogs and toads, the rains of fish and the rains of colors – maximums not unusually red, yellow or black – are among the maximum non-unusual stories of strange rains, reported since ancient times,” writes Cynthia Barnett in her book, Rain : A natural and cultural history. Scientists who a sea tromba or tornado selects animals, dust, or other elements in one position and are dragged through the typhoon to another position where they fall. John Knox, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Georgia, told The Smithsonian Magazine that he had noticed that photographs of them fell to Earth two hundred miles from where they had been collected through twisters. Take a look at those other strange things that fell from the sky.
Dust can reach the environment even more than photographs or frogs, and in addition to causing a shower of strange colors, it can also cause the sky to become misty and cause asthma attacks on vulnerable people. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, millions of tons of desert dust blow across the Atlantic Ocean every year from Africa, adding Caribbean bevery onees to the sand and fertilizing Amazonian soil. Dust can also disrupt hurricane formation by suppressing cloud formation. Here are 23 desert landscapes that look like paintings.
One of the most attractive facts about Earth is that dust doesn’t just come from earth’s deserts; scientists recently collected dust samples from the higher environment that traveled here with comets. By reading the chemical composition of the particles, they can say that the dust is older than the solar system. “Our observations recommend that these exotic grains constitute the interstellar dust pre-sol surviving that shaped the same building blocks of planets and stars,” lead researcher Hope Ishii, of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said in a statement. “If we have the initial fabrics for planet formation 4.6 billion years ago at your fingertips, it is exciting and allows for a deeper understanding of the processes that have shaped and replaced them since then. Then read on to notice the most bewildering mysteries of the universe.
Sources:
The New York Times: “Rogue Giants at Sea”
National Ocean Service: “What is a rebel wave?”
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: “Mid-Ocean Ridges”
Hawaii Vulcanology Center: “Mauna Kea”
National Geographic: “The Ring of Fire”
Vox: “Another volcano erupted into the “Ring of Fire””
National Geographic: “Australia drifts so fast that GPS can’t stay active”
BBC: ‘In 250 million years, Earth will have a continent’
The Washington Post: “The Yellowstone Supervolcán is a crisis that will happen”
Gizmodo: “A 298 million-year-old ordinary forest discovered under china’s coal mine”
National Geographic: “This river kills the one who falls on it”
BBC: “This global alien is the position on the planet”
The New York Times: “Look at danakil’s depression and watch Mars look back”
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: “Life in Vents – Seeing”
The Atlantic: ‘The Secret of the ‘Giant Fungus’
Cynthia Barnett of Rain: a natural and cultural history
Smithsonian Magazine: “Strange Rain: Why Fish, Frogs and Golf Balls Fall from the Sky”
NASA Earth Observatory: ‘Here is the dust of the Sahara’
Berkeley Lab News Center: “Berkeley Lab Experiments Target Interstellar Dust to Solar System Formation”
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