Some Parts Are Downright
Alien-Looking
Ethiopia’s
Danakil Depression is a bizarre landscape worthy of the superlatives tossed at
it. Hottest. Driest. Lowest. Weirdest. Though simmering hot springs, poisonous
gases, crackling lava lakes, and salty mirages make the Danakil Depression seem
like one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, even here, life has found a
way. Multicolored hydrothermal vents are home to ecosystems that astrobiologists are now using
as analog in the search for life beyond Earth.
There Are Hidden Gems Beneath
Your Feet
Buried a
thousand feet underground, the gypsum pillars in Mexico’s appropriately named
Cave of Crystals are the largest natural crystals known. Some of the beams in the sweltering cave measure
more than 30 feet long. You might think it hard for Earth to hide such a
glittering crystalline trove, but the cave was only discovered in 2000, when
silver miners accidentally broke through its walls.
Some of Its Clouds Are
Alive
Sometimes, at
dusk, dark shape-shifting clouds appear near the ground. As they swirl and
morph, these clouds can seem positively alive—and it’s because they are. Formed
by hundreds or thousands of starlings flying in tandem, the phenomenon is known
as a murmuration. Scientists suspect the birds engage in this mesmerizing display when
they’re looking for a spot to roost or evading predators
There’s an Underwater
Meadow
Who is the
oldest of them all?
The
Mediterranean’s most widespread seagrass, named Posidonia, after the Greek god Poseidon, is also
thought be among the oldest known living things on Earth: Genetic sequencing recently revealed that
an expansive Posidonia meadow growing off the coast of Spain
could be as many as a hundred thousand years old.
One River Is Boiling
Once thought to be the simple stuff of legend, a boiling river hidden
deep in the Peruvian Amazon actually exists. OK, it’s not actually boiling, but
the river comes within a few degrees of that mark, and it’s still hot enough to
transform an already otherworldly rain forest into a steaming, mystical
paradise that can cook clumsy small animals alive.
There’s no doubt that planet Earth is
awe-inspiring. That’s even more true for the handful of humans who’ve seen it
from space with their own eyes.
“We tend to think of ourselves as a weird, tiny
little human being on a very large, powerful planet, and therefore clearly
irrelevant to anything that might affect the planet at a planetary scale,” says former NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, who in 1984 became the first U.S. woman to walk
in space. “In some ways that’s true. But if you step back and look at the
planet in total, you see how richly interconnected and intertwined all the
actual systems are.”
It Has a Supersized Moon
Sunday evening marked the most recent rising of the
supermoon, but regardless of how large Earth’s moon appears in the
sky on any given night, it’s always among the solar system’s most overgrown
satellites.
Millions and millions of
bats—giant fruit bats, to be exact—fly between the Democratic Republic of Congo
and Zambia’s Kasanka National Park each year.