- Ball Lightning
- These atmospheric electrical phenomena have been considered a mystery over the years. Reports of spherical shaped floating "lightning balls" ranging from pea sized to meters wide have circulated, with varying descriptions of their behavior. Some accounts even state that ball lightning has entered buildings.
- Denmark's Black Sun
- In the marshlands of Denmark, up to a million migrational starlings gather in huge flocks and form tight formations in the sky together. The movement of the flock in the sky has been likened to a dance and seems to literally block the sun.
- Blue Holes
- Blue holes are holes in the ocean caused by giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation, hundreds of feet deep. From above, they look like dark blue circular punctures in the ocean. They are mostly oxygen deficient, due to the lack of water circulation, thus they are mostly devoid of sea life.
- Fire Rainbow
- When the sun is high and its light passes through certain cirrus clouds, sometimes a beautiful spectrum of color is produced, seemingly inside these clouds. This circumhorizon arc is an ice halo formed when light passes through the hexagonal ice crystals via a vertical side and leaves through the nearest horizontal bottom face. The rainbow of color looks like a burning fire, due to the thin, wispy shape of the clouds.
- Fire Whirl
- Also known as a fire tornado, these are rare natural phenomena that occurs under specific air and current conditions, sometimes during brush fires. A raging fire can sometimes develop a swirl and rise vertically, creating a tornado-like column of fire.
- Giant Snowflakes
- Giant snowflakes, as large as 15 inches (reported in 1887) but more commonly between less than half a foot across, have been seen over the years. These giant snowflakes contain hundreds of snow crystals sticking together as they fall. Conditions have to be perfect for this phenomenon to occur, with the right temperature for stickiness and a lack of wind to break them up.
- Ice Circles
- are pretty much what you’d expect from them. However, they’re very rare, appearing only in slow moving waters from cold climates such as Northern Europe or America, but some have also been spotted in Britain, including a huge one bigger than 3 meters . There are two types of ice circles. Here’s the general necessary conditions for the first type to form. No rain and temperatures below 0 Celsius for several days near a slow river bend. Thus, the water creates a force that is called ‘rotational shear’ and breaks a chunk of ice, twisting it around and grinding it to the surrounding ice, turning it into a perfect circle. The second type is perhaps even more spectacular. Also called ice pans, these formations are basically surface slabs of ice that form in the middle of the river, and not on its side. They’re explained by sudden shifts of temperature. As the water cools off, it gives away heat that creates frazil ice (randomly oriented ice needles loose in the water). These ice particles can of course form an ice pan, and if the lake has enough frazil ice and the current is slow enough, the ice pan can reach the sizes that baffle people and even become a hanging dam.
- Maelstrom
- When you hear a name like maelstrom, you just know it’s about something wicked. Introduced in English by Edgar Allan Poe from the Nordic languages, from which it came from the Dutch word maelstrom (maalstroom in modern spelling), it literally means crushing current, which is quite a very good description. A maelstom is basically a very big and powerful whirlpool, a free vortex; a free vortex with quite a downdraft. The original maelstrom was Moskstraumen, which is caused by a very powerful tidal current. Both Poe and Jules Verne depict it as a giant vortex that leads to the bottom of the ocean where it is in fact a crossroad of underwater currents. Well.. they were a bit off, but still, it’s quite a view to catch.
- Mammatus Clouds
- These clouds are the weirdest looking clouds I've seen (in pictures). They are ominous looking, bumpy, globular shaped, and indicate the onset of a storm. Individual formations can remain static for many minutes at a time.
- Moonbows
- We’ve all (probably) seen rainbows, at day. But how many of us have seen rainbows at night? This can actually happen, due to the light produced by the moon (thus moonbow, or lunar rainbow or white rainbow). Of course the light emitted by the moon is much much fainter than that of the sun, so as a result, so is the formed rainbow; most of the time, it’s even hard for the human eye to separate the colors there. The biggest chance you have of ever seeing a moonbow is when the moon is full (or near to full), when it’s the brightest, but there are other conditions required. The sky has to be very dark (close to black), and, of course, there must bee rain falling opposite to the moon.
- Penitentes
- These natural phenomena are snow formations that occur at high altitudes like mountain glaciers, in severely cold locations. They are thin spikes of hardened snow or ice, closely spaced together, up to 2 meters tall. They resemble a sea of blades or spikes varying from a few centimeters to two meters (or more) in diameter and can cover a vast area. They generally "follow the direction of the Sun."
- Honduras' Rain of Fishes
- The Rain of Fishes is a common yearly event between the months of May and July. Dark clouds roll in followed by lightning, thunder, heavy rain and wind for a couple hours. Once stopped, hundreds of living fish are found on the ground, waiting for people to take them home to eat. One theory that’s often accepted is the strong winds and waterspouts carry the fish from 200 km away. National Geographic sent a team to investigate the phenomenon though. Researchers discovered that the fish aren’t found in any surrounding bodies of water and are also blind, leading them to conclude that the fish come from underground rivers. Raining fish have been seen elsewhere occasionally. In Louisiana, 1947, in a one-hour span, thousands of freshwater fish fell in a 70,000-80,000-square-foot area. No unusual weather preceded the event.
- Sailing Stones
- Sailing stones are natural, geological phenomena in the baked desert of Death Valley. Large rocks (up to hundreds of pounds) move by themselves along the dirt ground, leaving smooth tracks behind them. Scientists have tried to explain their movements through winds and surface ice but those theories cannot explain why different rocks starting side by side move in different directions at different rates. Plus, rocks will move along a path and suddenly switch directions, stop or burst ahead.
- Supercells
- These rotating updrafts within severe thunderstorms are big and bloody scary. They can appear anywhere in the world given the right meteorological conditions, but most of the times they appear in the Great Plains of the US. They generally last a few hours sometimes split, with the two resulting storms going in opposite directions. The supercells usually produce large quantities of hail, torrential rainfall, strong winds, and substantial down-bursts. They are often carriers of giant hail. Scientists have quite an interest in supercells, because they’re dangerous.
- Waterspouts
- Waterspouts seem to be taken out of the Captain Planet series. A waterspout is in fact an intense columnar vortex that takes place over a mass of water and links it to a cumuliform cloud. Most of the time, they are weaker than land tornadoes, but some are extremely big and bring the water upward with immense speed and power. They can actually be tornadic or non-tornadic. The non-tornadic ones are more common and less dangerous with winds being slower than 70 mph (30 m/s). Tornadic waterspouts are similar at their core to a tornado, but they add huge masses of water to the show, making it a scenery hard to forget. The even rarer ‘cousin’ of the waterspout is the snowspout (or icespout). They are basically a very rare form of waterspouts that form at the base of a snow squall. There have only been six pictures taken of such an event.
- Waves of Fog
- In 2008, an odd storm over the Badlands in South Dakota produced some amazing fog. The fog was literally in gigantic waves passing over the land. Google "waves of fog Badlands," to see the amazing images.
apr 12 2011 ∞
jan 8 2014 +