Transcript File - Ms. Hendery`s Class

Creating Your Own Myth
Natural Phenomenons
Dirty thunderstorms, aka volcanic lightning, occur
when lightning is produced in a volcanic plume.
Flammable ice bubbles: frozen bubbles of
methane, trapped beneath Alberta’s Lake Abraham.
Christmas Island’s Red Crabs: Each year an
estimated 43 million land crabs migrate to lay their
eggs in the ocean.
Monarch butterflies: The eastern North American population is notable for its
southward late summer/autumn migration from the USA and Canada to Mexico,
.
covering thousands of kilometers
Namibia’s mysterious Fairy Circles: Studies suggest
that a sand termite is responsible for their creation.
Underwater crop circles in the ocean off Japan:
created by a male pufferfish in order to woo
females.
Spherical boulders in New Zealand: exhumed from
the mudstone enclosing them by coastal erosion.
The Great Blue Hole: a large submarine sinkhole off
the coast of Belize, over 300m across and 124m
deep.
The Black Sun: Huge flocks of up to 50,000 starlings
form in areas of the UK just before sundown during
mid-winter. They are known as murmurations.
The Sardine Run: occurs from May through July when billions of
sardines move north along the east coast of South Africa. Their
sheer numbers create a feeding frenzy along the coastline.
The Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland: an area of
about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the
result of an ancient volcanic eruption.
Sailing stones in Death Valley, USA: a geological
phenomenon where rocks move and inscribe long tracks
along a smooth valley floor without human or animal
intervention.
Tidal bores on the Amazon in Brazil and the Severn in England: a
tidal phenomenon in which the leading edge of the incoming
tide forms a wave of water that travels up a river against the
flow.
The Flowering Desert: occurs in the Atacama Desert, Chile, in
years when rainfall is unusually high. Normally the region
receives less than 12mm of rain annually.
Circumhorizontal arcs, misleadingly known as fire
rainbows: an optical phenomenon featuring an ice
halo formed by plate-shaped ice crystals in high
level cirrus clouds.
Lenticular clouds over Mount Olympus: stationary
lens-shaped clouds that form in the troposphere.
Because of their shape, they have been offered as
an explanation for some UFO sightings.
Polar stratospheric clouds: also known as nacreous
clouds (from nacre, or mother of pearl, due to their
iridescence).
waves”: This cloud formation has been proposed as
a separate cloud classification by the founder of
the Cloud Appreciation Society and would be the
first new type of cloud recognised since 1951.
Tanzania’s Lake Natron: a salt lake fed by mineral-rich hot
springs that is the only regular breeding area in East Africa for
the 2.5 million lesser flamingoes.
Canada’s saline endorheic alkali Spotted Lake:
contains some of the highest quantities of
magnesium sulfate, calcium and sodium sulphates
in the world.
Bioluminescent waves on a beach in the Maldives: Various
species of phytoplankton are known to bioluminesce; when
washed ashore by the tides, their chemical energy is turned into
light energy.
Bioluminescent dinoflagellates + the right
conditions = Red Tide: a condition where the
dinoflagellates become so numerous that the water
takes on a muddy reddish colour.
Light pillars: an optical phenomenon formed by the
reflection of sunlight or moonlight by ice crystals
that are present in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Frost flowers: ice crystals commonly found growing
on young sea ice and thin lake ice in extremely
cold, calm conditions nearing -22C or -7.6F.
The Moskstraumen is a tidal whirlpool, one of the
strongest in the world, that forms in the Norwegian
Sea*.