The incredible beauty of amazing natural phenomena

Incredible natural phenomena never cease to amaze us. There are many beautiful corners of unearthly beauty on our planet, the very sight of which takes your breath away. The Earth is much more amazing than you can imagine: some of its phenomena are so rare that perhaps you have never heard of them, while they are fantastically beautiful. Do you want to make sure of this? In this issue we will tell you about the most amazing phenomena on planet Earth.

On one of the beaches in New Zealand, near the village of Moreaki, huge spherical stones were found. The unusual shape and size of the stones, which were called "seaaks", attract tourists like a magnet. Two-thirds of the stones have a diameter of 1.5 to 2.2 meters, and the largest are 3 meters.

Moreaki stones consist mainly of mud, silt and clay, which are frozen in rock-forming calcite. According to a legend that exists among the locals, these are the remains of pumpkins and sweet potato tubers that the sea threw ashore from the sinking canoe of the ancestors of the indigenous inhabitants of these lands.

The near horizon arc, or fiery rainbow— is a unique optical phenomenon that represents a horizontal rainbow. It appears in the sky when the sun's rays pierce ice crystals in cirrus clouds. At the same time, the angle of inclination of the sun above the horizon should be greater than 58 degrees. The refraction of light in such conditions makes the colors of the near-horizon arc cleaner than the colors of an ordinary rainbow.

A fiery rainbow usually appears low above the horizon. Colored arcs can be seen mainly in the middle latitudes from May to August, only about 200 hours a year.

Vertical rays of light or light columns going straight into the sky look like something unearthly. This phenomenon occurs when light is reflected from almost vertically falling ice crystals. As a rule, such beams of light can be observed when the sun is low above the horizon - immediately after sunrise or before sunset.

Shimmering blue waves can be seen very rarely and in only a few places in the world. The luminescent glow of the water is due to the organisms living in it - plankton and algae. In the light of day, they look very nondescript, rather like a brown spot on the water. And at night, as a result of the biochemical processes taking place in them, a spectacular glow begins, from which it is impossible to take your eyes off.

This is a beautiful and fascinating phenomenon that can be seen mainly in warm seas, where plankton and algae with luminescent properties live. In the photo you can see how its author "bombarded" plankton with stones, and such beautiful glowing "explosions" turned out.

These frozen bubbles, resembling champagne bubbles, are very beautiful, but very dangerous. You can meet them on Lake Abraham in Canada, but we do not recommend smokers to go there, and all because inside the bubbles there is not air, but a combustible gas — methane. If you pierce a bubble near a fire, it will explode, throwing up flames.

Do you know where the methane came from in the bubbles? This is due to... bacteria. When fallen leaves and dead animals sink to the bottom of the lake, bacteria feed on them, releasing methane at the same time. And upon contact with frozen water, methane collects in white pockets of ice.

Monarch butterflies are known for their mass migrations: hundreds of thousands of these insects from North America rush south, traveling vast distances to overwinter there. According to scientists, for the winter in About 14 million individuals of this species arrive in Mexico.

Forests where monarch butterflies come to winter, from such an abundance of these creatures change their color from green to orange. In some parts of Mexico, butterflies occupy an area of up to 8 hectares. It happened that tree branches broke under the weight of several thousand butterflies.

12. The phenomenon you see in this photo occurs when a tidal wave collides with water from a river or bay flowing in the opposite direction. This happens in places where the difference between the water level before and after high tide is more than 6 meters. In Europe, this phenomenon can be observed in the UK and in France.

Zeus himself would have been afraid of such a thunderstorm. This unusual phenomenon occurs only in Venezuela — at the place where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo. Such thunderstorms are not uncommon here: they form from 140 to 160 times a year and can last up to 10 hours. Within just one hour, about 280 lightning bolts appear in the sky, which reach a length of 2 to 10 kilometers or even more. It is believed that the Venezuelan thunderstorm is the world's largest ozone generator. And lightning flashes are visible from a distance of hundreds of kilometers, so the phenomenon is called the "Maracaibo Lighthouse".

For many years, scientists have been trying to find out the reason for the formation of these unusual "magic circles" in the Namib desert in southwestern Africa. The diameter of the circles can reach from 2 to 15 meters. The indigenous inhabitants of the desert believe that it is the gods who leave footprints when stepping on the ground. According to scientists, the most likely cause of the emergence of magic circles in the desert is the vital activity of termites that feed on the roots of grass and just "eat it out".