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John and Kay Ure live in a former lighthouse keeper’s cottage at the edge of a cliff on the coast of northern Scotland. On December 19th, Kay Ure left to go buy a Christmas turkey in Inverness. Before she could return, a snowstorm blocked the road and she had to stay in the village of Durness, eleven miles from home.
Mr Ure spent Christmas and New Year on his own and celebrated his 58th birthday last Sunday with a tin of baked beans.
Yesterday, for the first time since mid-December, he managed to drive 11 miles to a small jetty and cross the Kyle of Durness by boat to collect his wife and the turkey.
The couple run the country’s “most isolated tearoom” at the end of an ungritted army road and were forced to spend their first festive season apart in 35 years.
John Ure was down to emergency rations before he could drive to town. He said reuniting with his wife was like a “second honeymoon”. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: Peter Jolly)
Unusually cold temperatures in southern Florida are causing a novel problem -falling iguanas. Iguanas are an invasive species in Florida due to pet owners abandoning the lizards. When the temperature falls below 40 degrees, they automatically begin to hibernate and fall out of the trees they live in. Ron Magill of Miami Metrozoo has a warning for those who find the iguanas.
“I knew of a gentleman who was collecting them off the street and throwing them in the back of his station wagon, and all of a sudden these things are coming alive, crawling on his back and almost caused a wreck,” Magill said.
The stories of “kamikaze iguanas” plummeting from trees were urban legends in Florida, but now have a plausible explanation. Link (with video)
Weather is explained in Star Wars terms on this site. Enter a city and get the current conditions, whether it’s like Hoth, Endor, Tatooine, Naboo, or some other planet in the Star Wars universe. Enter a city it doesn’t have listed, and the result will be Alderaan, meaning not there. Link -via b3ta
Remember the old saying that everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it? Well, not China! The country has a Weather Modification Office that aims to control the weather:
Chinese meteorologists say they brought about Beijing’s earliest snowfall in a decade, after seeding rain clouds with silver iodide to ease a drought.
The Weather Modification Office sprayed clouds with 186 doses of the chemical to bring rain for the wheat crop, the Beijing Evening News said.
But the arrival of a cold front caused heavy snow to fall, disrupting road, rail and air travel.
We live in a very bizarre world with all kinds of forces playing against each other. Between electricity, wind, atmospheric pressure and plasmas, there are some very specific combinations that, when paired together just right, can create incredibly strange phenomena. Here are a few examples of what nature is capable of – many of these occurrences are so extraordinary they have yet to be explained.
Red sprites are weak, but massive red flashes in the sky that appear above active thunder storms. While people claimed to have seen things that were probably red sprites in the past, the documentation of these phenomena are still relatively new – the first accidental images of red sprites were captured in 1989. Part of the reason we learned about them so late is that they only last for a few milliseconds. One thing that at least makes them a little easier to trace is the fact that sprites rarely occur alone; there are usually clusters of three or more together at once.
Because the phenomena are still so new to scientists, there is no official explanation for the cause of these flashes. However, evidence suggests they tend to occur in decaying portions of storms and are somehow created by the discharge of positive energy created by large cloud-to-ground lightning rays.
Blue jets are closely related to red sprites, as they are observed in many of the same storm settings. These phenomena are upward cones of bright blue light that appears to be coming out of the cloud above thunder storms. Similar to red sprites, they were not discovered until 1989.
Blue jets are not directly related to lightning like red sprites are and they are less common. They do seem to be more common in storms that involve hail. Scientists are still very unsure why blue jets occur, but they believe they are related to the collection or discharge of energy from lightning storms. The bright blue color is believed to be related to molecular nitrogen emissions when they collide with oxygen at a high speed.
St. Elmo’s fire is a eerie, but beautiful phenomenon where luminous blue plasma shoots from the extremities of an object. It was most commonly seen on ships in the olden days, which is why it was named for St. Erasmus, the patron saint of sailors. Anything with a point may be subject to St. Elmo’s fire, including cattle horns.
The “fire” occurs when a grounded object is inside of an atmospheric electric field, usually in a thunderstorm. What you see is actually plasma created by a discharge of energy on the point.
Image Via Cop4cbt
Fire whirls are created by two distinct factors, either a tornado that spins too close to a forest fire, or a whirling vortex of flame occurring in an area due to too much heat in a close proximity. The image above shows an artificially created fire whirl. Some whirls reach over a half a mile high.
These whirls are, not surprisingly, extraordinarily dangerous. In the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Japan, a fire whirl was created in a massive firestorm. The whirl alone killed 38,000 people who were packed into an open space in the Former Army Clothing Depot during the earthquake.
Fire whirls are created when a warm updraft converges with the wildfire. Most fire whirls are between 30 and 200 feet tall and under 10 feet wide. They generally last no more than a few minutes, but some have lasted as long as 20.
Image Via Hanroanu
Waterspouts look like mini-tornados made of water and they are always located below a cloud and above a body of water. While they seem to suck up liquid from the water they are located above, they are actually made of water droplets formed by condensation.
While there are occasionally strong water spouts, most are weak and caused by the clash of atmospheric dynamics forming a vortex. In most cases, waterspouts are created while the cloud they are attached to is still developing.
In one month of 2001, colored rain fell on the Kerala region of India. Most of the rains were red, but some where yellow, green or black. Many compared the red rain to blood, making it quite a terrifying spectacle for anyone superstitious. There have been stories about red rain sightings in the area as early as 1896, but none were so long-lasting or vivid as the 2001 downpour.
A number of theories spread about the cause of the colored rain, including its relation to aliens, before an official report concluded that the colors were caused by algae spores sucked into the atmosphere by a waterspout. There are a number of these algae species in the region, which could explain why the stories were so constant for the last hundred years.
Scientists believe those pesky waterspouts are responsible for one of the most bizarre weather experiences in the world, the dropping of animals from the sky. Many different animals have rained from the sky, including frogs, birds, bats, worms and fish. Some animals actually survive the process, but most die in the fall. In some cases, the animals actually freeze to death while in the clouds and dropped to the ground in an ice casing.
Waterspouts seem like the most likely causes of these events because the high-speed winds can lift animals into the air and carry them for lengthy distances. One thing that still baffles scientists though is why each incident only involves one specific species of animal, where in most cases a waterspout seems to be likely to suck up multiple similarly-sized animals in one area.
While this bizarre weather event is a rare occurrence in most places, it is actually common in Honduras, where the residents celebrate the yearly Lluvia de Peces (Rain of Fish). An even weirder aspect of this occurrence is the fact that the fish that are rained down do not live in the area at all. National Geographic researchers predict they live in underground water sources, but there is still no proof for this theory.
Birds and bats, of course, would be subject to a completely different process than the fish and frogs. In their case, it is most likely that the storm overtook them while in flight. Naturally, there is a lot less mystery and contention when it comes to these occurrences.
Image Via Simon Goldenberg [Flickr]
There were many times between 1813 and 1952 when London was overtaken with a thick, black fog. What made these fogs different than everyday fog most of us are familiar with is that in most instances, it actually killed people. The first event lasted for a week and visibility became so poor that even the most knowledgeable Londoners could no longer find their way through the city. In a 1873 black fog, the death rates in London were said to raise by 40%.
However, the real killer was the fog of January 26, 1880. The fog carried a thick mix of factory pollutants and coal smog that was heavy in sulfur dioxide. It stayed for three days and it is estimated that up to 12,000 people died from the fog. There were more fogs in following years that killed people, but it wasn’t til the fog of 1952 that killed 4,000 people until England finally took a stand to start fighting the pollution that made the fogs so deadly.
Photo: Mark Gallagher
Resembling something out of Independence Day, or the arrival of Cthulu, Mammatus Clouds are a meteorological phenomenon caused by sagging cellular accumulations produced in clouds of ice and water, and usually mean a fierce storm is trying to develop.
Tending to form in warmer months over the Midwest and eastern areas of the US, mammatus are nonetheless found elsewhere, as our chase across the States to track this singular meteorological phenomenon will reveal.
The above photograph was taken in Colorado, but Environmental Graffiti has a bunch of cool examples. The one from Tornado Alley state Oklahoma is particularly ominous.
Photo: Wikipedia by NOAA
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Most Awkward Chair Promo Ever
You know, this looks like a great chair – but do they have to focus so much on the benefits to the groin area? I don’t think I’ll be taking my underwear advice from them either. |
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Ice Circle – Extremely rare cold-weather phenomenon
A rare phenomenon usually only seen in extremely cold countries, scientists generally accept that Ice Circles are formed when surface ice gathers in the center of a body of water rather than the edges. |
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Quick-Peel An Egg
You might think you know how to peel an egg quickly, there are certainly a few techniques- but I’ve never seen one this fast. Save 4 years of your life. |
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Float plane takes off, almost hits guy filming, then crashes
De Havilland Beaver plane crash at Lake Hood in Anchorage AK, on June 7, 2009, apparently caused by a strong wind gust. None of the family of four and two dogs aboard were hurt. |
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EXTREME RICE!
Urrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!!! |
For more of the web’s most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
Sometimes the rarest and most mysterious things on our planet also become the most precious, intriguing and exciting. Why do rocks seem to move by themselves in the desert? How can an entire tide turn red or clouds look solid as far as the eye can see? This collection addresses some of the strangest wonders in the world – most of which you have likely never seen.
The classical natural wonders are huge and hard to miss – vast canyons, giant mountains and the like. Many of the most fantastic natural phenomena, however, are also least easy to spot. Some are incredibly rare while others are located in hard-to-reach parts of the planet. From moving rocks to mammatus clouds and red tides to fire rainbows, here are seven of the most spectacular phenomenal wonders of the natural world.
Web Urbanist has a great new post up of some really unique felines. There’s the cat that predicts death, the seeing eye cat, the station master kitty and more. Most of them, if not all, have already been featured on Neatorama, but it’s great to see these kitties all in one place.
(image credit: Luc Arnold)
Another tornado caught on camera. These weather phenomena never cease to amaze me but I’m glad I don’t live in an area where tornado formations are frequent.
Link: LiveLeak
I often wonder when these so called storm chasers will meet mother nature’s fury face to face only to end up dead. This clip demonstrates the braveness or stupidity (you be the judge) of these guys. And to top it off, they’re chasing the tornado with the car in reverse.
Source: LiveLeak
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