TraveloCity

Saturday, 4 October 2014

Bamboo Forest, Japan

Image credits: Yuya Horikawa | Tomoaki Kabe

Friday, 3 October 2014

The Beautiful Red Beach of China

Red Beach, Panjin, China

Image credits: MJiA

Thursday, 2 October 2014

The World's Highest Waterfall - Angel Falls

Angel Falls is the highest in the world, with a height of 979 meters (3,212 ft) and a plunge of 807 meters (2,647 ft). The height of the falls is so great, that before getting anywhere near the ground, the water is atomized by the strong winds and turned into mist that can be felt a mile (1.6 km) away.

It is located in the Canaima National Park, an UNESCO World Heritage site in the Gran Sabana region of Bolivar State, Venezuela. It is one of the country’s top tourist destinations despite its isolated location. The base of the falls feeds into the Kerep River (alternatively known as the Rio Gauya), which flows into the Churun River, a tributary of the Carrao River.

The Natives in Venezuela had known about the "Salto Angel" since the beginning of time. Then United States pilot Jimmie Angel was flying over the area in 1935 when he landed on the top of a lone mountain in search of gold. His plane got stuck in the boggy jungle on top of the mountain and he noticed a pretty impressive waterfall plunging thousands of feet down. He wasn't too happy about the 11 mile hike back to civilization, and his plane remained stuck and rusting upon the mountain as a monument to his discovery. Soon the whole world would know about the falls, which came to be known as Angel Falls, after the pilot who "discovered" them.

The Blood Falls of Antartica

The Taylor Glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica flows a curious blood-red colored water. When it was first discovered by geologist Griffith Taylor in 1911, the color was thought to have come from an algae. The source of the red color was later discovered to be an iron-rich underground saltwater lake that was trapped by the encroaching glacier at least 1.5 million years ago. The temperature of the water is -5 Celsius, but it's so salty that it doesn't freeze.

But the Blood Falls houses another secret, which scientists from Harvard University have started to uncover - it's home to an entire ecosystem of bacteria, trapped for millennia in conditions that are extremely inhospitable to life.

Roughly two million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. With no light or free oxygen and little heat, the microbes had no chance of getting energy through photosynthesis. Instead, the microbes started to live off the minerals that were trapped in the lake with them, evolving independently of the rest of the living world.

The existence of the Blood Falls ecosystem shows that life can exist in the most extreme conditions on Earth.

The fascinating secrets that remain locked inside the inaccessible sub-glacier lake will help scientist understand the range of conditions to which life can adapt and to advance assessment of the possibility of life elsewhere in the solar system, in places such as Mars or Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter. Indeed, scientists of the NASA Astrobiology Institute speculate that these worlds could contain subglacial liquid water environments favorable to hosting elementary forms of life, which would be better protected at depth from ultraviolet and cosmic radiation than on the surface.