The Beautiful Fukang Meteorite

The Fukang meteorite, believed to be some 4.5 billion years old, which is as ancient as Earth itself, was unearthed near a town of the same name in China, in 2000. It is a pallasite, a type of meteorite with translucent golden crystals of a mineral called olivine embedded in a silvery honeycomb of nickel-iron. It’s a gorgeous meteorite, and possibly the most stunning extraterrestrial piece of rock man has ever seen.

The Fukang meteorite was found by a hiker. The man had often stopped and had lunch on this giant rock, and he always wondered what the metal and crystals were. He finally took a hammer and chisel and broke some pieces off, which he sent to the USA to confirm that it was a meteorite.

The original meteorite weighted just over a thousand kilogram, but the rock was so brilliant that everybody wanted a piece of it. Since then it has been divided into dozens of thin slices and auctioned or distributed around the world.

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Colorful Danxia Landforms of China

The Danxia landform is a unique type of “petrographic geomorphology” found in China, characterized by strips of red sedimentary rock in steep cliffs. According to Wikipedia, “the landforms look very much like karst topography that forms in areas underlain by limestones, but since the rocks that form danxia are sandstones and conglomerates, they have been called "pseudo-karst" landforms.” A very peculiar feature of danxia landscape is the development of numerous caves of various sizes and shapes. The caves tend to be shallow and isolated, unlike true karst terrain where caves tend to form deep, interconnecting networks.

The word “Danxia” actually comes from Mount Danxia, located in Renhua County of Guangdong Province, where the most famous examples of the Danxia landform is seen. Over the past 70 years, geologists and geographers have identified over 700 Danxia landforms in China, mostly in southeast and southwest China. Today, the study of Danxia landforms has developed into a sub-discipline of geomorphology and Danxia Mountain has become China’s research base for Danxia landforms.

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Fire Rainbows: A Rare Cloud Phenomenon

“Fire Rainbows” are neither fire, nor rainbows, but are so called because of their brilliant pastel colors and flame like appearance. Technically they are known as circumhorizontal arc - an ice halo formed by hexagonal, plate-shaped ice crystals in high level cirrus clouds. The halo is so large that the arc appears parallel to the horizon, hence the name.

Brightly colored circumhorizontal arc occur mostly during the summer and between particular latitudes. When the sun is very high in the sky, sunlight entering flat, hexagon shaped ice crystals gets split into individual colors just like in a prism. The conditions required to form a “fire rainbow” is very precise – the sun has to be at an elevation of 58° or greater, there must be high altitude cirrus clouds with plate-shaped ice crystals, and sunlight has to enter the ice crystals at a specific angle. This is why circumhorizontal arc is such a rare phenomenon.

A colourful circumhorizon arc spans the sky near Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, in 2003.

The position of the observer is also important. Circumhorizontal arcs cannot be seen in locations north of 55°N or south of 55°S. Likewise there are certain times of the year when they are visible. For example, in London, England the sun is only high enough for 140 hours between mid-May and late July. While in Los Angeles, the sun is higher than 58 degrees for 670 hours between late March and late September.

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Dietmar Eckell’s Photos of Plane Wrecks With “Happy Ends”

Airplane wrecks usually denote tragedies, but photographer Dietmar Eckell aims to highlight the rare miracles from the history of aviation where everyone survived.

"'Happy End' is a photo-project about miracles in aviation history - 15 airplanes that had forced landings but all on board survived and were rescued from the remote locations," says Dietmar Eckell a photographer from Dusseldorf, Germany.

For nearly three years, Eckell trekked to extremely isolated locations across the world — nine countries on four continents — from Australia to Iceland looking for abandoned remains of plane wreckage. These planes have remain abandoned from anywhere between 10-70 years and have become part of the landscape. In the forests, trees grow through broken windows. In the desert, piles of sand conform to the shape of the fuselage. In the mountains, their gray metal innards start to resemble the rocks around them. According to Eckell, all wreckage involve stories of survival and sheer luck.

West Sahara

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Photographer Tracks Down Abandoned Sets From Star Wars in Tunisia

New York-based Italian photographer Rä di Martino first discovered the ruins of the sets of Star Wars and The English Patient near Chott el Djerid in Tunisi on Google Maps. Determined to get a first person view of the location, the visual artist and filmmaker travelled to Tunisia in September 2010 to track down the three Star Wars sets.

“With only my Google map as a guide, I struggled at first to find anything,” said Martino to The Guardian. “Then I met a driver who knew the desert well and offered to take me to the sites. We still ended up asking for directions at a police station and they told us it was 15km from the Algerian border – but only accessible by quad bike. Somehow we made it.”

Morroccan desert has long been used by Hollywood and European studios to depict anywhere from ancient Egypt to Jerusalem, Tibet to ancient Rome. There are huge re-creations of ancient Rome and Greece, a fake Mecca and a replica of an American gas station, which a homeless guy has moved into. After the shoot these were abandoned to become almost like archaeological sites.

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Art and Decor of Moscow Metro Stations

The Metro began operating in Moscow in 1935 with a single 11 km line connecting just thirteen stations, but it has since grown into the world’s fourth busiest transit system, spanning more than 300 kilometers and offering 188 stops along the way.

The Moscow Metro was one of the USSR’s most extravagant architectural projects, with stations constructed as luxurious “palaces for the people”. Built under the command of Stalin, the iron-fisted leader ordered the metro’s artists and architects to design a structure that embodied svet (radiance or brilliance) and svetloe budushchee (a radiant future). He directed his architects to design structures which would encourage citizens to look up, admiring the station’s art, as if they were looking up to admire the sun and—by extension—him as a god. With their reflective marble walls, high ceilings and grandiose chandeliers, many Moscow Metro stations have been likened to an “artificial underground sun”.

The art includes bas-reliefs, friezes, marble and bronze statues, stained-glass windows and countless mosaics made with glass, marble and granite in good Byzantine fashion. You can find the images of the former revolutionary and historical characters, their victories, sports, industry, agriculture, and warfare, as well as of common Soviet people such as workers, soldiers, farmers, and students.

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Waitomo Glowworm Caves, New Zealand

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves, located just outside the main Waitomo township on the North Island of New Zealand, is a famous attraction because of a sizeable population of glowworms that live in the caves. Glowworms or Arachnocampa luminosa are tiny, bioluminescent creatures that produce a blue-green light and are found exclusively in New Zealand.

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves were first explored in 1887 by local Maori Chief Tane Tinorau accompanied by an English surveyor Fred Mace. Local Maori people knew of the Caves existence, but the subterranean caverns had never been extensively explored until Fred and Tane went to investigate. They built a raft of flax stems and with candles in hand, floated into the cave where the stream goes underground.

As they entered the caves, they came across the Glowworm Grotto and were amazed by the twinkling glow coming from the ceiling. As they travelled further into the cave by poling themselves towards an embankment, they were also astounded by the limestone formations.

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Wadi Al-Salaam: The Largest Cemetery in The World

Wadi us-Salaam, which literally means the Valley of Peace, is an Islamic cemetery located in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq. The cemetery covers an area of 1485.5 acres and contains millions of bodies, making it one of the strongest contender for the title of the largest graveyard on earth. Najaf itself is one of Iraq's biggest cities, with a population of nearly 600,000. But the adjoining city of the dead holds the remains of millions, stretching for up to 10km along the valley. Wadi Al-Salam cemetery is also the only cemetery in the world where the process of burial is still continuing to day since more than 1,400 years.

The graveyard holds importance in Shiite belief as it has been said that the souls of all faithful men and women shall be moved there, no matter where their bodies have been buried. Many prophets, kings, princes and Sultans lie in this cemetery including that of Prophet Hud, Prophet Saleh, and Ayatullah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, as well as the remains of the prince of faithfuls, Ali Ibn Abi Talib.

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Impressive Artwork Made Out of Denim by Ian Berry

Ian Berry is a British born artist currently based in Sweden, who creates artwork solely from denim. Using old jeans, jackets, and other denim clothing, Berry creates monochromatic portraits, urbanscapes and other unique works. Berry even adopted the name Denium, the Japanese phonetic spelling of denim, to further emphasize his obsession with blue jeans.

To produce the works of art, Berry would cut pieces of denim into precise shapes before painstakingly gluing them all together. To achieve different looks, he sometimes uses bleach, either with a stencil and spray, or experiments with different color jeans.

“I was about 14 and we were going to a family party”, recalls Berry. “I wanted to wear my favorite pair of jeans, but my mum had other ideas. Out instead came the corduroy. I still remember feeling so self-conscious and uncomfortable, and not myself. How I wanted to be in my beloved denim, just like my cousins were wearing. A few years later I came across the very same pair, now unique through wear, on top of a pile of cast offs ready for the charity shop. I found myself staring at them, wishing I could still fit in them remembering the times when I could. I was transfixed by the ripped, faded beauty of the fabric.”

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Bunda Cliffs in Australia: Is this the End of the World?

Located on the Great Australian Bight in Southern Australia, is the vast, featureless Nullarbor Plain - the world’s largest single piece of limestone, covering an area of 270,000 square km and extending some 1,000 km from the east to the west. The area is so flat that the Trans Australian Railway runs across its surface for about 483 kilometers in a completely straight line. On the surface of the plain there are areas of slight depressions where sparse rainfall has slowly dissolved away some of the limestone. There are also places where underground caves or sinkholes have collapsed to form dents in the surface. But mostly, the plain is horizontally flat and devoid of trees, as its Latin name suggests. The Nullarbor Plain ends abruptly at the spectacular Bunda Cliffs, comprising a 200-kilometer-long precipice curving around the Great Australian Bight.

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