Incredible natural
phenomena
Honduras’ rain of fishes
The Rain of Fish is common in Honduran Folklore. It occurs in the
Departamento de Yoro, between the months of May and July. Witnesses of
this phenomenon state that it begins with a dark cloud in the sky
followed by lightning, thunder, strong winds and heavy rain for 2 to 3
hours. Once the rain has stopped, hundreds of living fish are found on
the ground. People take the fish home to cook and eat them. Since 1998 a
festival known as “Festival de la Lluvia de Peces” (Rain of Fish
Festival) is celebrated every year in the city of Yoro, Departamento de
Yoro, Honduras.
Venezuela’s everlasting storm
The mysterious “Relámpago del Catatumbo” (Catatumbo lightning) is a
unique natural phenomenon in the world. Located on the mouth of the
Catatumbo river at Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela), the phenomenon is a
cloud-to-cloud lightning that forms a voltage arc more than five
kilometre high during 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours a night, and as
many as 280 times an hour. This almost permanent storm occurs over the
marshlands where the Catatumbo River feeds into Lake Maracaibo and it is
considered the greatest single generator of ozone in the planet, judging
from the intensity of the cloud-to-cloud discharge and great frequency.
The area sees an estimated 1,176,000 electrical discharges per year,
with an intensity of up to 400,000 amperes, and visible up to 400 km
away. This is the reason why the storm is also known as the Maracaibo
Beacon as light has been used for navigation by ships for ages. The
collision with the winds coming from the Andes Mountains causes the
storms and associated lightning, a result of electrical discharges
through ionised gases, specifically the methane created by the
decomposition of organic matter in the marshes. Being lighter than air,
the gas rises up to the clouds, feeding the storms. Some local
environmentalists hope to put the area under the protection of UNESCO,
as it is an exceptional phenomenon, the greatest source of its type for
regenerating the planet’s ozone layer.
Morocco’s climbing goats
Goats on trees are found mostly only in Morocco. The goats climb them
because they like to eat the fruit of the argan tree, which is similar
to an olive. Farmers actually follow the herds of goats as they move
from tree to tree. Not because it is so strange to see goats in trees
and the farmers like to point and stare, but because the fruit of the
tree has a nut inside, which the goats can’t digest, so they spit it up
or excrete it which the farmers collect.
The nut contains 1-3 kernels, which can be ground to make argan oil
used in cooking and cosmetics. This oil has been collected by the people
of the region for hundreds of years, but like many wild and useful
things these days, the argan tree is slowly disappearing due to
over-harvesting for the tree’s wood and overgrazing by goats. As a
result a group of people and organizations have banded together to try
to save the tree. To do so one of the primary locations where the trees
grow has been declared a biosphere preserve.
It was also decided that by making the world aware of the oil, it’s
great taste and supposed anti-aging properties, would create a demand
for it. However, the people who planned to market the oil could not
envision people wanting to put an oil on their food or their face that
was collected from goat excrement. As a result, a campaign is being led
to ban grazing on the trees by goats during certain parts of the year to
allow the fruit to ripen and fall off on its own. The fruit is then
collected and turned into oil by oil cooperatives. So far, this
arrangement seems to be working.
Kerala’s (extraterrestrial?) Red Rain
From 25 July to 23 September 2001, red rain sporadically fell on the
southern Indian state of Kerala. Heavy downpours occurred in which the
rain was coloured red, staining clothes with an appearance similar to
that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. It was
initially suspected that the rains were coloured by fallout from a
hypothetical meteor burst, but a study commissioned by the Government of
India found that the rains had been coloured by airborne spores from a
locally prolific terrestrial alga.
Then in early 2006, the coloured rains of Kerala suddenly rose to
worldwide attention after media reports of a conjecture that the
coloured particles were extraterrestrial cells, proposed by Godfrey
Louis and Santhosh Kumar of the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam.
The terrestrial origins of the solid material in the red rain were
supported by an investigation into the isotopic ratios of nitrogen and
carbon. |