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55.1%ANMag Issue 17 Global Awareness
The Seven Natural Wonders of the World - Part II of II
By Ghassan Teffaha, Staff Writer
Beirut, Lebanon - Part II - Unlike the previous wonders discussed in ANMag, the Seven Natural Wonders of the World were not made or improved upon by humans; they were formed over millions of years without human contribution.
The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro, located in the City of Rio on the eastern coast line of Brazil in Latin America. The city gets its name from the Portuguese explorers who used to sail down the Brazilian coast in the sixteenth-century in order to further explore the New World. The sailors kept track of their findings by naming them after the day and date of their exploration. On New Year's Day, 1502, they glided toward a narrow opening in the coastline, guarded by fabulously shaped mountains. Beyond this entrance lay a body of water stretching 35 km inland. Convinced that they had reached the mouth of a great river, they named the Area, River of the First of January which in Portuguese is Rio de Janeiro.
Their newly-found river was actually an island-studded bay that the locals had long before named Guanabara which means “arm of the sea” in the native language. Guarding the entrance to the bay, the naked and lopsided mountain the Portuguese called “Pao de Acucar” evoked the sugarloaves fashioned on the island of Madeira. They called the highest mountain Corcovado - "the hunchback" - for its humped profile. Today, the very famous statue of Christ the Redeemer crowns the 2,300-foot-high peak.
The bay's vastness has been shrinking. With usable land at a premium, landfill has twice altered Guanabara Bay's contours, in the 1920s and again in the 1960s. The new land now anchors an airport, a six-lane highway, parkland and beaches, the city's modern art museum, and other twentieth-century landmarks as Rio looks to its great bay for elbow room.
Paricutin Volcano is a volcano located in the state of Michoacán west of Mexico. Discovered On the afternoon of February 20, 1943, by a Mexican farmer, it began as a fissure in a cornfield owned by that farmer who along with his wife and son witnessed the initial eruption of ash and stones first-hand as they plowed the field. Much of the volcano's growth occurred during its first year, while it was still in the explosive phase. Nearby villages Paricutín (after which the volcano was named) and San Juan Parangaricutiro were both buried in lava and ash; the residents relocated to vacant land nearby. No one died from the Parícutin volcano.
At the end of this phase, after roughly one year, the volcano had grown 336 meters tall. For the next eight years, the volcano continued erupting, although this was dominated by relatively quiet eruptions of lava that scorched the surrounding 25 km² of land. The volcano's activity slowly declined during this period until the last six months of the eruption, during which violent and explosive activity was frequent. In 1952, the eruption ended and Parícutin went quiet, reaching a final height of 424 meters above the cornfield from which it was born. The volcano has been quiet since. Like most cinder cones, Parícutin is a monogenetic volcano, which means that it will never erupt again.
The scientific world was almost as stunned as the hapless farmer himself by the volcano's sudden appearance. Around the world, volcanic eruptions are commonplace, but the birth of an entirely new volcano is genuinely rare.
The Northern Lights is a bright glow observed in the night sky, usually in the polar zone. It is also known as Aurora Borealis which brings together two mythological deities; Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, and Boreas, Greek god of the north wind. It is mostly observed in Europe where it often appears as a reddish glow on the northern horizon, as if the sun were rising from an unusual direction. The Aurora Borealis is also called the northern lights, since it is only visible in the North sky from the Northern Hemisphere. The Aurora Borealis most often occurs from September to October and from March to April. This phenomenon has awed and terrified northern peoples for thousands of years. To the Finns the aurora was called fox fire. Some Alaskan Inuit saw the dancing souls of deer, seals, salmon, and beluga, while others believed that if they whistled, the lights might snatch them away. The Athabascan saw messages from their dead or what they called the sky dwellers.
Auroras are now known to be caused by the collision of charged particles (e.g. electrons) found in the magnetosphere, with atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere (at altitudes above 80 km). These charged particles are typically energized to levels between 1 and 15 Kelvin and as they collide with atoms of gases in the atmosphere the atoms become energized. Shortly afterwards, the atoms emit their gained energy as light. Light emitted by the Aurora tends to be dominated by emissions from atomic oxygen, resulting in a greenish glow especially at lower energy levels and at higher altitudes. In addition to visible light, auroras emit infrared and ultraviolet rays as well as X-rays. While the visible light emissions of auroras can easily be seen on Earth, the UV and X-ray emissions are best seen from space, as the Earth's atmosphere tends to absorb and attenuate these emissions.