A unicorn of the sea somehow ended up separated from other narwhals. Luckily, the lost narwhal was welcomed into a pod of beluga whales, where they were spotted frolicking in the St. Lawrence River. Read the rest
Great Whites travel months to visit what The San Francsico Chronicle describes as a "shark lair" in the Pacific Ocean. Mystified scientists took a deeper look. Read the rest
Yan Wang Preston left a medical career because she was drawn to nature photography. Her fascinating shots of old-growth trees replanted in urban areas is both beautiful and depressing. Read the rest
Birgit Schlosser specializes in spare, clean architecture photography, and that aesthetic is also in play in Volcanic Dreamscapes, a new series of works depicting the beauty of sparse volcanic ecosystems. Read the rest
Mudslides cascading down from the steep Swiss mountains are common enough that locals knew to come out and watch them, but even jaded locals were surprised by the intensity of slides so big they didn't fit under the bridges. Read the rest
Sharp-eyed ornithologists noticed that some specimens of Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise that they observed looked different enough that they may be a separate species. They captured video of the other kind for comparison. Read the rest
Shape of Life is a classic series produced by Sea Studios Foundation. Here, they show how sponges feed by placing harmless dye around the outside of a sponge. Read the rest
Conservationist, entomologist, and photographer Phil Torres recorded this enchanting slow-motion video of hummingbirds in the cloud forest of Sumaco, Ecuador. He used Moment lenses Read the rest
Photographer Barry Kusuma shares this beautiful and relaxing footage of his visit to Thailand's Lake Nong Han, nicknamed the Red Lotus Sea. Read the rest
Fly Geyser was accidentally created in 1964 by well drilling for geothermal energy. In the ensuing half century, the continuously-spouting geyser has accumulated quite a mound of travertine terraces from dissolved minerals. Read the rest
Like most salt flats, Salinas Grande in Argentina has a short but glorious window where the skies open and deluge the desert with a thin layer of water. El Tribuno de Jujuy captured this lovely drone footage of the phenomenon. Read the rest
Jesse Watson captured this perfectly-timed footage of a massive dust cloud roiling across the Arizona desert at sunset. Read the rest
A scuba diver in shallow water was surprised to see what looked like a "ghostly apparition" coming toward her. It turned out to be a rare albino stingray. Read the rest
Le Morne Brabant on the southwest coast of Mauritius has a cool optical illusion offshore: water flowing between two reefs pulls sand out to sea, giving the appearance of an underwater waterfall.
YouTuber RubenMRU says:
So the day after my birthday this year saw one of my dreams come true... Vassen Kauppaymuthoo of Delphinium Ltd took me out on a boat trip to the south west coast of Mauritius and we've captured the now famous Underwater waterfall of Mauritius... Now it's not really a waterfall, it only appears to be one from above - this illusion is caused by the trails of sand on the sea floor, being dragged away by water going between the opening in the reefs
Earthporn has some other lovely images:
Some good ones on Instagram, too:
View this post on Instagramdiscovered the underwater "waterfall" is real.. i still can't comprehend how places like this exist
β’ 2018-06-12 - Mauritius's Underwater Waterfall (YouTube / ReubenMRU) Read the rest
The little pink-edged ferns above are Azolla filiculoides, and they're smaller than a fingernail. Scientists just made it the first fern to get its genome sequenced because of its potential for fertilizing and even cooling the planet. Fifty million years ago, it was so abundant as ocean blooms that it helped cool the earth's atmosphere. Via Quartz:
This great Azolla boom was so successful that it lasted for 800,000 years, and is now known to paleobotanists as the βAzolla event.β Green plants suck up carbon dioxide; Azolla is particularly good at doing so. Over that period, researchers believe it sequestered about 10 trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the Earthβs atmosphere, or well over 200 times the total amount of carbon dioxide humans currently release into the atmosphere every year.
During the Azolla boom, global temperatures plummeted, suggesting the diminutive fern βplayed a key role in transitioning Earth from a hot house to the cool place it is today,β Fay-Wei Li, a plant evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, said in a press release. As Yaleβs E360 pointed out, scientists have wondered for years if Azolla could be harnessed to cool the planet again.
View this post on Instagram
β’ This teeny tiny fern may hold a key to lowering global temperatures (Quartz) Read the rest
Echinopsis cactus flowers explode in a riot of colors in this beautiful timelapse work by YouTuber EchinopsisFreak. In the example above, blooms somehow synchronize their brief appearance to maximize the chance of pollination. Read the rest
Landscape photographer Michael Kenna just had a big retrospective of his tree photography, prompting renewed interest in how he got so many amazing images. Read the rest
