Despite the numerous contributions made by modern scientists to our understanding of the world and everything in it, there are still many things we don’t know or aren’t certain about. While other events are more sensible from our perspective, they are so infrequent that when they do occur, they appear out of this world. Let’s now consider of uncommon or unusual abnormalities that have occurred in various parts of the world.
A Blooming Sahara Desert
A blooming desert is truly an amazing sight to see. A simple thing like a freak storm can kick-start plants and flowers blooming in places that would otherwise seem completely devoid of life. Nevertheless, this phenomenon, though beautiful, is only temporary and soon enough the landscape will inevitably turn desolate once again. The Sahara Desert, for instance, has seen three major periods in which sand dunes turned into lush savannah grasslands over the past 120,000 years.
The Guatemalan Sinkhole of 2010
Guatemala City, the country’s capital, back in 2010. It almost looks man-made, as if someone took one of those tunnel boring machines and pointed it straight down. And even though that scenario might sound cool, what really happened is even stranger. As it turns out, leaking pipes are mainly to blame here. Bonis suspects that the city’s poor infrastructure led to water seeping into the ground over a long period of time and slowly eroding it.
The Disappearance of an Entire Canadian River
While on a fieldwork expedition to the Slims River basin in early 2017, in Canada’s remote Yukon Territories to the Northwest, a team of geologists from the University of Washington Tacoma came upon an incredible discovery. When they got there, they discovered that the 1,575-foot wide river had simply disappeared. The once mighty river that flowed through the region had. Not knowing what to make of it, they took the helicopter upriver in an effort to find the source of the problem.
Poisonous Spiders Invade Indian Village
Back in 2012, during an annual festival in Sadiya in northeastern India, a swarm of spiders descended upon the town out of nowhere, creating a panic and biting people at random. The spiders even ended up killing two in the process – one of those victims being a schoolboy. Scientists from Dibrugarh University and Gauhati University later came on the scene, but were unable to identify the arachnid attackers.
The 1986 Lake Nyos Catastrophe
On the morning of the August 22, 1986, people living in settlements surrounding Lake Nyos in Cameroon woke up to a grisly sight. During the night, some 1,700 people and over 3,500 livestock got asphyxiated within just minutes. Only a handful of people managed to survive, surrounded everywhere by the bodies of animals and of their loved ones.