Dec
28

From the Department of Awesome Natural Wonders come these mysterious patterns on the ocean floor off the southern coast of Japan. Japanese scuba diver and photographer Yoji Ookata, who has spent the last 50 years exploring and documenting his underwater discoveries off the coast of Japan, spotted these beautiful and puzzling patterns in the sand, nearly six feet in diameter and 80 feet below sea level, during a dive near Amami Oshima at the southern tip of the country.

So what happened next? Are these rippling geometric patterns the equivalent of crop circles on the seafloor? Not quite, but the answer is still a good one. Colossal explains:

“He soon returned with colleagues and a television crew from the nature program NHK to document the origins what he dubbed the “mystery circle.”

Using underwater cameras the team discovered the artist is a small puffer fish only a few inches in length that swims tirelessly through the day and night to create these vast organic sculptures using the gesture of a single fin. Through careful observation the team found the circles serve a variety of crucial ecological functions, the most important of which is to attract mates. Apparently the female fish are attracted to the hills and valleys within the sand and traverse them carefully to discover the male fish where the pair eventually lay eggs at the circle’s center, the grooves later acting as a natural buffer to ocean currents that protect the delicate offspring. Scientists also learned that the more ridges contained within the sculpture resulted in a much greater likelihood of the fish pairing. To learn more about the circles check out the full scoop over on Spoon and Tamago, and you can see two high resolution desktop photos courtesy of NHK here.”

Busy little pufferfish boys wooing potential mates by sculpting the sand with their bodies. As far as we’re concerned, that’s pretty awesome!

[via Colossal]

The 2nd most popular Geyser of Awesome post of 2012 looks like it was made by a talented and adventurous artist, but it’s really a talented and patient puffer fish. 

(via archiemcphee)

Reblogged from archiemcphee

Dec
20

Oct
05

Earth Science is the broad term that incorporates all of the sciences related to our home planet and its atmosphere. One amazing phenomenon that takes place in Earth’s atmosphere is the aurora. ”An Aurora is a natural light display in the sky particularly in the high latitude (Arctic and Antarctic) regions, caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere (thermosphere).”

This incredibly awesome time-lapse video of the Aurora Borealis was shot with a special low-light 4K-camera by the crew of NASA expeditions 28 and 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011. 

Video edited by Michael König.

[via Colossal]

Anyone up for a field trip to outer space?

Jan
03

“An unexpected side-effect of the 2010 flooding in parts of Sindh, Pakistan, was that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters; because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water took so long to recede, many trees became cocooned in spiders webs. People in the area had never seen this phenomenon before, but they also reported that there were less mosquitoes than they would have expected, given the amount of standing water that was left. Not being bitten by mosquitoes was one small blessing for people that had lost everything in the floods.” Photo courtesy of Russell Watkins, U.K. Department for International Development [via My Modern Metropolis]

“An unexpected side-effect of the 2010 flooding in parts of Sindh, Pakistan, was that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters; because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water took so long to recede, many trees became cocooned in spiders webs. People in the area had never seen this phenomenon before, but they also reported that there were less mosquitoes than they would have expected, given the amount of standing water that was left. Not being bitten by mosquitoes was one small blessing for people that had lost everything in the floods.”

Photo courtesy of Russell Watkins, U.K. Department for International Development

[via My Modern Metropolis]