Ever played the game of Twister on water? The green, yellow, and brown polka dots that form on British Columbia’s Spotted Lake each summer make it look like you could.
It’s a far cry from the stereotypical landscapes of clear blue lakes, rolling green hills, and white-sand beaches that inspire most travelers—and that’s part of what makes strange natural wonders like Spotted Lake so thrilling.
A recently discovered cave that grows crystals the size of four-story buildings, a lake the color of a strawberry milkshake, and a glacier that seems to bleed sound like they’re from another planet, but can be seen right here on earth, and they remind us that there’s plenty of mystery left to explore.
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For billions of years, our planet has been a work in progress. Wind, water, pressure, minerals, heat, and lesser-understood forces mold and shape our environment, carving out caves and canyons, flooding and drying lakes, shaping mountains, shifting shorelines, moving the ground beneath our feet, and creating all manner of strange formations.
Long before scientists were able to offer explanations for the world’s more curious natural achievements, locals have been coming up with their own ideas. Māori legend says the enormous boulders found on New Zealand’s Moeraki Beach are the washed-ashore gourds and sweet potatoes from the wreck of a mythological canoe, while Irish folklore attributes the creation of the Giant’s Causeway to a quarrel that spanned across the sea to Scotland.
Such bizarre formations are, in fact, the result of time and pressure working against soil and rock, an often slow and methodical process that yields showstopping results. Others are the result of a sudden dramatic shift in conditions. Together, they caution us, as author Will Durant wrote in the January 1946 edition of Ladies Home Journal, that “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”
Seeing is believing, so take our tour of the strangest natural wonders—and keep an eye out for what the powerful planetary forces may do next.
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Marble Caves, Chile
Six thousand years of wave erosion created the undulating patterns that give these caves their marbleized effect, enhanced by the reflection of the blue and green water of Carrera Lake, near Chile’s border with Argentina.
Although the area is threatened by a plan to build a dam nearby, for now, visitors can kayak throughout the caves on days when the waters are calm.
Lake Retba, Senegal
It looks as if someone poured a giant bottle of Pepto-Bismol into Lake Retba—that’s how deeply pink these waters are.
The color is actually caused by a particular kind of algae called Dunaliella salina that produces a pigment. The salt content is extremely high, reaching 40 percent in some spots and allowing the algae to thrive (and swimmers to float effortlessly on the surface of the 10-foot-deep lake).
Blinding white piles of salt line the shores, and locals work several hours a day harvesting salt from the bright pink water.
Asbyrgi Canyon, Iceland
Legend has it that the Asbyrgi Canyon in northern Iceland was created when the hoof of a Norse god’s horse touched the earth, slicing through 300-foot-tall cliffs and flattening an area just over two miles long and more than a half mile wide.
The likelier scientific explanation is that two periods of glacial flooding carved the canyon between 3,000 and 10,000 years ago. But standing atop the cliffs, with the green carpet of the horseshoe-shaped canyon spread before you, it’s fun to imagine otherwise.
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