Lanzarote Vineyards – The Magical Black Gardens

In Lanzarote, Spain there is a unique cultural landscape called “La Geria”. The La Geria covers around 5,250 hectares, of which almost 3,000 acres are cultivated. The vineyards of Lanzarote are spectacular and fascinating. Semi-Circular stonewalls protect verdant vines from the persistent blowing trade winds. In the first look, you can’t even help. The cultivation of grapes in Lanzarote is unique to this part of the world. But to be impressed by endless land that’s covered black ash and volcanoes. Most of the island has treeless, moonlike landscapes with different colored soils, craters, strange rock formations, and gently sloping mountains.

  

These vines spot actually created more than 250 years ago with human hands. Each vine yields produced approximately 25KG of grapes a year. However, rains make the place seem like a miracle. The greenery you might expect to find at this tropical latitude is almost completely absent from most of Lanzarote. The young vine is placed into this human-made depression. Then, larger volcanic stones are balanced around the wind-facing edge of the hole, creating a low, semicircular barrier.

The ‘Paisaje Protegido’ – cultural protected landscape has an interesting history. In the 18th century, Lanzarote was a lush island with a thriving agriculture industry.  But massive volcanic eruptions took place in the 1730s when the entire region was covered in Lave ash. A series of violent eruptions left thick layers of ash and volcanic pebbles on the ground. That is also called lapilli, Rofe or picón. Therefore, thousands of hectares of fertile farmland were lost under up to three meters thick layers of ash. After the volcanoes had ceased to rumble, the Islanders starts to dig holes until they came upon fertile soil in areas where the lapilli was thin.

Then they began to plant vines and other fruit trees. After they quickly realized that the ash was a blessing in disguise. The lapilli is porous and has hygroscopic (water-attracting) properties. Some wineries still follow the traditional practice of using camels to haul newly harvested grapes from the vineyard to the processing areas, which are lower on the hillside.

The cool breezes from the Atlantic and the warm temperatures from the African mainland give the vineyards the kind of warm-to-cool variation that grapes need. Also, the days are warm and almost always sunny; nights are very cool.  Though annual rains fall is very low in Lanzarote. But early morning hours are very humid and allow ash to store the morning dew. The difference in temperature, known in the viticulture world as the diurnal temperature variation, is important for grapes to develop both the right amount of acidity and sweetness.

The pits were the vines are dug have to be 5 meters in diameter and 2-3 meters deep and also need a lot of space. The roots spread out in a wide circle near the surface to be able to absorb as much water as possible. The range of wines from La Geria includes the traditional Lanzarote wines Malvasia, Listán Negra, Moscatel, and Manto. To add to the mystic, tourists often arrive at the wineries' bodegas on the backs of camels. Imported from the Sahara long ago, these beasts are able to easily negotiate the soft, sandy soil and go where vehicles cannot. Lanzarote landscapes are unforgettable and you must visit once in a lifetime.
 Source: CP

The Steinhuder Meer or Lake Steinhude is a lake in Lower Saxony, Germany. The Lake is located 30 KM northwest of Hanover. It lies within a region known as the Hanoverian Moor Geest. The lake is named after the nearby village of Steinhude, has an area of about 30 square kilometers. The steinhuder Meer is the largest lake of northwestern Germany. The Lake Steinhude is very shallow, with an average depth of only 4.4 ft and a maximum depth of less than 9.8 ft.

The Steinhuder Meer is part of the glacial landscape formed after the recession of the glaciers of the latest Ice Age, the Weichselian glaciation. Nature lovers can join one of the nature and landscape tours and with luck catch a glimpse of sea eagles. The environment around the lake can be best explored as a one or two-day trip around the Steinhuder Meer.

The two theories explained the formation of Lake Steinhuder. The first one says that glaciers gouged out the hole and meltwater filled it. However the other theory says that an ice storm formed the hole and as the groundwater rose, the lake was formed. The most important is 18^th century fortification small artificial island “The Wilhelmstein”.  The Wilhelmstein Island was built around 1761 to 1765 then used as a military fortress. Afterwards it was used as military school. It is located in the middle of lake. The The Steinhuder Meer is heart of nature reserve, and also used as recreational area.

The other Badeinsel Steinhude  was built in 1975 using sand retrieved from the lake. It has a sandy beach which is popular during summer.  Access to this island is via 80m pedestrian bridge from Steinhude. The lake offers the opportunity for sailing and surfing for water enthusiasts.

The Steinhuder Meer as a Tourist Place:

The lake steinhuder is famous destination for locals and for vacationists. Up to three ships offer cruises; they are supplemented by smaller boats running on schedule across the lake. The various small shops, seafood restaurants and markets invite you to take a stroll or enjoy a good meal. A beautiful bike path encircles the lake, crossing various landscapes. Source: CP

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Devil’s Marbles of Karlu Karlu

 

Devil’s Marbles or Karlu Karlu, are a collection of giant granite boulders strewn across a shallow valley. Devil’s Marbles are recognized by the local Warumungu Aboriginals. It is located almost 100 KM south of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, Australia. The Devil’s Marble is one of the most widely considered symbols of Australia’s outback.

 

The Marbles have great importance for the Aboriginal people. They’re protected under the Northern Territory Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act. In the Aboriginal mythology the Devils Marbles are the eggs of the rainbow serpent. Many dreamtime stories and traditions of the Warumungu, Kaytetye and Alyawarre Aboriginal folks are linked with this area.

 

The unique shapes are formed by erosion more than millions of years. These marbles are made of granite with varying sizes from 50cm to 6m across. Different boulders are naturally precariously balanced atop one another or on massive rock formation. However, many others have been split cleanly down the middle. Though they are appear to have been prudently placed or maybe brought here by flood or glaciers from distant places. These boulders in fact formed on the ground they stand by erosion of rock that reached the surface from below.

 

The Devils Marbles started out, several million years ago, when an upsurge of molten rock penetrated the ground from below. It spread out and settled into a solid layer within the Earth's crust. Thus, after some time, tectonic forces caused folding of the Earth's crust in the area. Which have lifted the granite causing it to fracture into big, square blocks?

 

The weathering by water and wind rounded off the edges and turned them into smooth boulders that we see today. Moreover the extreme temperature difference between day and night in the arid desert region. Where the reserve is located creates massive stress on these boulders, that causing them to frequently expand and contract. Some of the rocks eventually crack completely in half.

 

According to one interesting story, “Arrange”, the Devil Man, while walking through the area, made a hair-string belt, a type of traditional adornment, worn only by initiated Aboriginal men. He was twirling the hair to make strings. Then he dropped clusters of hair on the ground which turned into the big red boulders. He finally returned to his place of origin, a hill named “Ayleparrarntenhe”, where the legend myths he’s still lives today.

 

4,000-year-old Termite Mounds Found Equal to the Size of Great Britain

Termites are tiny insects about the size of an ant. They live in colonies that may contain 2 million relatives. Despite their small size they are extraordinary builders.  In the seasonally dry, deciduous forests of northeastern Brazil, obscured by walls of thorny-scrubs, is a vast landscape made up of tens of millions of densely packed earthen mounds. The findings suggest that the over-dispersed spatial mound pattern isn’t generated by aggressive interactions.

The cone-shaped are not nests, actually piles of dirt each measuring 30ft wide at its base and twice as tall as a grown man. Which are waste earths excavated by the termites when they burrow tunnels under the soil. It’s unbelievable that finding an unknown biological wonder of this sheer size and age still existing. There are lots of different kinds of termite mounds. Some of them actually keep the termites cool during the day, and a little bit warmer at night.

Investigators approximation that these are more than 200 million mounds. These are covering a huge region approximately equal to the size of Great Britain. The amount of soil excavated is over 10 cubic KM, comparable to the volume of great pyramids of Giza. The still-inhabited mounds are up to 4,000 years old and so tall they can be seen via satellite.

Therefore, this makes them the largest engineering project by any animal besides humans. Unbelievably, some of these mounds are as old as the Egypt Pyramids themselves. These mounds are remains mainly hidden from view in the deciduous, semiarid, thorny-scrub caatinga forests exclusive to this part of Brazil. The locals call them “murundus” but not too much people outside of the region have heard about it. It was only in recent decades when some of the lands were cleared for pasture that outsiders have come to discover them.

Roy Funch, from the State University of Feira de Santana, first saw these fields of mounds in the 1980s when he arrived in Brazil as a Peace Corps volunteer. A pheromone map might allow the termites to minimize their travel time from any location in the colony to the nearest waste mound.

Investigators have found that this colossal feat of engineering is the work of a tiny species of termite called Syntermes dirus, barely half an inch long. These creatures have been building this landscape for the past four thousand years, and they are still present in the soil surrounding the mounds. Soil samples collected from the centers of 11 mounds and dated youngest mound is about 690 years old, while the oldest was at least 3,820 years old.

These mounds discarded earth, have no internal structures save for a single large central tunnel descending into the ground to meet a widespread network of underground tunnels and thin horizontal galleries where the termites store harvested food. In the night, the termite workers and soldiers emerge from their underground nest and onto the forest floor through small temporary tunnels excavated between the mounds. After their work is done, they return back to the nests and seal the tunnels shut.

There are many questions still to chase. How termite colonies are physically structured because a queen chamber of the species has never been found. Some reports say the mounds can be viewed from space. They can be easily viewed on open source satellite images, including Google Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ancient Walls of Avila

The ancient city of Avila is located in central Spain, in the autonomous community of Castile and León, about 100 km to the west of Madrid. This walls is considered as one of the finest walled city in Europe. The Walls of Avila is built on the flat summit of a rocky outcrop which rises abruptly in the middle of a vast treeless plain strewn with immense grey boulders and surrounded by lofty mountains. The Walls of Avila is about 2,500-meter long and almost completely intact. The Old Town of Avila was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. The walls construction work was started in 1090 but most of the defensive walls appear to have been rebuilt in the 12th century.  

The Walls of Avila has an average width of 3 meters and an average height of 12 meters.  The city Avila was once part of the Roman Lusitania, before falling to the Arab and Berber invaders in 714 CE. For the next 350 years, the northern Iberian Christian kingdoms tried repeatedly to seize control of the city. However, it was King Alfonso VI of León and Castile, who eventually managed to conquer the Muslims in 1088 ADE. The King instantly started building great stone walls around Avila to protect his latest conquest from further attacks. The job was supervised by his brother-in-law, Raymond of Burgundy, who was a legendary figure himself.

The Walls of Avila is an impressive 2.5 kilometers barrier of stone and granite that surrounds the city’s almost rectangular layout. This wall is up to 10 feet thick and 40 feet high, and topped by a continuous battlement rampart-walk and parapet with merlons and cernels. Protruding out from the Walls are 88 semi-circular defensive towers, placed at uniform intervals.

The Walls of Avila are punctured by 8 or 9 entrance gates. Originally, there was a moat and a barbican outside the walls but they no longer exist. The huge fortification was completed in less than a decade. The area enclosed by the walls is now designated the Old Town. It contains all of the city’s historic landmarks including the Gothic cathedral. The Convent of Santo Tomás, containing the tombs of Tomás de Torquemada, who was the first grand inquisitor of Spain, and of Don Juan, the only son of Ferdinand and Isabella, and several Romanesque churches.

Nowadays it is possible to walk upon the walls for approximately half their circumference. At night the entire circumference of the walls is beautifully lit up by yellow-orange halogen lights. Which are making it the largest fully illuminated monument in the world?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Nuclear Sedan Crater

Sedan Crater comes into existence of Sedan Nuclear Test. This Crater is located within the Nevada Test Site twelve miles of Groom Lake.  The Sedan Crater Maximum depth is 320ft and Maximum diameter is 1280ft. Sedan Crater is the result of the displacement of 12,000,000 short tons of earth. The Crater was created on July 6, 1962 by a 104-kiloton-of-TNT (440 TJ) thermonuclear explosion. In 1994, the crater was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  The Sedan experiment was part of the Plowshare Program, established in June 1957 to discover peaceable applications for controlled nuclear detonations. The idea was that a nuclear explosion could easily excavate a large area. They are facilitating the building of canals and roads, improving mining techniques, or simply moving a large amount of rock and soil.

Also more than ten thousand visitors pay a visit to Sedan Crater through free monthly tours. These tours are arranged by U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office. Its closest Soviet counterpart is the slightly wider Chagan Crater which filled in to create Lake Chagan. The Sedan Crater at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) have features similar to the topography of Moon craters, 11 of the 12 American astronauts who walked on the moon trained in Nevada before their missions.

The Sedan experiment used an explosive device 3.5 times greater than any similar event at the Nevada Test Site. The explosion displaced approximately 7.5 million tons of earth, scattering it over 2,500 acres. The event covered vegetation and soil in radioactive material as far away as 10,000 feet from ground zero. Within 7 months of the excavation, the bottom of the crater could be safely walked upon with no protective clothing and photographs were taken. Hence, negative impacts from Operation Plowshare’s 27 nuclear projects eventually led to the program's termination in 1977, mainly due to public opposition. The explosion created fallout that affected more US residents than any other nuclear test, exposing more than 13 million people to radiation, although within 7 months of the detonation. The radiation had decayed to the point that the bottom of the crater could be safely walked upon with no protective clothing.

Further, the Sedan event and the other related experiments established that radioactive contamination in the surrounding areas made the technology prohibitive in area that might become populated. Nowadays, Russian thistle, also recognized as tumbleweed, dominates the plant species that have crept back into the Sedan Crater site. However in an analysis conducted in 1993 observed that the original perennial shrubs once living there had shown no recovery.