A Neo Meditation™

Great Arch @ Getu Valley, China by msanzub

The Calm Before the Wave

Japan :: More than 1,500 people died last March in Rikuzentakata, one of several towns eradicated by the tsunami. “As the buildings were destroyed, black, dusty smoke was thrown up,” a survivor told an Al Jazeera reporter. “Then the tsunami swallowed up the smoke.”

Photograph by Tamon Suzuki

Via: nationalgeographic

The Calm Before the Wave

Oregon :: Offshore lies a fault that in centuries past has triggered large earthquakes—and tsunamis that swamped the coast. These houses at Cannon Beach sit just inside an evacuation zone based on a worst-case scenario. As the world’s coasts get more crowded, geologists are finding that tsunamis occur more often than once thought.

Photograph by John Stanmeyer

Via: nationalgeographic

Krubera (Voronja) Cave, West Caucasus, Abkhazia, Georgia

The Krubera Cave (or the Voronya Cave sometimes spelled Voronja Cave) is the deepest known cave on Earth. It is located in the Arabika Massif of the Gagrinsky Range of the Western Caucasus, in the Gagra district of Abkhazia, Georgia’s breakaway republic.

The cave remains the only known cave on Earth deeper than 2,000 metres.

The difference in the altitude of the cave’s entrance and its deepest explored point is 2,191 ± 20 metres (7,188 ± 66 ft)

Via: bbcnews

美国佐治亚州埃里森洞的奇异坑（Fantastic Pit at Ellison’s Cave, Georgia）

要确定哪一个洞穴是世界上最令人惊异的有点儿像“拿海鲜与比萨相比”，洞穴专家豪斯说，“它取决于你喜欢什么样的类型。”如果你喜欢极端垂直的洞穴，埃里森洞的奇异坑就很适合你。它有586英尺（合179米）深，是美国最深的自由落体坑，而且大得足以装下整个华盛顿纪念碑——它只有555英尺（合169米）高。摄影师曼纽尔•比尔斯（Manuel Beers）说，“我去过那儿三次，每一次都激动不已，因为它是在太深了。”

Via: yeeyan

The Makauwahi Cave in Hawai’i

Hawaiian Cave Reveals Ancient Secrets
David A. Burney and Lida Pigott Burney

From the moment we saw it, we knew the place held many great secrets. We had been looking for new fossil sites on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1992 with our colleagues, Helen F. James and Storrs L. Olson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., along with their children, Travis and Sydney, and our own, Mara and Alec.

And what we found was a cave — once a Pleistocene dune field, and later a sinkhole with pickling-jar powers — that may be the richest fossil site in the Hawaiian Islands, perhaps in the entire Pacific Island region.

Sixteen years after our discovery, we have excavated seeds, pollen, Polynesian artifacts, thousands of bird and fish bones, and more from this half-acre pile of sediments spanning many millennia. The site has yielded up some of the island’s long-kept secrets, telling of a time when the largest land animals here were flightless waterfowl, such as the turtle-jawed moa nalo (Chelychelynechen quassus). Moreover, it documents the great changes that occurred when first Polynesians, and later Europeans, Americans, and Asians, arrived with boatloads of invasive alien species.

The first boats began arriving roughly a thousand years ago, kicking off the first of three stages of extinction on Kauai. In the first stage, Polynesians probably overhunted the large flightless birds, while introduced rats, chickens, and small pigs disrupted their remaining nests. Later, but before Captain Cook arrived in 1778, the agriculture of a growing Hawaiian population wiped out more species. Finally, Europeans arrived and brought goats and other livestock that finished the job.

In 2000 we learned the long-lost nineteenth-century name of the cave, Makauwahi, thanks to a local archaeologist, William K. “Pila” Kikuchi, who recovered the name from an essay written by a high school student more than a century ago. It means something like “smoke eye.” That may have been in reference to Keahikuni, a mid-nineteenth-century native diviner who read the future in spirals of smoke rising from the sinkhole.

The story struck a resonant chord, as we had begun thinking about Makauwahi Cave as a preserver of the future at least as much as the past. In 2004, we were granted a lease on the cave property, including the surrounding seventeen acres of dunes, wetlands, and abandoned farmland, by the owners, Grove Farm Company. Using the fossils as a guide, we set out to suppress plants introduced in the last two centuries and to favor those that evolved here or were brought from other Pacific islands by the first human inhabitants.

The most unusual patch of land is on several acres of weedy thicket formerly used for cane and corn farming. After only three years of rehabilitation, nearly a hundred species of native and Polynesian trees, shrubs, and ground covers are now thriving. Planted by volunteers, including some of the same folks who helped us sift the fossils from the cave sediments, and the eager assistance of hundreds of schoolchildren from all over Kauai, the new forest has flourished beyond all expectations.

Thousands of acres of abandoned farmland throughout the Hawaiian Islands could grow native plants just as well as this!

Unfortunately, many of the animals that disappeared from Kauai were unique to the island. But even if we can’t have giant, flightless waterfowl, we can make the area more attractive to the surviving species of birds, animals, and insects that are indigenous to the island. In this way and others, we’d like to think we can be a little like old Keahikuni the Diviner in telling the future. Here at Makauwahi, which has given us such a powerful sense of the past, we can find a better future for an island world that was nearly lost.

Via: livescience

Tightrope Walking at Yosemite, CA

Reed Flute Cave In China

The Reed Flute Cave is the largest and the most impressive natural cave in Guilin, China. This cave, marked on the most travel itineraries, got its name from the reeds growing in this region, with which people make pipes and flutes. The cave is divided into different parts. It served as a war refuge for many people during World War II.

Inside the Reed Flute Cave is a spectacular world of different stalactites and rock formations shimmering with amazing colors of artificial lighting. It all creates an impressive effect! Reed Flute Cave is a fascinating gallery of natural sculpture, now enhanced by multicolored lighting, which has been one of Guilin’s many interesting attractions for over 1200 years. It rates as one of the top four tourist sites in the city.

Reed Flute Cave is situated in the northwest suburbs of Guilin City. The entrance is situated by Ludi Road on the south side of Guangming Hill. The cave got its name from a type of reed growing outside, which can be made into melodious flutes. The cave is filled with a large number of stalactites, stalagmites and rock formations in weird and wonderful shapes.

The cave is about 240 meters long and a tour lasts about one hour. Along the u-shaped route, visitors will have ample time see the oddly shaped rocks and stone pillars while the guide narrates interesting stories about them. Illuminated by the colored lights, the cave looks like a dazzling underground palace. That’s why the cave is also known as the Nature’s Art Palace.

Inside the cave there are more than 70 inscriptions written in ink, which can be dated back as far as 792 AD in the Tang Dynasty. These aged inscriptions tell us that it has been an attraction in Guilin since ancient times. Since the cave opened to the public in 1962 millions of tourists have visited it.

Via: evilreligion

Favorite Place To Hung-Out

Mysterious Trees

Nature of the surprising thing creates a wonderful and unique creations

Via:funzu with Eijoo

Fish With Human Teeth

This fish have teeth like humans. I bet that you don’t want to eat “it”. It’s one ugly fish.

via:looneynaturedotcom with Eijoo

Hairy Frogfish, they inhabits rocky and coral reefs, on rocks, sand or rubble, and is also found in weedy estuaries along the east coast of southern Africa. Coloration is variable, often light yellow, orange, green, gray or brown with black stripes or elongate blotches, sometimes solid black. Frogfishes do not swim in the conventional way; instead, they “walk” on their pectoral fins or use ‘jet propulsion’.

Odd Animal Plant – Weirdest Species

Welcome to the Odd Animal Plant – our earth…Yes, it is on earth, not something alien species or 3d creation. 17 most unusual and weirdest animals … from forest and land animals to the animals from the deepest and darkest depths of the ocean. Some of these are so odd you wont even believe that something like that could actually exist. But believe me… they are really living around us.

via: designswan

With its long, furry appendages, the newly-discovered Yeti Crab looks like some kind of sea sloth. It was discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean during a deep-sea diving expedition in 2006 and is so unusual that a new taxonomic family had to be invented for it. The Yeti Crab is blind and white, with fur that supports colonies of bacteria. It lives near hydrothermal vents 7,540 feet under the surface.

Odd Animal Plant – Weirdest Species

Welcome to the Odd Animal Plant – our earth…Yes, it is on earth, not something alien species or 3d creation. 17 most unusual and weirdest animals … from forest and land animals to the animals from the deepest and darkest depths of the ocean. Some of these are so odd you wont even believe that something like that could actually exist. But believe me… they are really living around us.

via: designswan

If you’re afraid of bugs, you’re really not going to like the Giant Isopod. It resembles nothing so much as a cockroach the size of a guinea pig, but it’s actually a crustacean related to shrimp and crabs.

Odd Animal Plant – Weirdest Species

Welcome to the Odd Animal Plant – our earth…Yes, it is on earth, not something alien species or 3d creation. 17 most unusual and weirdest animals … from forest and land animals to the animals from the deepest and darkest depths of the ocean. Some of these are so odd you wont even believe that something like that could actually exist. But believe me… they are really living around us.

via: designswan