Failing to do so has proven to have deadly consequences.Such is the case of sound, light, dawn and twilight, lightning, storms, tornadoes, fog, rainbows, tides, among others. So you do not need to fear being consumed by the Earth while you sleep (though that’s exactly what happened to one man in Florida) however, it is extremely important for city planners to take erosion into consideration during the building process.
Of course, sinkholes are not terribly common. Sinkholes generally develop slowly as bedrock is whittled away by water, but sometimes, when there has been enough erosion and the pressure is just right (or just wrong), the ground will give way all at once–swallowing trees, people, and anything else unfortunate enough to be standing in the immediate area. Most often, these gaping maws form because of the extreme erosion that is taking place in the rocks beneath the soil. Sinkholes (also aptly known as “sinks”) owe much of their creation to water. Sinkholes are terrifying they are unstoppable they are deadly and they are almost entirely unpredictable. These beasts have swallowed people, cars, trees, and even entire houses or city blocks. Some dip just a few meters into the earth, while others are over 600 meters (2,000 feet) deep. They can be as small as a car, or they can span hundreds of acres. Sinkholes are terrifying monsters are massive holes that open up in the Earth without warning. This sinkhole appeared in downtown Guatemala City, swallowing a three-story building. The infralateral arc curves upwards from the horizon slightly and this is best checked for visually because lens distortions invariably also show the circumhorizon arc as curved. High sun infralateral arcs occupy a similar position in the sky. Often only fragments are visible where there happen to be cirrus clouds – the individual patches of cirrus are then lit with colour that can be mistaken for iridescence. If a cirrus’s crystals are aligned just right, the whole cloud lights up in a spectrum of colors.” More properly, this event should be called a circumhorizon arc.Īs Atmospheric Optics notes, “it is a very large halo and always parallel to the horizon. As National Geographic notes, “When light enters through a vertical side face of such an ice crystal and leaves from the bottom face, it refracts, or bends, in the same way that light passes through a prism. Notably, this can only occur when the Sun is higher than 58° above the horizon, and it generally occurs when light is passing through cirrus clouds, in particular. As a result, the clouds refract light in a similar manner. The clouds display such fantastic colors because of water droplets that happen to be nearly uniform in size. These phenomena are actually clouds that have been (figuratively) set aflame. Replace ice with volcanic rock and ash, and you've got lightning rumbling through the ash cloud above a volcano, simple… right? When that charge finds an opposite charge, a connection happens, and we get lightning. As you may recall from above, in thunderstorms, ice crystals rub together to produce an electrostatic charge. Rietze points out, “you will always arrive too late” unless you happen to be documenting the eruption at its start. To make things more difficult, the lightning is most active during the beginning of the eruption, giving an added challenge (and danger) to photographers and researchers. Martin Rietze, a German photographer who travels the world to capture these electrifying events explains to io9.com that smaller volcanic eruptions lead to less intense electrical storms, which can be hard to spot through the thick plumes of ash and rock spewing from the volcano. This lightning is as hard to study as it is beautiful, for more than one reason. While it’s rare, those who have captured its intensity on camera describe it like a legend – researchers can’t describe it much better either. Volcanic lightning has been said to be the most beautiful natural event on Earth.