DORSEYLAND (NOT DISNEYLAND)

November 24, 2006, Google Earth

Natural Wonders of the World

Only our third list and we’re already into controversy. Modern people just can’t seem to agree on anything, can they? What we have below are the seven most accepted natural wonders, followed by another seven that a lot of folks feel are pretty darned deserving of the title too.

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The Grand Canyon, shown above from Google Earth, is a colourful, steep-sided gorge carved by the Colorado River in northern Arizona. President Theodore Roosevelt was a major proponent of the Grand Canyon park area, visiting on numerous occasions to hunt mountain lions and enjoy the breathtaking scenery.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef, stretching 2,000 kilometres. The first European to see it was Captain James Cook, who ran aground on it on June 11, 1770.

Due to its vast biodiversity, warm clear waters and its accessibility from the floating guest facilities called “live-aboards”, the reef is popular with scuba divers. The reef is sometimes referred to as the single largest living animal in the world, but in reality is many colonies of corals.

The Harbour of Rio de Janeiro embraces the Brazilian city famed for its hotel-lined tourist beaches Copacabana and Ipanema, for the giant statue of Jesus, known as Christ the Redeemer and for its yearly Carnival.

It also has the biggest forest inside an urban region, called Floresta da Tijuca. Rio is Brazil’s second-largest city after São Paulo and was the capital until 1960, when Brasília took its place.

Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth as measured from sea level, with a summit ridge marking the border between Nepal and Tibet.

In Nepal, the mountain is called Sagarmatha (Sanskrit for “Forehead of the Sky”) and in Tibetan Chomolangma or Qomolangma (”Mother of the Universe”). It was named in honour of Sir George Everest.

The polar aurorae, which aren’t meant to be illustrated in this image, are optical phenomena characterised by colourful displays of light in the night sky. An auroral display in the Northern Hemisphere is called the aurora borealis, or northern lights, and in the south the aurora australis.

Aurorae are the most visible effect of the solar wind upon the Earth’s atmosphere, occurring when the Van Allen radiation belts become “overloaded” with energetic particles, which cascade down magnetic field lines and collide with the earth’s upper atmosphere. Aurora in Latin means dawn and borealis comes from Boreas, the name of the Greek god of the northern wind.

Paricutín Volcano in the Mexican state of Michoacán, close to the village of the same name, didn’t exist prior to 1943. During the first several weeks of that year a series of strange thunderings were heard in clear weather.

These turned out to be tremors deep in the earth, and intensified until February 20, when local farmer Dioniso Pulido witnessed the opening of a volcanic fissure in the middle of his cornfield. Pyroclastic activity began that day, and within 24 hours of the initial fissure the volcano had already built into a 50-metre-high cone. Within a week this height had doubled.

Victoria Falls is the world’s largest and most spectacular waterfall, 1.6 kilometres wide and with a maximum drop of 128 metres, in the Zambezi River on the Zambia and Zimbabwe border.

Numerous islets at the crest divide the water to form a series of falls. The thick mist and loud roar are perceptible from 40 kilometres away. The mighty cascade of the Zambezi River as it plunges into the Batoka Gorge is the widest curtain of falling water on the planet.

British explorer David Livingstone visited the falls in 1855 and named them for Queen Victoria. They were formerly known as Mosi-oa-Tunya, the “smoke that thunders”.

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There’s a second list of natural wonders – call it the Emergency Backup Natural Wonders – and it’s no less splendid than the first.

Angel Falls in Venezuela