Natural Wonders Facts

The longest cave in the world is the 'Mammoth Cave System' in the USA at 560,000 mtrs deep!

The Niagara Falls moves upstream at an average rate of about 295ft a century!

They turned Niagara Falls off. In 1969, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dumped 28,000 tons of rock into the Niagara River, stopping the American Falls completely for five months. Tourists walked the dry riverbed and found millions of coins - and engineers discovered the fallen boulders below were holding the falls up.

Miners in Mexico found a hidden cave in 2000 with the largest crystals on Earth. The crystals were white gypsum beams up to 37 feet long and 3 feet wide. The heat inside hit 136 degrees with near-total humidity. Without a cooling suit, a person can die within about 10 minutes. In 2015, the mine flooded and sealed the cave shut.

Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest mirror. Once a year, seasonal rain covers 10,582 square kilometres of salt so flat the horizon vanishes. You appear to walk on the sky. The surface varies less than a metre in elevation across the entire expanse. Space agencies calibrate their altimeters here - five times better than open ocean.

At the edge of Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, a storm has returned night after night for centuries. It produces almost 250 lightning flashes per km2 per year - more than anywhere on Earth. Sailors gave it a name: the Beacon of Maracaibo. It fires 140 to 160 nights a year, for up to 9 hours a night. Zulia state put a white lightning bolt on its flag.

Lake Hillier sits on a remote island off Western Australia. For 200 years, it stayed bubblegum pink through every season. Algae and bacteria in the salt crust cause the color, not the water. It is safe to swim in, just not to drink. Bottle a sample and it keeps that same shade. Heavy rain in 2022 diluted the salt, turning the lake grey. Scientists expect the pink to return within a decade.

Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey means Cotton Castle, and it looks like snow that never melts. Hot spring water loaded with calcium carbonate has crept down this hillside for hundreds of thousands of years, hardening into blinding white terraced pools. People have bathed in them since Roman times. The ancient spa city of Hierapolis was built right on top, and the whole site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Fly Geyser looks like something from another planet, its mounds streaked bright red and green in the Nevada desert. Nobody designed it. In 1964, engineers drilling a geothermal test well left it uncapped, and scalding mineral water has erupted nonstop ever since. The rainbow colors come from algae that thrive in the hot mineral runoff, and the mound is still growing today.