Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

Anything that doesn't quite fit in elsewhere...
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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The green flash and green ray are meteorological optical phenomena that sometimes occur transiently around the moment of sunset or sunrise. When the conditions are right, a distinct green spot is briefly visible above the upper rim of the Sun's disk; the green appearance usually lasts for no more than two seconds. Rarely, the green flash can resemble a green ray shooting up from the sunset or sunrise point.

Green flashes occur because the Earth's atmosphere can cause the light from the Sun to separate, or refract, into different colors. Green flashes are a group of similar phenomena that stem from slightly different causes, and therefore, some types of green flashes are more common than others

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It's also not a flash.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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Hector the Convector is fascinating to me. It forms so regularly, you can use it to tell time.

Hector (cloud)
Hector is a cumulonimbus thundercloud that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia, from approximately September to March each year. Hector, or sometimes "Hector the Convector", is known as one of the world's most consistently large thunderstorms, reaching heights of approximately 20 kilometres (66,000 ft)
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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Vela incident
The Vela incident, also known as the South Atlantic Flash, was an unidentified double flash of light detected by an American Vela Hotel satellite on 22 September 1979 near the Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean.

The cause of the flash remains officially unknown, and some information about the event remains classified by the U.S. government. While it has been suggested that the signal could have been caused by a meteoroid hitting the satellite, the previous 41 double flashes detected by the Vela satellites were caused by nuclear weapons tests. Today, most independent researchers believe that the 1979 flash was caused by a nuclear explosion– perhaps an undeclared nuclear test carried out by South Africa and Israel.

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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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Sailing stones (also called sliding rocks, walking rocks, rolling stones, and moving rocks) are part of the geological phenomenon in which rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without animal intervention. The movement of the rocks occurs when large sheets of ice a few millimeters thick and floating in an ephemeral winter pond break up on sunny days. Frozen during cold winter nights, these thin, floating ice panels are driven by wind and shove rocks at speeds up to 5 meters per minute.

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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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Ice has almost two dozen different phases, which makes it a premier example of what I mean by "alternative forms of normal things."

We on Earth are familiar with ice-I, which forms when water becomes colder than 0°C. But are you aware of ice that forms when water is compressed via gigapascals of pressure?
There are plenty!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice#Phases

Ice-XVIII, or "superionic water," is one of the coolest. Ironic as it's also one of the hottest.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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Yuli Ban wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 11:10 pm Noctilucent clouds, or night shining clouds, are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Earth. They consist of ice crystals and are only visible during astronomical twilight. Noctilucent roughly means "night shining" in Latin. They are most often observed during the summer months from latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the Equator. They are visible only during local summer months and when the Sun is below the observer's horizon, but while the clouds are still in sunlight. Recent studies suggest that increased atmospheric methane emissions produce additional water vapor once the methane molecules reach the mesosphere – creating, or reinforcing existing noctilucent clouds.

They are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 km (47 to 53 mi). They are too faint to be seen in daylight, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in Earth's shadow.
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And now here are noctilucent clouds on Mars
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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Fakenadoes: Scud clouds, non-tornadic clouds touching the ground, and misidentifications | One of the rarest weather phenomena types, fakenadoes include very-low hanging clouds (ground-scrapers) and alternative whirlwinds not related to a supercell



Imagine it's a stormy-looking day. Dark clouds and evil-looking scuds everywhere. And then you see it: a funnel cloud dipping lower and lower. Soon, it makes touchdown, and it's barreling right at you. So you take cover and watch it pass, until you notice: nothing's flying. There's no wind. No debris. No "freight train" sound. The cloud's not even rotating. And then it passes down your street so close that you can run your hand through it, and the shaft lazily continues on. The chillest tornado in history.

It's like tornado.exe failed to load properly and glitched out.

Tornadoes are already rare as shit, but you just got to experience something so rare, it's borderline paranormal in meteorology.

I MAY have seen a fakenado when I was really young.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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raklian wrote: Wed May 26, 2021 1:55 am
This is precisely the reason we can't exactly say everything we consider to be presently in the realm of sci-fi and impossible to realize in real life IMPOSSIBLE.

Never say never, so the saying goes.
We already know this is the case. It's all but accepted that humans at our current level of intelligence will NEVER understand dark energy. It's a problem too far beyond our understanding, individual or collective. Unifying quantum physics and general relativity may be this way too.

I recently thought extensively about this, about the fact there are things that not only do we not know but in fact CAN'T know. We as Homo sapiens² simply do not have the necessary brain resources to do it, even when we put our brains together and build tools to help. It's like chimpanzees trying to understand fire. They just can't. It's physically impossible for chimpanzees to master fire, even though they are usually aware it exists. They don't know the mechanisms or physics behind it or what fire is; it just happens and is very hot.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

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Quantum gas goes below absolute zero
Atoms Reach Record Temperature, Colder than Absolute Zero
Negative temperature
Certain systems can achieve negative thermodynamic temperature; that is, their [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_temperature]temperature can be expressed as a negative quantity on the Kelvin or Rankine scales. This should be distinguished from temperatures expressed as negative numbers on non-thermodynamic Celsius or Fahrenheit scales, which are nevertheless higher than absolute zero.
The absolute temperature (Kelvin) scale can be understood loosely as a measure of average kinetic energy. Usually, system temperatures are positive. However, in particular isolated systems, the temperature defined in terms of Boltzmann's entropy can become negative.
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