'Calving' glacier:

A spectacular sight to behold.

'On May 28, 2008, Adam LeWinter and Director Jeff Orlowski filmed a historic breakup at the Ilulissat Glacier in Western Greenland. The calving event lasted for 75 minutes and the glacier retreated a full mile across a calving face three miles wide. The height of the ice is about 3,000 feet [900m], 300-400 feet [100m] above water and the rest below water.'

Aerial Slices: Islands and Ocean

North and South Malosmadulu Atolls are in the Maldives, an island republic in the northern Indian Ocean, southwest of India. The Maldives are made up of a chain of 1,192 small coral islands, which are grouped into clusters of atolls. It has a total area of 298 square kilometers and a population of about 330,000 - NASA Earth Observatory

Fata Morgana (mirage)

A Fata Morgana can be seen on land or at sea, in polar regions or in deserts. These specific kinds of mirages involve any distant object, such as islands, boats, and coastline / cliffs. A Fata Morgana is not only complex, but also rapidly changing; the complex mirage comprises several inverted (upside down) and erect (right side up) images that are stacked on top of one another. Fata Morgana mirages also show alternating compressed and stretched zones. (1)

  
click images for source


I enjoyed this use of the phrase cited in the OED: ' Cloud mountains, and fatamorgana cities' (2) from 1829 by a  T. Carlyle in Foreign Rev.


Interesting to note during the filming of the Herzog's Fata Morgana (1971) Herzog and the crew encountered many problems, most notably being imprisoned because cameraman Schmidt-Reitwein's name was similar to the name of a German mercenary who was hiding from the authorities and had recently been sentenced to death in absentia. Also; Herzog contracted bilharzia, a blood parasite sometimes refered to as 'snail fever' (3).


(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_(mirage)
(2) "fata Morgana, n.". OED Online. September 2011. Oxford University Press. 5 December 2011 .
(3) Fata Morgana (1971) Trivia: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067085/trivia

Cueva de los Cristales

An incomprehensible selection of found, oddly toned images of Mexico's Cave of the Crystals.