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The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro Information -Pictures, Wallpapers Posted: 23 Jan 2010 07:54 AM PST Information About The The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro, this is one of the The Seven Natural Wonders of the World. See The Beautiful Pictures and Information and Comment On it.. The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro Picture The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro Wallpaper The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro Wallpaper The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro Picture The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro Picture The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro Information : At the beginning of the 16th century, the Portuguese explorers who sailed down Brazil's coast kept tarck of their discoveries, and the days of the year, by naming the former for the latter. On New Year's Day, 1502, they glided toward a narrow opening in the coastline, guarded by fabulously shaped mountains. Beyond this entrance lay a body of water stretching 20 miles inland. Convinced that they had reached the mouth of a great river, they named the area River of the First of January. The large waterway was not a river; it was an island-studded bay that the Tamoio people had long before named Guanabara - "arm of the sea." Nearly five centuries later, both the native and European names persist. But now, instead of caravels and dugouts, supertankers and yachts glide across the magnificent balloon-shaped harbor of Guanabara Bay. No longer a tropical wilderness teeming with tapirs and jaguars, the bay's western shores now hold a roaring metropolis called Rio de Janeiro - the River of January. The great bay that looked like a river was only one of many illusions that Rio held. Europeans called the smaller bay of Botafago, under Sugarloaf, a "lake"; the Tamoio themselves named Guanabara Bay's eastern edge Niteroi, meaning "hidden waters." For early European voyagers, it was as though, when Rio hove into view, the curtain rose on a stage set with such strange, striking shapes and forms that virtually everything looked like something else. Guarding the entrance to the bay, the naked and lopsided mountain the Portuguese called Pao de Acucar evoked the sugarloaves fashioned on the island of Madeira. They called the highest mountain Corcovado - "the hunchback" - for its humped profile. Today, a statue of Christ the Redeemer crowns the 2,300-foot-high peak. The bay's vastness has been shrinking. With usable land at a premium, landfill has twice altered Guanabara Bay's contours. In the 1920s and again in the 1960s, small hills that once had been home to Rio's earliest settlers were sluiced through pipes to create bayfill. The new land now anchors an airport, a six-lane highway, parkland and beaches, the city's modern art museum, and other 20th-century landmarks as Rio looks to its great bay for elbow room.

The Northern Lights Wallpapers, Photos- Seven Natural Wonders of the World Information Posted: 23 Jan 2010 07:48 AM PST The Seven Natural Wonders of the World Information : The Northern Lights Wallpapers, Photos The Northern Lights Photo The Northern Lights Photo The Northern Lights Photo The Northern Lights Information : Northern lights, or Aurora borealis brings together two mythological deities - Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, and Boreas, Greek god of the north wind - to describe an event witnessed mostly at night in the high northerly latitudes. An identical phenomenon, the aurora australis, occurs in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, a region that has always been much more sparsely inhabited than the planet's northern reaches. Only a few eyewitness accounts of the aurora australis were available before 20th-century explorers arrived in Antarctica. By contrast, the flowing ribbons, sky-filling swirls, otherworldly glow, gossamer veils, and brilliant rays of the aurora borealis are a regular presence that has awed and terrified northern peoples for thousands of years. To Finns the aurora was "fox fire" sparked by glistening fur. Some Alaskan Inuit saw the dancing souls of deer, seals, salmon, and beluga; others believed that if they whistled the lights might snatch them away. The Athabascan saw messages from their dead, the "sky dwellers." For a long time, scientists offered almost as many interpretations of the northern lights as did the traditional peoples who observed them. The 20th century has brought with it studies of the earth's magnetism and the sun's workings. The aurora arises in the roiling turbulence of the sun. More than 100,000 times hotter than boiling water, the sun's interior chops the atoms that form solar gases into a thin stream of electrically charged particles - protons and electrons. Both matter and energy, this stream continuously erupts from the sun and is called the solar wind. Two or three days after bursting from the sun's surface at speeds of up to 500 miles a second, the solar wind reaches the earth, 93 million miles away. The solar wind has the force to swiftly annihilate life on earth. What stops it from doing so is the shielding power of the planet's magnetic field, reaching out more than 40,000 miles into space. Like the earth, the sun is also a mighty magnet, and the solar wind carries fragments of its magnetic field. As solar particles crash into the planet's magnetic field, the fields repel each other. Though most of the solar wind harmlessly sideswipes the magnetic shield, small streams of solar particles do manage to become trapped, spiraling down toward the planet's north and south magnetic poles. As they tumble, beams of electrons spread, ripple, and swirl, and yet their movements remain invisible. But when the solar wind hits the upper reaches of the ionosphere and encounters atmospheric gases, it starts churning the thin soup of oxygen and nitrogen there. Marvelous shapes and flowing patterns begin to appear. Electrons bouncing around among atoms of oxygen create a greenish glow much lower. Nitrogen molecules hit by solar wind may shine bright pink, or blue and violet, depending upon their distance from the surface. The ever changing dance of lights belies the aurora's permanence. Though only parts of it can be seen at any time, and almost never during the day, the aurora borealis forms a 2,000-mile-wide auroral oval above the magnetic north pole day in and day out, year after year. What can dramatically change the oval are the occasional spikes in solar activity that turn the solar wind into a raging hurricane. Then, for a few days, the auroral oval flows toward the Equator and treats sky-gazers as far south as Mexico to midnight extravanganzas. At the same time, electromagnetic disturbances intensify, with overloaded power lines and scrambled communications serving to remind us of the force behind the celestial fireworks. The Northern Lights Wallpaper The Northern Lights Wallpaper The Northern Lights Wallpaper

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