Rare Photos Of Remote Tribes About to Disappear

It took over four years for photographer Jimmy Nelson to document 29 cultures and tribes at risk of disappearing from their remote corners of the world. He set out to “celebrate the beauty of these cultures and their traditional ways of life” and beautifully captured his subjects.

The Most Magnificent Trees In The World

Dragon Blood Tree, Yemen

Rainbow Eucalyptus. Kauai, Hawaii

125-year-Old Rhododendron Tree. Canada

 145 Years Old Wisteria In Japan

The Windswept Trees in New Zealand 

Japanese maples in Portland,Oregon

Antarctic Beech Draped in Hanging Moss, Oregon 

Blooming Cherry Trees in Bonn, Germany

Angel Oak in John's Island in South Carolina 

Flamboyant Tree, Brazil

The President, Third Largest Giant Sequoia Tree in the World, California 

Maple Tree Tunnel , Oregon

Avenue of Oaks at Dixie Plantation , South Carolina 

The Baobab Trees,  Madagascar

The Dark Hedges, Northern Ireland

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

This karst landscape in the state of New Mexico comprises over 80 recognized caves. They are outstanding not only for their size but also for the profusion, diversity and beauty of their mineral formations. Lechuguilla Cave stands out from the others, providing an underground laboratory where geological and biological processes can be studied in a pristine setting.

The more than 100 limestone caves within Carlsbad Caverns National Park are outstanding and notable world-wide because of their size, mode of origin, and the abundance, diversity and beauty of the speleothems (decorative rock formations) within. On-going geologic processes continue to form rare and unique speleothems, particularly in Lechuguilla Cave. Carlsbad Caverns and Lechuguilla Cave are well known for their great natural beauty, exceptional geologic features, and unique reef and rock formations. The Permian-aged Capitan Reef complex (in which Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla and other caves formed) is one of the best preserved and most accessible complexes available for scientific study in the world.

The park’s primary caves, Carlsbad and Lechuguilla, are well known for the abundance, diversity, and beauty of their decorative rock formations. Lechuguilla Cave exhibits rare and unique speleothems, including a great abundance of large calcite and gypsum formations, including the largest accumulation of gypsum “chandeliers,” some of which extend more than six meters (18 feet) in length.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is one of the few places in the world where on-going geologic processes are most apparent and rare speleothems continue to form, enabling scientists to study geological processes in a virtually undisturbed environment. These speleothems include helictites forming underwater, calcite and gypsum speleothems, and an astonishing collection of “biothems,” cave formations assisted in their formation by bacteria. Researchers can study both the Capitan reef’s inside through cave passages that penetrate in and through it as well as eroded canyon-exposed cross sections outside.

Death Valley National Park

Not for the faint of heart, Death Valley National Park, in California and Nevada, is hot and dry. Temperatures once hit 134°F in July 1913. Zabriskie Point, seen here, offers a spectacular view of the badlands.

Location: California & Nevada

Size: About 3.4 million acres

The largest national park south of Alaska, Death Valley is known for extremes: It is North America's driest and hottest spot (with fewer than two inches/five centimeters of rainfall annually and a record high of 134°F), and has the lowest elevation on the continent—282 feet below sea level. Even with its extremes, the park still receives nearly a million visitors each year.

In 1849 emigrants bound for California's gold fields strayed into the 120-mile long basin, enduring a two-month ordeal of "hunger and thirst and an awful silence." One of the last to leave looked down from a mountain at the narrow valley and said, "Good-bye, Death Valley."

The moniker belies the beauty in this vast graben, the geological term for a sunken fragment of the Earth's crust. Here are rocks sculptured by erosion, richly tinted mudstone hills and canyons, luminous sand dunes, lush oases, and a 200-square-mile salt pan surrounded by mountains, one of America's greatest vertical rises. In some years spring rains trigger wildflower blooms amid more than a thousand varieties of plants.

Native Americans, most recently the Shoshone, found ways to adapt to the more recent and forbidding desert conditions that exist here now. Rock art and artifacts indicate a human presence dating back at least 9,000 years.

From 1883 to 1889, wagon teams hauled powdery white borax from mines since fallen to ruin, an enterprise that spread word of Death Valley's striking landscapes, deep solitude, and crystalline air.

As night falls, Death Valley's elusive populations of bobcats, kit foxes, and rodents venture out. Far above on steep mountain slopes, desert bighorn sheep forage among Joshua trees, scrubby junipers, and pines, while hawks soar on thermals rising into vivid blue, cloudless skies.

Fact !!!

The highest mountain in the park, 11,049-foot Telescope Peak, lies only 15 miles from Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the U.S. The vertical drop from the peak to Badwater Basin is twice the depth of the Grand Canyon.

Named by gold prospectors struggling through the area in 1849, Death Valley has been inhabited by Timbisha Shoshone Native Americans; gold prospectors, including slaves; Chinese immigrants mining for silver and borax; Basque immigrants who settled here at the turn of the 20th century; and Japanese Americans temporarily interned here during World War II.

Eternal Flame Falls

Location: New York, USA

Tucked deep within Chestnut Ridge Park, New York, is a small waterfall called the Eternal Flame Falls. The waterfall is so called because of a simple phenomenon – a natural gas leak just underneath the falls that just happens to be burning. The flame is not really "eternal" in the sense that it goes out occasionally. Often it is re-lit by the next hiker that finds it extinguished.

Chestnut Ridge Park is situated on 1213 acres of the northern face of a series of hills sandwiched between the Eighteen mile Creek and West Branch Cazenovia Creek valleys in Erie County. The park itself is a superb summer family destination containing miles of hiking trails, cycling paths, several playing fields, tennis courts, and a wealth of picnic facilities and shelters. Eternal Flame Falls, despite being located within the park boundaries, is off on the fringe, away from the crowds, and most directly accessible from a trail that begins on the southern edge of the park.

As you approach the falls, the smell of rotten-egg hits your nose. What you smell is the natural gas that leaks from between the shale layers. The gasses produced during the decomposition of the organics within the rock deposits are under pressure and push out through cracks and loose layers within the rock. One large fissure is located right within Eternal Flame Falls, in a small grotto that protects the gas seepage from the falling water and any wind, enabling it to sustain a flame when lit. Two other, smaller seepages within the grotto can be lit, although they can't hold a flame as large or as long as the primary flame. There are several other gas seepages, or springs, around the falls, but locating them can be tricky and lighting them often impossible. Some are located underneath the pool below the falls, and can be seen as bubbles rising up from the bedrock below.

Eternal Flame Falls is highly dependant on rainfall and melt water. It is usually only flowing in early spring, or after long bouts of heavy rain. It reaches 30 ft high, cascading over sloping shale in two segments. A small grotto, 5 ft up from the creek bed, to the right houses the natural gas spring that can be ignited to create a flame of 4-8 inches in height. When flow is high, the water pours over the grotto, covering the flame and diffusing the light like a lampshade.

Eternal Flame Falls is truly one of the most unique waterfalls in the country and one of the few remaining natural areas that we find on our planet. It is said that the falls may be the only one of its kind on the planet.

Timbuktu

Location: Mali

UNESCO World Heritage Site: 1988

Timbuktu city. central Mali, near the Niger River. Connected with the Niger by a series of canals, Timbuktu is served by the small river port of Kabara. Its salt trade and handicraft industries make it an important meeting place for the nomadic people of the Sahara. 

Timbuktu is the Home of the prestigious Koranic Sankore University and other madrasas, Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital and a centre for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, recall Timbuktu's golden age. Although continuously restored, these monuments are today under threat from desertification.

Timbuktu was founded (11th cent.) by the Tuareg as a seasonal camp. By the 14th cent., when it was part of the Mali empire (see History under Mali), it had become one of the major commercial centers of the W Sudan region, famous for its gold trade. Under the Songhai empire (15th and 16th cent.) the city was a great Muslim educational center, with more than 100 Qur'anic schools and a university centered at the Sankoré mosque, one of three great mosques there that are outstanding examples of local earthen buildings.

Timbuktu was sacked in 1593 by invaders from Morocco and never again recovered its leading position. It was repeatedly conquered by neighboring peoples until it was captured (1894) by the French. In recent years it has been threatened by the desertification of the surrounding region, and in 2012–13 it and the rest of N Mali was seized by Tuareg and Islamist rebels. After the IIslamistgained ascendancy over their Tuareg allies, they destroyed city shrines to local Sufi saints as well as some of the city's ancient manuscripts.