Sunday, March 25, 2018

Alien World Next Door

At this link in Cosmos magazine, you can see some photos of ten places on Earth that give a pretty good impression of being somewhere else entirely.

The first one, in fact, the Wadi Rum in Jordan, has doubled for the surface of Mars in a couple of movies. No. 8, Mexico's Cave of Crystals, looks familiar to anyone who watched one of the Christopher Reeves Superman movies. But the environment is nothing like Supes' Arctic Fortress of Solitude, with near 100% humidity and temperatures pushing 140° F. It's not an alien world, but it requires near spacesuit-level protective gear to spend even a few minutes inside.

The Darvaza Crater in Turkey, the result of a failed oil mining attempt by the Soviet Union in 1971, is sometimes called "the door to hell" because its natural-gas fueled flames have been burning continuously since then. When told of the nickname, both the White House and the Capitol said in unison, "Hold my beer."

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