Heavy rocks moving on their own across the flat desert of Death Valley National Park, USA, might seem alienesque, but they are not! What actually happens is that in the winters, the thin slabs of floating ice around the rocks melt, nudging them into motion with a little help from light winds – a rather simple phenomenon that was mysterious to us until a few years ago.

A rainbow around the moon surely sounds like made-up stuff, unless you chance upon one in Hawaii! Similar to its solar counterpart, the moonbow, or lunar rainbow, appears as a giant arc when moonlight is refracted through water droplets in the air. Its size and intensity, though, depend on the moon’s height in a dark sky – the lower the moon, the bigger the moonbow.

Truly a natural masterpiece, the Danxia landform was once a part of the ocean about 540 million years ago. Tectonic movements and collisions folded the land and propelled it above sea level, giving the landform a unique topography. The vast multitude of reds, blues, yellows and greens caused by metamorphic progressions gave rise to its name, the ‘Rainbow Mountains’.

The Black Sun (Sort Sol in Danish) is a poetic natural phenomenon that occurs every year in spring and autumn when millions of starlings travelling north make a pitstop at Wadden Sea National Park’s marshlands for rest and food. What seems like a well-choreographed routine is also these starlings’ ingenious ways to fend off predators while hiding the sun with their sheer numbers.

This ‘upside-down umbrella tree’ is indigenous only to the island of Socotra, Yemen, and is categorised under the Dracaena genus of the Asoaragaceae family. When truncated, the tree bleeds a red liquid, which is actually a form of red resin containing an important element called Draco that is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry to treat health problems like burns, ulcers, etc.