Icenami

'Ice shove' from a Minnesota lake in 2013 "consumed" homes

A mix of currents across Mille Lac Lake, in Minnesota, temperature differences and powerful winds force chunks of ice up onto the land, and into peoples' homes. A kind of instant, fast moving glacier. Just incredible video:

Beautiful mutation

Usually grey, this is a pink Katydid, a 1 in 500 mutation, so fairly common.

Look At Me! Look At Me!

This is just showing off:

 Pic from here

Ice Balls!

Ice balls, or ice boulders, a fascinating natural phenom recorded during the US Polar Vortex last week:

Explanation:

The incredible basketball sized - and bigger - 'ice balls' have been captured on film at Glen Arbor Township, Michigan, were they  cover the entire shoreline.

Despite appearing as unnatural creations, the boulders are a regular feature of Lake Michigan when temperatures drop below freezing, and are formed by ice clumping together in a similar way to snowballs.

Meteorologist Joe Charlevoix explains: "[When] the water temperature on the Lake Michigan is just a little bit below freezing, so you get a small piece of ice that forms in the water and as waves move back and forth it adds additional water and freezes in layers.

"It gets bigger and bigger, and eventually you get big balls of ice, that are pushed to the shore by the wind."

100,000 Bats Rain Down Over Queensland

Had no idea bats can't stand the heat. They were thriving in Kakadu when I visited in the mid-90s, then again, it wasn't as hot as parts of Queensland have been in recent weeks.

About 100,000 bats have fallen from the sky and died during a heatwave in Australia that has left the trees and earth littered with dead creatures.

In scenes likened to "an Alfred Hitchock thought bubble", a heatwave across the north-east state of Queensland in recent days caused mass deaths of flying foxes from an estimated 25 colonies.

"It's a horrible, cruel way to die," a conservation worker, Louise Saunders, told The Courier Mail.

"Anything over 43 degrees [Celsius, 109F] and they just fall. We're just picking up those that are just not coping and are humanely euthanising what we can."

Venus Flower Basket Sponge Will Blow Your Fcking Mind

David Attenborough has seen nature at its most beautiful, and most brutal, its most simple and most complex. So what really impresses him? According to a Q &A on Reddit, the Venus Flower Basket Sponge pretty much blows his mind. And it will blow your mind, too. Go to 54:30 -



Wow!

Conjoined Whales Thrived For Years

We still know so little about life beneath our oceans that conjoined whales may be more common than we think. This one grew to 4 metres before dying near the Baja Peninsula, so they clearly managed to survive for many years.

More here