"Mountain of God".

"Mountain of God".

Named Ol Doinyo Lengai – meaning “Mountain of God” in the local Maasai language, the volcano in Tanzania is the weirdest on Earth. 


It is the only active volcano known to erupt natro-carbonatite lava, not the usual melts based on silica. Its lava is of unusual black color what results from its composition and the comparably low temperature at which it erupts.

 While basalt based lava erupting from volcanos in Hawaii reach scorching 1100 degrees Celsius, the Mountain of God’s cough appears rather cool at about 510 degrees Celsius. 

Once the black lava gets in contact with moisture, it turns white. Looking at Ol Doinyo Lengai with unsuspecting eyes, you might think its peak is covered in snow, while in fact it is black lava turned white.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Disturbing History Of Chinese Water Torture — And How It Drove Victims Insane

Image
The Disturbing History Of Chinese Water Torture — And How It Drove Victims Insane. A centuries-old interrogation method, Chinese water torture was actually invented far from Asia and eventually evolved into far crueler forms of punishment. Human beings have inflicted untold suffering on each other since the dawn of time. Over the centuries, people have worked to devise constantly evolving forms of punishment and coercion. Compared to devices like the Iron Maiden or chains and whips, Chinese water torture may not sound particularly grueling, but history begs to differ. Medieval torture devices typically used razor-sharp blades, ropes, or blunt instruments to pry confessions from subjects. Chinese water torture was more insidious, however. According to the  New York Times Magazine , the torture method involves holding a person in place while slowly dripping cold water on their face, forehead, or scalp. The splash of water is jarring, and the victim experiences anxiety whi...
Read more

The terror of the execution wheel

Image
The terror of the execution wheel The  breaking wheel  or  execution wheel , also known as the  Wheel of Catherine  or simply the  Wheel , was a torture method used for public execution primarily in Europe from antiquity through the Middle Ages into the early modern period by breaking the bones of a criminal or bludgeoning them to death. The practice was abolished in Bavaria in 1813 and in the Electorate of Hesse in 1836: the last known execution by the "Wheel" took place in Prussia in 1841. In the Holy Roman Empire it was a "mirror punishment" for highwaymen and street thieves, and was set out in the  Sachsenspiegel  for murder, and arson that resulted in fatalities. Those convicted as murderers, rapists, traitors and or robbers to be executed by the wheel, sometimes termed to be "wheel...
Read more

Meet Oliver Sipple, the veteran who saved President Ford's life - and was punished for it

Image
Meet Oliver Sipple, the veteran who saved President Ford's life - and was punished for it In 1975, a disabled Vietnam vet named Oliver Sipple saved President Gerald Ford from an assassin. Although Sipple was hailed a hero at first, the tide quickly turned when the media outed him as a gay man. Not only did the exposure of his homosexuality overshadow his heroic act, it also led to his family essentially disowning him. Years later, Sipple's lifeless body was found next to a cheap bottle of bourbon in his apartment. He'd been dead for nearly two weeks before anyone found him. See the photos and discover the tragic story of the man who saved President Ford’s life and was punished for it — by clicking the link in our bio. After disarming an assassin, Oliver Sipple was hailed a hero. But the ensuing media storm outed him as gay and upended his entire life. One morning in September 1975, 33-year-old ex-Marine Oliver Sipple went for a walk around his San Francisco neighborhood. Wi...
Read more

October 1916: The German Military’s Jewish Census 

Image
October 1916: The German Military’s Jewish Census ( Judenzählung ) (Jewish Census) In October 1916, the Prussian War Ministry conducted the  Judenzählung , also referred to as the “Jew Count” or “ Judenstatistik ,” a census of Jewish soldiers serving in the German army. The  Judenzählung  operated on unfounded accusations that Jews were shirking frontline military service and attempted to ascertain the number of Jewish soldiers in combat units relative to those serving in rear-area support roles behind the front lines. Table of Contents 1 Introduction 2 Reasons for the  Judenzählung 3 Flaws in the Census 4 Conclusion: Effects of the Census Notes Selected Bibliography Citation Introduction The Prussian War Minister, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn (1860-1925) initiated the  Judenzählung  on 11 October 1916. The  Judenzählung  was a response to the demands of the anti-Semitic circles in the army and th...
Read more

The Macabre True Story Of Edward Paisnel, The Beast Of Jersey–world history and facts

Image
 The Macabre True Story Of Edward Paisnel, The Beast Of Jersey–world history and facts Throughout the 1960s, Edward Paisnel appeared to be a pillar of his small community on the English Channel Island of Jersey. He was a family man who was devoted to his wife Joan and her young children, and he even played Santa Claus at Christmastime for the young foster children at the group home that Joan founded.  But when he wasn't spending time with his family or doing good deeds, he was donning this mask and sneaking into his neighbors' homes at night in order to sexually assault women and children. It would take more than a decade for police to finally catch up with the “Beast of Jersey" as they repeatedly focused on other suspects, blind to the fact that a man like Paisnel could commit such crimes.  Officers only caught him when he ran a red light one day in 1971 and they happened to see his mask sitting right there in his car. Edward Paisnel committed more than a dozen rapes and...
Read more

Thomas Edward Ketchum the (Black Jack)_world history and facts

Image
Thomas Edward Ketchum the  (Black Jack) Thomas Edward Ketchum  (known as  Black Jack ; October 31, 1863 – April 26, 1901) was an American cowboy who later became an outlaw. He was executed in 1901 for attempted train robbery. The execution by hanging was botched; he was decapitated because the executioner used a rope that was too long. Tom Ketchum was born in San Saba County, Texas. He left Texas in 1890, possibly after committing a crime. He worked as a cowboy in the Pecos River Valley of New Mexico, where by 1894, his older brother, Sam Ketchum, had joined him. Black Jack and a group of others were named as the robbers of an Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway train that was en route to Deming, New Mexico Territory, in 1892 with a large payroll aboard. The gang supposedly robbed the train just outside Nutt, New Mexico Territory, a water station twenty miles (32 km) north of Deming. Black Jack and his gang would often visit th...
Read more

The bodies of civilians executed by the German army hang in the Pancevo city cemetery

Image
The bodies of civilians executed by the German army hang in the Pancevo city cemetery The woman, whose body is hanging in the middle of the group, owned a restaurant under which the Germans found a tunnel that led to the cemetery and was the suspected escape route for the sniper. On the back of the photograph, there is a caption in German handwriting: " The woman was the owner of the restaurant from which a secret passage [660 feet] long led to a cemetery, it passed under the street and ended in a chapel.  Then the German soldiers were shot at night from the cemetery. All the hanged ones had been caught in the cemetery." Captions on the back of photographs, such as this one, taken by a German military photographer attached to a propaganda unit, were usually supplied by the photographer himself. Event History The action was carried out on orders from the city commander, Lieutenant Colonel von Bandelow, in reprisal for the killing of 4 German soldiers by civilians on 18 April 1...
Read more

The Battle of Moscow

Image
The  Battle of Moscow  was a military campaign that consisted of two periods of strategically significant fighting on a 600 km (370 mi) sector of the Eastern Front during World War II, between September 1941 and January 1942. The Soviet defensive effort frustrated Hitler's attack on Moscow, the capital and largest city of the Soviet Union. Moscow was one of the primary military and political objectives for Axis forces in their invasion of the Soviet Union. The German Strategic Offensive, named Operation Typhoon, called for two pincer offensives, one to the north of Moscow against the Kalinin Front by the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies, simultaneously severing the Moscow–Leningrad railway, and another to the south of Moscow Oblast against the Western Front south of Tula, by the 2nd Panzer Army, while the 4th Army advanced directly towards Moscow from the west. Initially, the Soviet forces conducted a strateg...
Read more

Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon The Hidden Disabled Cousins of Queen Elizabeth

Image
Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon The Hidden Disabled Cousins of Queen Elizabeth Nerissa Jane Irene Bowes-Lyon (18 February 1919 – 22 January 1986) and Katherine Juliet Bowes-Lyon (4 July 1926 – 23 February 2014) were two of the daughters of John Herbert Bowes-Lyon and his wife Fenella (née Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis). John was the brother of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the Queen Mother, so the two daughters were first cousins of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, sharing one pair of grandparents, Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and Cecilia Bowes-Lyon, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Background Nerissa Bowes-Lyon was born on 18 February 1919 and Katherine Bowes-Lyon was born on 4 July 1926, the daughters of John Herbert Bowes-Lyon and Fenella Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis. Their father, the second son of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was a brother of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen Elizabeth II...
Read more

Visually impaired girl’s photo incorrectly shared as the one who saw the Nuclear blast in Hiroshima

Image
An image purportedly showing "the eyes that saw a nuke," a picture of a girl who was blinded by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in the closing days of World War II, is frequently shared on social media sites: Although the image is a real photograph, the title commonly applied to it may be misleading. The photograph comes from a set of pictures taken by Scandinavian photographer Christer Strömholm in Japan in 1961 and 1963, 16 to 18 years after a nuclear bomb was detonated over the city of Hiroshima.  While it is not possible to verify the age of the woman shown in the photograph, she appears too young to have witnessed the nuclear blast first-hand, and the caption for the picture on Strömholm's official website identifies her simply as "the blind girl": The photographs from Strömholm's "Hiroshima suite" included some pictures of children, presumably the children of Hiroshima survivors. It might be the case that the pictured girl's blind...
Read more