Antarctica Warming

Larsen B Ice Shelf Breakup

Over a 35-day period in early 2002, Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf lost a total of about 1,255 square miles, one of the largest shelf retreats ever recorded. This image, captured by NASA's MODIS satellite sensor on February 23, shows the shelf mid-disintegration, spewing a cloud of icebergs adrift in the Weddell Sea. In December 2007, a team of National Geographic explorers will begin a five-week expedition across the continent's Larsen ice shelf to study how global warming is changing the topography of Antarctica.

Glacier Advance

A stark white lobe of a glacier advances across Antarctica's dry valleys region, so called because of its scarcity of snow. Earth's fifth-largest continent contains more than two-thirds of the world's freshwater in the form of ice, yet some areas receive less than two inches (five centimetres) of precipitation a year.

Penguins on Shore

A group of gentoo penguins nests on an icy shore of Cierva Cove, Antarctica. The continent is home to a number of penguin species, including Adélie, chinstrap, emperor, gentoo, and rock hopper.

Large Iceberg

Global warming is forcing ice shelves to calve, producing icebergs like this monolith jutting into the waters of the Antarctic Peninsula. National Geographic's Larsen Ice Shelf Expedition team will examine calving shelves and the bergs they spawn, determining how shelves fragment and how diminishing ice mass affects the world's oceans and climate.

Penguin and Chick

An Antarctic gentoo chick stays near its parent for warmth. Gentoos are the fastest underwater swimming birds and can reach speeds of 22 miles an hour (36 kilometers an hour). Scientists worry that warming temperatures will encroach on penguin habitats, threatening their populations across Antarctica.

Neumeyer Channel

Icebergs drift across Antarctica's Neumeyer Channel. The Larsen Ice Shelf Expedition team predicts melting Antarctic shelves and bergs will raise sea levels around the world, flooding hundreds of thousands of square miles and displacing tens of millions of people. The team will collect evidence from their expedition to better understand how global warming is changing the continent and how we can prepare ourselves for its effects.

Traditions of Top Universities Around The World

St Andrews University

Wow! What a wonderful and very unique tradition of this university is celebrated  on the second weekend in the month of November.

The students of third year adopt the first year students. The younger students go to the home of seniors. Where they live for two days and enjoy the parties.

Tradition is an object, culture and remembers able events that create uniqueness in the society. Every society and place has its own traditions which become the popularity of that.
University is and institution of degree education or higher education. It provides undergraduate and postgraduate education to its students.
Every university has its own special and historical culture and traditions which provide some amazing and informative activities. You should see and learn about top universities of the world.


Harvard University
This is the best university in all over the world. It has its own amazing and historical culture and traditions.
The tradition of screaming has been doing since 1960s. Students of the university cry for 10 minutes on the last night before the exams.



Stanford University
The wondrous tradition of this university is Steam-Tunneling. Students lift manhole covers and drop for exploring of the network for brick tunnels that are located near the university.




Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In this famous institute, there is an old tradition is that the students make very nice and amazing jokes on those students who is leaving the university along with on teachers.
They make things in the remembrance of leaving persons of the university. This exciting activity is formally known as hacks.



Yale University
In this university, there is an amazing tradition is found of smoking. At the time of convocation the final students smoke tobacco out clay pipes before crushing them under their foot.
It is a sign of completing the college life along with the enjoyment and smiles are comes to an end.



Cornell University
This university celebrates Dragon Day on 17th march in every year. That day all the students of architecture department make a big dragon by joint effort.
This event is organized in the remembrance of the great person St Patrick.



Princeton University
This university has a tradition to celebrate a victory of winning football matches against two big universities Yale and Harvard in the same tournament. If they win both matches they make their victory remember able by bonfire in the university.
This event last time celebrated in 2006 after a long time of 12 years.



Oxford University
It is an oldest and high standard university of the world. More than 20,000 students are studding there and more than 30 colleges of this big university. It has its own wonderful and pretty traditions which are very unique.
The students of Merton College celebrate a ceremony on last Sunday of every October. They walk backwards around the Quad drinking port of fellows. The basic aim of this event to maintain the space-time during in summer season.



Chicago University
Very practical and informative tradition is found in this university. The event of Scavenger Hunt is organized on every year to check out the best talent among the all students. Students do their best effort according to their knowledge in groups.
Students complete different tasks according to the mention instructions. Previous two intelligent students of physics make plutonium reactor.



Carnegie Mellon University
Here is a tradition related painting a picture that is located in the middle of the campus of university. Any student of the university can paint on that picture. But there are some rules regarding that activity like you can paint after middle of night and before the sunrise without any helping material rulers and pencils. You can paint only with paint brush.

Best trips of the World 2011

Ice Land

Dusk falls on a primeval landscape on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. A final relic from the world’s last ice age, this North Atlantic island nation is a world of knife-cut valleys, gargantuan fjords, monumental cliffs, black-sand beaches, thundering waterfalls, and silent white glaciers. Recent volcanic eruptions remind us that Iceland is still a country in the making, with changed landscapes that even Icelanders continue to discover.

Three years of financial recovery have made Iceland more affordable, with consumer prices now largely pegged to the euro. The country’s return to a humbler attitude stems from a thousand-year-old tradition of self-reliance—a tradition that has preserved one of the world’s oldest living languages and harnessed some of the cleanest energy on Earth.

Koh Lipe, Thailand

Thailand's sun-drenched jewel in the South Andaman Sea, Koh Lipe has recently risen to the top of intrepid beach lovers’ A-list of island paradises. Considered an alternative to the overexploited Koh Phi Phi (which gained fame as the setting for the film The Beach), Koh Lipe is accessible only by boat, with departure ports that include Krabi and the nearby Malaysian island of Langkawi.

Crystal waters and pristine reefs surround the island. Up to 25 percent of the world’s tropical fish species swim in the protected waters around Koh Lipe (the island is in Tarutao National Marine Park). Pattaya Beach may be the island’s most developed tourist spot, but head to quieter Sunrise Beach, where a now settled community of “sea gypsies,” the Chao Lei, live and fish. Take in the view from Castaway Resort's "chill-out deck," above.

Dresden

resden shone brightest in the 1700s, when the kings of Saxony spent their wealth to turn their capital into “Florence on the Elbe.” But in February 1945, two days of British and American bombing destroyed much of Dresden’s center and killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Nearly 70 years later, the city has been resurrected as one of Germany’s top tourist destinations. The landmark Frauenkirche (“church of our lady”), a baroque masterpiece designed by George Bähr, was rebuilt from rubble in 2005 (above). Today it towers above a carefully reconstructed historic center that is home to half a dozen world-class museums—from the Albertinum and the Old Masters Picture Gallery, with its Vermeers and Titians, to the oddly named but unforgettable German Hygiene Museum.

North Colombia

Tayrona National Park's gorgeous beaches are a highlight of northern Colombia, home also to the famed Ciudad Perdida. The cleared mountaintop terraces of the "lost city" shine like a green grassy beacon declaring the country’s rebirth as a travel destination at the crossroads of the Caribbean and South America.

Virunga Volcanoes

Perhaps nowhere on Earth is the dual creative and destructive nature of volcanoes more evident than in central Africa’s Virunga Volcanoes Massif. Straddling the borders between Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the eight-volcano chain is one of Earth’s most active volcanic regions and a veritable salad bowl for mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, and other wildlife. Landscapes in all three countries conjure visions of both Eden and hell.

In Congo, the swirling plume of the active Nyiragongo Volcano (above) beckons. Check on the security situation in the troubled country before going, but those who make the steep five-hour hike up Nyiragongo are rewarded with heady vistas of the world’s largest lava lake. Spend the night on the rim to fully experience the crater’s fiery light and sound spectacle.

World’s Biggest Toy Collection

A collection of 35,000 vintage toys dating from 1850 to 1940 are on display at Sotheby’s in New York. The collection includes rare, handmade and historically significant European pieces, and depictions of actual rail stations, bridges and buildings.

The collector, Jerry Greene, has kept the collection in five basement rooms of his suburban Philadelphia home and hopes a public institution or an individual will acquire and donate the collection to a museum.

Ancient Egyptian Artifacts Damaged in Looting

Tanks roll into Tahrir Square outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo on Sunday, January 30, 2011. During the chaotic protests two nights before, would-be looters broke into the 108-year-old building through a skylight, according to official reports. The vandals damaged mummies and artifacts but were arrested before they could make off with anything.



Two ancient mummified heads, as yet unidentified, lie on the floor of the Egyptian Museum on Monday after the weekend attack by looters.



Pictured in 1963, a 14th-century B.C. statuette from King Tut's tomb shows the young pharaoh balanced on the back of a leopard. One of a matched pair, the sculpture was reportedly damaged in the weekend attack on the Egyptian Museum.



In a gallery displaying King Tut's 3,300-year-old chariots, a member of the Egyptian special forces stands guard near a case allegedly smashed by looters this past weekend. Pieces of the pharaoh's damaged ceremonial fan of gold lie on top of the glass.



Looters in the Egyptian Museum reportedly damaged 4,000-year-old models that represent an army of Nubian archers (shown intact in a file picture). Standing about 21 inches (53 centimeters) tall, the statues were discovered in 1894 in the tomb of a prince in the town of Assiut.



In the region around this 4,500-year-old tomb of an official at Abusir (pictured in an undated photo), looters allegedly broke into excavation warehouses filled with artifacts this past weekend.
Egypt's museums are so full of ancient treasures that many excavated objects are stored near the sites where they were found. In peaceful times a padlocked door, lead seals marked with an inspector's stamp, and a guard are enough to keep them safe.

Shown in an undated picture, crowds throng King Tut's golden funerary mask in the Egyptian Museum. The iconic piece was not among the damaged artifacts.

"A lot of the things that were broken off were gilded wood, so I think [the looters] were after gold," UCLA Egyptologist Willeke Wendrich told National Geographic News.

"The restoration of those objects, even if all the parts are still there, will be very difficult, time consuming, and costly," she added. "This is really fragile wood."

Travel Photo of the Week Jan '11

Pont San't Angelo, Rome

The pedestrian bridge, Ponte Sant' Angelo, in Rome leads to Castel Sant' Angelo, a round-walled, battlemented structure that today serves as a museum. Commissioned as a mausoleum for Emperor Hadrian in the second century A.D., it got its current name in the sixth century—a time when a plague was devastating Rome—after Pope Gregory the Great had a vision of an angel hovering over the structure, sheathing its sword. The vision was interpreted as heralding the end of the plague, and a statue of Archangel Michael, the rescuing angel, was placed on top of the structure.

 

Bois Brule River, Wisconsin

Canoes outside a boathouse await paddlers on northern Wisconsin's Bois Brule River. Once traveled by Native Americans and European explorers, trappers, and traders, the river is now a popular recreation area for paddling, wildlife viewing, and hiking. The entire 44 miles of the river is contained within the Brule River State Forest.

Ireland Coast

Caught in the moment by a slow shutter speed, water heads out to sea through a rocky gateway on the Irish shore. Water is inescapable in Ireland; the island—Europe's third largest—is surrounded by the Irish Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the Celtic Sea to the south.

 

Varenna, Italy

Photograph by Raymond Choo, My Shot

Colorful buildings line the small harbor in Varenna, Italy. Located on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy, the quiet town is an hour's train trip from Milan.

 

Paris, France

On a cold and bright winter afternoon, Parisians and tourists stroll around the marbled plaza of the Palais de Chaillot with a view of the iconic Eiffel Tower. Built in 1889, the tower stands 1,063 feet, or 81 stories, tall.

 

Giza, Egypt

Photograph by Romona Robbins, My Shot

If a camel ride doesn't appeal, visitors to Giza can take in the Great Pyramids and surrounding sites astride an Arabian horse. Memorials to Egyptian kings, the Pyramids have risen above the desert outside Cairo for more than 4,000 years. Stone—not sun-dried mud brick—gave permanence to these monuments, the last of the world's ancient wonders.

The Volkswagen Assembly Plant