If still haven’t decided which is cooler, ringing rocks or lake guns. Both make inexplicable noises.
Both are easily observable in nature, and both puzzle the dickens out of those who observe them. Lake guns go boom, and no one knows why. Every theory they came up with has a hole in it. Meanwhile, all over the world, for longer than history, the lake guns continue to go boom…
https://leeduigon.com/2015/08/30/another-mystery-of-gods-creation/
A lot of you weren’t here in 2013 when I posted “The Mystery of the Ringing Rocks,” and now seems as good a time as any to revisit. Besides, by now I’ve learned how to post a video to go along with it, so you can hear the rocks ring.
Yes, they ring: when tapped with a hammer, some of the rocks in the boulder field produce a musical tone. But not all of them! Which is hard to understand. And if you put in the time, you could probably find a way to play a tune on the rocks. “Happy Birthday,” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It’s been done by others.
What makes them ring? After studying them for going on 200 years, nobody knows.
Ringing rocks are found, as far as we know, in only seven places, world-wide: in England, Scotland, Australia, Mexico, Montana, and at two sites in Pennsylvania. Why are they so rare? No one knows. I’ve visited Ringing Rocks Park in Upper Black Eddy, PA, and heard the rocks ring. Back then you were allowed to climb around the boulder field and play with the rocks; I don’t know if you still can.
Just as puzzling as the rarity of this phenomenon, if you break a rock into two or more pieces, the pieces won’t ring anymore. It’s as if something spilled out and was lost. Even more puzzling, if you remove ringing rocks from one of the two boulder fields in Pennsylvania, they won’t ring anymore! Well, they will, sort of–but the sound is too low-frequency to be detected by the human ear. But if you remove a ringing rock from the other field, only a few miles away from the first one, it will still ring.
Something Biblical about it all, isn’t there?
Meanwhile, if you think you’ve got God’s creation all figured out, the ringing rocks should make you reconsider your position. And this is Mr. Nature, signing off for now.
Hi, Mr. Nature here, with yet another zoological head-scratcher: the seals of Lake Baikal.
So what’s the mystery? They’re just another species of seal, right? Ah! But consider where Lake Baikal is–in the middle of Siberia, north of Mongolia. In fact, it contains more fresh water than any other lake in the world, and has no outlet–repeat, no outlet–to the sea, which is hundreds of miles away. And these are the only exclusively fresh-water seals in the world.
How did they get there? It’s not like seals are well-equipped to travel overland for any distance. It’s hard enough for people to get there from the sea, let alone seals. And yet there they are, perhaps as many as 100,000 of them. How in the world did seals wind up in Lake Baikal?
Nobody knows.
God’s creation is more complex than we will ever know, and it will never run out of hard questions to pose us as we study it.
Hi! Mr. Nature here, with some more of the strange and fascinating stuff that God has included in His creation.
Here we see a boy playing with a humongous stingray–not an activity I would personally recommend. After all, a stingray that size could kill you dead with one thrust of his stinger. But this child pets it, talks to it, and even feeds it, and comes to no harm.
My question is, what’s going through the stingray’s mind? We have no idea what kind of mind it has. Is it enjoying this little play session? And if you were a stingray, how would you process this experience? I mean, this is so far off the beaten path, I hardly know what to start wondering about.
Just a reminder of how little we truly know, and how much remains to be learned and understood…