A circular, slow-turning sheet of ice in Maine’s Presumpscot River has captured the imaginations of millions around the world after photos and videos of it have been shared on social media.

It’s been called a “frozen crop circle”, a “frozen moon”, an alien ship”, but scientists say it’s a rare natural phenomenon at an unprecedented scale. Rotating ice circles have been reported in the US before, but they were in the 20- to 30-foot range, whereas the ice disk in the Presumpscot River, in the city of Westbrook, is roughly 100 meters wide. It is constantly rotating counterclockwise and it’s size appears to vary according to the outside temperature and sunlight – it’s larger in the morning, but shrinks when the sun is strong and the temperature rises.

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It’s not every day that you see octopuses, starfish and prawns literally raining down from the sky, but that’s exactly what happened Wednesday in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao, after strong winds sucked the marine creatures from the sea.

On Wednesday, the seaside city of Qingdao, in China’s Shandong province, was hit by a severe storm that brought down trees and large sign posts, flooded the streets and brought traffic to a stand-still. But there was a particular phenomenon that captured the attention of motorists in the city during Wednesday’s storm – various sea creatures started falling from the sky.

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In 1980, when loggers for the Georgia Kraft Corp. cut a chestnut oak into logs they made a grim discovery. Lodged in a hollow stretch near the top of the tree was a mummified hunting dog. Rather than send the section of the tree on to the sawmill, the loggers donated it to Forest World, a tree museum in Waycross, Georgia. He has been a star attraction ever since.

The dog, named (slightly insensitively) “Stuckie” after a 2002 naming contest, had apparently been in the tree for approximately 20 years before the loggers discovered him. Experts believe that he had probably chased after some small game, wedging himself into the hollow tree and climbing a whopping 28 feet up before getting stuck.

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Imagine waking up one day and finding that your beautiful local beach is no more – gone, its fine white sand swept away by a freak storm. You go about your daily business for 12 long years and then suddenly the beach is back, all its glory restored by another storm. This is what happened on the island of Achill, off the coast of Ireland, where the inhabitants are celebrating the return of the beautiful Ashleam Bay beach that was taken from them in 2005.

That in itself is remarkable enough, but the story gets even better! You see, another beach in Achill did a disappearing act once, but took much longer to return. The beach at Doonagh, located only six miles (10km) away from Ashleam Bay, was restored earlier this year after waves created by spring storms had swept away all the sand in 1984, leaving just rock pools behind.

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If you’ve never heard of an egg-laying mountain, you probably don’t know about Chan Da Ya, a mysterious cliff in China that reportedly lays perfectly round or oval stone eggs every 30 years.

Located in Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Region, China’s Guizhou Province, Chan Da Ya – Mandarin for “egg laying cliff” – has been puzzling geologists for decades. The 9ft high and 65ft long heavily eroded formation has an uneven surface dotted with dozens of round and oval-shaped stones of various sizes. As the elements continue to eat away at the cliff, the harder “eggs” become even more exposed and eventually fall out of their natural sockets. According to the people of the nearby Gulu village, Chan Da Ya takes 30 years to lay its strange stone eggs.

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Crown shyness or canopy disengagement is a mysterious natural phenomenon in which the crowns of some tree species do not touch each other, but are separated by a gap clearly visible from ground level. The effect usually occurs between trees of the same species, but has also been observed between trees of different species.

The Crown Shyness phenomenon was first documented in scientific literature during the 1920s, but researchers have since not been able to reach a consensus regarding its causes. There are many theories going around in scientific circles, most of which make sense, but no one has been able to prove without the shadow of a doubt why some trees avoid touching each other. But perhaps it’s this mystery, along with its striking appearance, that makes crown shyness such a fascinating phenomenon.

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Earlier this month, the residents of Goulburn – a small town in Australia’s Southern Tablelands – were spooked to discover their properties blanketed by millions of tiny spiders and mounds of their silky threads. The spiders had apparently rained down from the sky, silken thread and all, a phenomenon known as “Angel Rain”.

“Anyone else experiencing this Angel Hair or maybe aka millions of spiders falling from the sky right now?” wrote resident Ian Watson on the Goulburn Community Forum Facebook page. “I’m 10 minutes out of town, and you can clearly see hundreds of little spiders floating along with their webs and my home is covered in them. Someone call a scientist!”

That sounds positively frightful, but experts say that arachnid rains are actually a natural phenomenon, and not as uncommon as you’d think. It is referred to as ‘spider rain’ or ‘angel hair’ in scientific circles, and is actually a form of spider transportation called ‘ballooning’.

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If you strike a rock, you’d expect to hear a dull ‘thud’. Or maybe a ‘chink’. Definitely not a ringing sound. So you’d be surprised to know that ringing rocks actually do exist. Nestled in the midst of the 128-acre Ringing Rocks County Park in Pennsylvania, is a field of unique boulders. Spread out across seven to eight acres, the boulders produce a distinctive metallic ‘clang’ when struck with a hammer or another piece of rock. Native Americans have known about the rocks for centuries, and passed on their knowledge to the first White settlers in the mid-1700s.

The sound produced by the rocks is so unexpected that it could get you wondering if they are really made of stone. They actually sound hollow and metallic. The strange phenomenon has baffled scientists and geologists for years. Several experiments have been conducted on the ringing rocks, but the exact reason for the unusual sound remains unknown.

Richard Faas, a geologist from Pennsylvania, tested a few of the rocks in his lab in 1965. He discovered that when struck, each individual rock produced low frequency tones that aren’t audible to the human ear. The tones from multiple rocks interact with each other and it’s the collective sound that we get to hear.

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The world’s greatest natural sound and light show occurs over the Catatumbo River in Venezuela, a 15 hour drive from Bogota, Columbia. For centuries, a storm unleashing over 40,000 bolts of lightning has ripped across the night sky at exactly the same spot over Lake Maracaibo. This has occurred repeatedly for as many as 160 nights a year, lasting up to 10 hours a night.

The people of northwestern Venezuela call the phenomenon ‘rib a-ba’, which means ‘river of fire in the sky’. It is also known as ‘Relámpago del Catatumbo’, the ‘everlasting storm’. It generates 1.2 million lightning strikes a year (the highest in the world), visible from almost 250 miles away. For centuries, the ‘Beacon of Maracaibo’ has guided sailors and fishermen at night. It is now a popular tourist attraction in the region.

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