theoutlawstar:

Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years

“No, this isn’t a make-believe place. It’s real.

They call it “Ball’s Pyramid.” It’s what’s left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone.

What’s more, for years this place had a secret. At 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush, and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don’t know.

A satellite view of Ball’s Pyramid in the Tasman Sea off the eastern coast of Australia.

Here’s the story: About 13 miles from this spindle of rock, there’s a bigger island, called Lord Howe Island.

On Lord Howe, there used to be an insect, famous for being big. It’s a stick insect, a critter that masquerades as a piece of wood, and the Lord Howe Island version was so large — as big as a human hand — that the Europeans labeled it a “tree lobster” because of its size and hard, lobsterlike exoskeleton. It was 12 centimeters long and the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world. Local fishermen used to put them on fishing hooks and use them as bait.”

For all of you who don’t like insect, here’s something else to fear.

thescienceofrealities:

Want to See Every Tree in America?

“We may sing about purple mountains and amber grains, but one of America’s most vital resources is its vast amount of carbon-catching, oxygen-spewing trees. Now, after six years of effort, NASA knows how many we’ve got.

Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of Woods Hole Research Center worked in conjunction with the National Geological Survey and US Forest Service to catalog a mix of data gleaned from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and old-fashioned tree counting. The map above shows the total amount of woody biomass in the USA. It’s displayed at a 30 meter resolution, where every four pixels constitutes an acre and every ten represents a hectare.”

[NASA Earth Observatory viaBusiness Insider via Geekosystem]

(via prettywhores)