Nature of beauty in earth- Water

Water on Earth 

Water is a chemical substance that is composed of hydrogen and oxygen and is vital for all known forms of life. In typical usage, water refers only to its liquid form or state, but the substance also has a solid state, ice, and a gaseous state, water vapor or steam. Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface.^[27] On Earth, it is found mostly in oceans and other large water bodies, with 1.6% of water below ground in aquifers and 0.001% in the air as vapor, clouds (formed of solid and liquid water particles suspended in air), and precipitation. Oceans hold 97% of surface water, glaciers and polar ice caps 2.4%, and other land surface water such as rivers, lakes and ponds 0.6%. Additionally, a minute amount of the Earth's water is contained within biological bodies and manufactured products.Main article: Water

Oceans

Main article: Ocean

Earth's oceans
Arctic Pacific Atlantic Indian Southern
World Ocean
v t e

An ocean is a major body of saline water, and a principal component of the hydrosphere. Approximately 71% of the Earth's surface (an area of some 361 million square kilometers) is covered by ocean, a continuous body of water that is customarily divided into several principal oceans and smaller seas. More than half of this area is over 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) deep. Average oceanic salinity is around 35 parts per thousand (ppt) (3.5%), and nearly all seawater has a salinity in the range of 30 to 38 ppt. Though generally recognized as several 'separate' oceans, these waters comprise one global, interconnected body of salt water often referred to as the World Ocean or global ocean. This concept of a global ocean as a continuous body of water with relatively free interchange among its parts is of fundamental importance to oceanography.

The major oceanic divisions are defined in part by the continents, various archipelagos, and other criteria: these divisions are (in descending order of size) the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean. Smaller regions of the oceans are called seas, gulfs, bays and other names. There are also salt lakes, which are smaller bodies of landlocked saltwater that are not interconnected with the World Ocean. Two notable examples of salt lakes are the Aral Sea and the Great Salt Lake.

Lakes

A lake (from Latin locus) is a terrain feature (or physical feature), a body of liquid on the surface of a world that is localized to the bottom of basin (another type of land form or terrain feature; that is, it is not global) and moves slowly if it moves at all. On Earth, a body of water is considered a lake when it is inland, not part of the ocean, is larger and deeper than a pond, and is fed by a river. The only world other than Earth known to harbor lakes is Titan, Saturn's largest moon, which has lakes of ethane, most likely mixed with methane. It is not known if Titan's lakes are fed by rivers, though Titan's surface is carved by numerous river beds. Natural lakes on Earth are generally found in mountainous areas, rift zones, and areas with ongoing or recent glaciation. Other lakes are found in endothermic basins or along the courses of mature rivers. In some parts of the world, there are many lakes because of chaotic drainage patterns left over from the last Ice Age. All lakes are temporary over geologic time scales, as they will slowly fill in with sediments or spill out of the basin containing them.Main article: Lake

Ponds

A pond is a body of standing water, either natural or man-made, that is usually smaller than a lake. A wide variety of man-made bodies of water are classified as ponds, including water gardens designed for aesthetic ornamentation, fish ponds designed for commercial fish breeding, and solar ponds designed to store thermal energy. Ponds and lakes are distinguished from streams via current speed. While currents in streams are easily observed, ponds and lakes possess thermally driven microcurrents and moderate wind driven currents. These features distinguish a pond from many other aquatic terrain features, such as stream pools and tide pools.Main article: Pond

Rivers 

A river is a natural watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing toward an ocean, a lake, a sea or another river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be called by several other names, including stream, creek, brook, rivulet, and rill; there is no general rule that defines what can be called a river. Many names for small rivers are specific to geographic location; one example is Burn in Scotland and North-east England. Sometimes a river is said to be larger than a creek, but this is not always the case, due to vagueness in the language. A river is part of the hydro-logical cycle. Water within a river is generally collected from precipitation through surface runoff, groundwater recharge, springs, and the release of stored water in natural ice and snow packs i.e., from glaciers).Main article: River

Streams

A rocky stream in Hawaii

Main article: Stream

A stream is a flowing body of water with a current, confined within a bed and stream banks. In the United States a stream is classified as a watercourse less than 60 feet (18 meters) wide. Streams are important as conduits in the water cycle, instruments in groundwater recharge, and they serve as corridors for fish and wildlife migration. The biological habitat in the immediate vicinity of a stream is called a riparian zone. Given the status of the ongoing Holocene extinction, streams play an important corridor role in connecting fragmented habitats and thus in conserving biodiversity. The study of streams and waterways in general involves many branches of inter-disciplinary natural science and engineering, including hydrology, fluvial Geo morphology, aquatic ecology, fish biology, riparian ecology and others.

Nature of Beauty

Nature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Natural" redirects here. For other uses of "Nature", see Nature (disambiguation). For other uses of "Natural", see Natural (disambiguation).

Hopetoun Falls, Australia

Bachalpsee in the Swiss Alps

Lightning strikes during the eruption of the Galunggung volcano, West Java, in 1982.

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural, physical, or material world or universe. "Nature" refers to thephenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.

The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth".^[1] Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord.^[2][3] The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is one of several expansions of the original notion; it began with certain core applications of the word φύσις by pre-Socratic philosophers, and has steadily gained currency ever since. This usage continued during the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.^[4][5]

Within the various uses of the word today, "nature" often refers to geology and wildlife. Nature may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects – the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and thematter and energy of which all these things are composed. It is often taken to mean the "natural environment" or wilderness–wild animals, rocks, forest, beaches, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention. For example, manufactured objects and human interaction generally are not considered part of nature, unless qualified as, for example, "human nature" or "the whole of nature". This more traditional concept of natural things which can still be found today implies a distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the artificial being understood as that which has been brought into being by a human consciousness or a humanmind. Depending on the particular context, the term "natural" might also be distinguished from the unnatural, thesupernatural, or synthetic.

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European Nature Photographer of the Year 2014

Congratulations to Neil Aldridge, who was recently named European Nature Photographer of the Year 2014 in the Prestigious GDT competition! Click here to view the winning image of galloping blesbok and here to view the competition results.

The largest penguin that ever lived!

Recently discovered fossils reveal that the Mega Penguin was the largest and heaviest penguin ever, reaching 2 metres in height. Our illustration shows this species with Emperor penguin and human for scale. Click here to find out more…

Biodiversity Hotspots – Wonders of the World Exhibition

The IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia runs from 12 to 19 November, and includes an exhibition on the 35 Wonders of the World, featuring more than 100 great images from Nature Picture Library, documenting the world’s Biodiversity Hotspots. To celebrate this, we’ve created a gallery of images from the exhibition.

WPOY 2014 Winners Announced

Congratulations to NPL photographers Bence Mate, Tim Laman, Sam Hobson, Ingo Arndt, Jurgen Freund, Alex Mustard, Will Burrard-Lucas, Alex Badyaev, Bruno D’Amicis and Charlie Hamilton James on their success in the Wildlife Photography of the Year awards. You can see a gallery of all the winning images here.

UN Climate Summit in New York

The United Nations has invited world leaders to the Climate Summit 2014 at their New York headquarters on 23rd September, in an attempt to galvanize climate action. To find out more, check out our new Climate Change Gallery focusing on the key issues.

Explore the Oceans with Solvin Zankl

Solvin Zankl’s latest book Ozeane explores the mysteries of the oceans, from the depths to the surface and from the tropics to the poles.
View our new gallery of Solvin’s dramatic images from the book.

Wildscreen Photography Festival 2014

Keynote speaker at the Wildscreen Photography Festival, to be held 24-26 October, is Tim Laman.
For more details or to buy tickets for this 3 day event, visit www.wildphotos.org.uk.
To explore Tim Laman’s amazing work on birds of paradise, view our feature gallery.

British Wildlife Photography Awards 2014 Success

We’d like to congratulate NPL photographers Pete Cairns, Alex Mustard, Andrew Parkinson and Nick Upton, who were all winners in this year’s British Wildlife Photography Awards.
View their winning images here.