TOP 10

10. Norman Rockwell –  The Little Model Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator.  For many years Rockwell created cover illustrations for  The Saturday Evening Post .  He is noted for using a visual reflection of America and has become one of the most popular artists of the 20th century.  In 1963, Rockwell published his last painting for the  Post.   It marked the end of a publishing relationship that included 321 cover works.  During his career, Rockwell was commissioned to paint the portraits for U.S. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.  He produced over 4,000 original artworks in his lifetime.  Most of his paintings are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. The Discovery On June 4, 2011, the popular television program  Antiques Roadshow  was in Eugene, Oregon when they discovered a genuine Norman Rockwell painting...

10. Clearwater Lakes The Clearwater lakes are twin lakes that formed at the same exact time in Northern Canada. The asteroids that made them were huge, at 16 miles and 22 miles respectively. The lakes are named after their clear  water ; that, and the fact that there are 25 lakes in the area also called “Clearwater lake” really says something about Canadian creativity. No one’s sure how two large asteroids managed to hit the same area at the same time. One expert says it may be because asteroids have their own small moons, or it may be that it used to be one big asteroid and split in two in our atmosphere. 9. Barringer Crater Barringer Crater, also known simply as Meteor crater is a crater in Northern Arizona that was formed something like 50,000 years ago when an iron-metallic asteroid crashed into Earth while texting and driving. Experts estimate that it struck at approximately 45,000 miles per hour and produced an explosion of 10 megatons. Rest assured there weren...

10. Chocolate Hills, Philippines More than 1,770 perfectly cone-shaped hills can be found in the Central Visayas region of the Philippines, more exactly in Bohol. Unfortunately, these amazing hills aren’t really made of chocolate, but they do look curious.  The hills look like a sea of chocolate kisses during the dry season. The unusual geological formation has baffled geologists for decades. There are different theories on how the conical hills formed. Spread over an area of 50 square kilometers, the amazing hills are Philippines’s 3 rd National Geological Monument together with Hundred Islands National Park and Taal Volcano, the world’s smallest active volcano. 9. Moeraki Boulders, New Zealand Scattered along the beautiful Koekohe beach in New Zealand, these unusually large boulders attract tourists from all over the world. According to the Society for Sedimentary Geology , “the Moeraki boulders are large calcite concretions with septarian veins of calcite and...

10.  Natural Disasters Ok, this may sound like a given.  After all, what year doesn’t come with a slew of natural disasters?  From earthquakes to erupting volcanoes, we can certainly expect Mother Nature to rear her head in 2012.  The question, really, is how bad of a disaster season will the world experience?  If 2011 was an indication, we can expect some serious carnage. While one shouldn’t expect apocalyptic level disasters, we still better brace ourselves. Major earthquakes (those that register 6.0 or higher on the Richter scale) are on the rise. There were 205 major quakes last year- up from 2010 and 2009 that registered 173 and 161 quakes, respectively.  It’s not improbable that a major quake will be seaborne, which in turn, could trigger another massive tsunami like the one that devastated the coast of Japan last year.  Remember the volcanic eruption in Iceland last year that shut down air traffic on both sides of the Atlantic...