Wonders Around the World 110
Myvatn
A strange lakeside terrain features a series of round depressions like the scars of numerous meteor impacts in the distant past. This is Myvatn, a lake in a region of volcanic activity in northeastern Iceland. It was created by an eruption some 2,300 years ago.
These odd pits on the lake's southern shore are distinctive landforms called pseudocraters. They're not craters formed by volcanic eruptions; rather, they resulted from repeated steam explosions due to lava that flowed over sediment on the bottom of the lake and caused the water to boil. The name Myvatn means "lake of midges" in Icelandic, and comes from the fact that swarms of mosquito-like midges appear around the lake in summer.
The Myvatn area has many tourist spots, including the popular Hverir, a geothermal zone where the volcanism causes vents that emit sulfur and steam, and bogs where hot water wells up from below.
Wonders Around the World 107
Yuanyang
The predawn pitch-darkness slowly lifts, revealing a pattern of blue gradations like a work of kiri-e art. As the sun rises, thousands of terraced rice fields, now like mirror cladding, turn gold, orange, and red.
Yuanyang County lies in the mountains about 350 kilometers south of Kunming in China's Yunnan Province. It's home to a vast area of rice terraces described as a "sculpted landscape." Covering some 54,000 hectares --roughly 35 times the area of Haneda Airport ---and at elevations of 1,500 to 2,000 meters, the terraces have been carved into the mountains for over 13 centuries by the Hani people, an ethnic minority, and comprise about 3,000 levels. Even today, they're worked without machinery, almost all tasks being done by manual labor.
For preserving a beautiful landscape representing coexistence and harmony between people and the natural environment, the Yuanyang rice terraces were listed as a World Heritage site in 2013.
