Petra

Petra lies concerning 3-5 hours south of modern Amman, about 2 hours north of Aqaba, on the boundaries of the mountainous desert of the Wadi Araba. The city is bordered by towering hills of rust-coloured sandstone which gave the city some natural defense next to invaders.

The site is semi-arid, the friable sandstone which allowable the Nabataeans to carve their temples and tombs into the rock breakdown easily to sand.The colour of the rock ranges from pale yellow or white during rich reds to the darker brown of more resistant rocks. The twisted strata of different-coloured rock form whorls and waves of colour in the rock face, which the Nabataeans browbeaten in their architecture.

Christ Redeemer

Statue of Christ the Redeemer is situated at the top of Corcovado Mountain at a height of 710 meters.

Statue of Christ the Redeemer Brazil is surely one of the world's best known and the majority visited monuments.

The statue of Christ the Redeemer represents Jesus standing with outspread, welcoming arms and is one of the most well-known symbols of this lively city.

The entire monument of statue of Christ the Redeemer is 38m elevated with the statue accounting for 30m, the span from finger tip to fingertip is 28m and there is a small chapel housed in the bottom. As a vantage point it offers superb views of downtown Rio de Janeiro, the bay, Sugarloaf Mountain and Copacabana and Ipanema Beaches.

The monument of statue of Christ the Redeemer was inaugurated on the day of Our Lady of Aparecida, 12 Oct 1931 by then President of Brazil, Getúlio Vargas and cardinal Dom Sebastião Leme .

The innovative design of Statue of Christ the Redeemer Brazil was done by a Brazilian, named Heitor da Silva Costa. He was also the engineer in charge of the construction. He shared the project with French sculptor Paul Landowski. It was built from 1926 to 1931, with funds raised from donations. There's a chapel for 150 people on the stand of the statue.

Roman Colosseum

The Colosseum, which stands near the center of contemporary Rome, is possibly the finest existing example of antique Roman architectural engineering. One of the most well-known ruins in the world, thousands of tourists visit it every year.

The Colosseum is shaped like a contemporary football stadium and could seat 45,000 viewers. The four-story facility is 161 feet high, about 600 feet long and 500 feet wide. Events such as fights flanked by gladiators and between men and wild animals were detained there. Awnings could be hung from the walls to defend spectators from the sun.

The oval-shaped, sand-covered floor of the arena at first could be flooded for water spectacles. Later, though, cages for people and animals were installed under the arena. A wall alienated the arena from spectators whose seats rested on sloping concrete ropes as in many stadiums today.

Construction of the Colosseum started during the reign of Emperor Vespasian, who ruled from A.D. 69 to 79. building was completed in A.D. 80.

Taj Mahal

India’s pride and symbol of love and passion, Taj Mahal finally get the position among the new seven wonders as it deserves. The unofficially declaration held in a crowded soccer stadium at Lisbon in Portugal.It joined the other six greatest monuments including ‘Great wall of China’ and Peru’s Machu Picchu.

More than 100 million voters voted for this contest, said organizers on Saturday night. Taj Mahal joined the three Asian and two Latin American monuments along with only one European wonder. The Asian wonders are: ‘Taj Mahal’ of India, ‘Great Wall of China’ and ‘Petra’ of Jordan while in the Latin American monuments, ‘Chichen Itza’ of Mexico, ‘Christ Redeemer’ of Brazil and ‘Machu Picchu’ of Peru could get place in the list. ‘The Roman Colloseum’ of Italy is a single monument of Europe could able to get listed in the new wonders list.

Millions of people along with presented audience were cheered when Hollywood’s actor Ben Kingsley announced the list. The ceremony was live telecasted across the world. These new wonders replace the old wonders selected by Greek Scholars more than 2,000 years ago.

The old wonders were: ‘The Hanging Gardens’ of Babylon, ‘The Statue of Zeus’ at Olympia, ‘The Temple of Artemis’ at Ephesus, ‘The Mausoleum’ at Halicarnassus, ‘The Colossus’ of Rhodes, ‘The Lighthouse’ of Alexandria and ‘The Great Pyramid’ at Giza, Egypt in which only the Giza’s Pyramid is still in existence and the organizers have honoured it by giving a special category of wonder.

Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums originated as a group of sculptures collected by Pope Julius II (1503-1513) and placed in what today is the “Cortile Ottagono” within the museum complex. The popes were among the first sovereigns who opened the art collections of their palaces to the public thus promoting knowledge of art history and culture. As seen today, the Vatican Museums are a complex of different pontifical museums and galleries that began under the patronage of the popes Clement XIV (1769-1774) and Pius VI (1775-1799). In fact, the Pio-Clementine Museum was named after these two popes, who set up this first major curatorial section. Later, Pius VII (1800-1823) considerably expanded the collections of Classical Antiquities, to which he added the Chiaromonti Museum and the “Braccio Nuovo” gallery. He also enriched the Epigraphic Collection, which was conserved in the Lapidary Gallery.

Gregory XVI (1831-1846) founded the Etruscan Museum (1837) with archaeological finds discovered during excavations carried out from 1828 onwards in southern Etruria. Later, he established the Egyptian Museum (1839), which houses ancient artifacts from explorations in Egypt, together with other pieces already conserved in the Vatican and in the Museo Capitolino, and the Lateran Profane Museum (1844), with statues, bas-relief sculptures and mosaics of the Roman era, which could not be adequately placed in the Vatican Palace. The Lateran Profane Museum was expanded in 1854 under Pius IX (1846-1878) with the addition of the Pio Christian Museum. This museum is comprised of ancient sculptures (especially sarcophagi) and inscriptions with ancient Christian content. In 1910, under the pontificate of Saint Pius X (1903-1914), the Hebrew Lapidary was established. This section of the museum contains 137 inscriptions from ancient Hebrew cemeteries in Rome mostly from via Portuense and donated by the Marquisate Pellegrini-Quarantotti. These last collections (Gregorian Profane Museum, Pio Christian Museum and the Hebrew Lapidary) were transferred, under the pontificate of Pope John XXIII (1958-1963), from the Lateran Palace to their present building within the Vatican and inaugurated in 1970.

The Museums also include the Gallery of Tapestries, a collection of various 15th and 17th century tapestries; the Gallery of Maps, decorated under the pontificate of Gregory XIII (1572-1585) and restored by Urban VIII (1623-1644); the Sobieski Room and the Room of the Immaculate Conception; the Raphael Stanze and the Loggia, which were decorated by order of Julius II and Leo X (1513-1521); the Chapel of Nicholas V (1447-1455), painted by Fra Angelico; the Sistine Chapel, which takes the name of its founder, Pope Sixtus IV; the Borgia Apartment, where Pope Alexander VI lived until his death (1492-1503); the Vatican Pinacoteca, created under Pius XI (1922-1932) in a special building near the new entrance to the Museums; the Missionary-Ethnological Museum which was founded by Pius XI in 1926, arranged on the upper floors of the Lateran Palace and later transferred, under Pope John XXIII, to the Vatican where it has been opened again to the public in the same building which housed the former Lateran collections. In 1973 the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Religious Art was added and inaugurated by Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) in the Borgia Apartment. The Vatican Historical Museum, founded in 1973 and transferred in 1987 to the Papal Apartment in the Lateran Palace, houses a series of papal portraits along with objects of the past Pontifical Military Corps and of the Pontifical Chapel and Family and historic ceremonial objects no longer in use. The Carriage and Automobile Museum is a section of the Vatican Historical Museum. In the year 2000, the Vatican Museums opened a new large entrance that provides visitor information and other services; on display are many new artworks, two of which were specially created for this grand entrance hall.

Sahara Desert

The other side of the world could be closer than you think. Little pieces of Earth, particles of dust, can travel halfway around the globe and alter air quality, affecting animals, plants and weather. Summer storms from the planet's deserts kick up literally millions of tons of dust, and winds send it flying to far-flung destinations where it clogs our lungs, changes soil chemistry, deposits minerals in bodies of water and reflects the Sun's rays back into space.

In July 2000 alone, nearly 8 million tons of dust from Africa's Sahara desert reached as far west as Puerto Rico. "If you figure that a pickup truck weighs 1 metric ton, that dust weighed as much as 8 million pickups," says NASA aerosol researcher Dr. Peter Colarco. Colarco works to create computer simulations that forecast the movement of dust given current weather conditions. NASA and its partner agencies want to know what drives the movement of this dust and how exactly the dust changes our environment, not only so scientists can better understand the health of our planet, but also so they can predict where dust will imminently affect people.

Take the case of Africa. Winds blow twenty percent of dust from a Saharan storm out over the Atlantic Ocean, and twenty percent of that, or four percent of a single storm's dust, reaches all the way to the west side of the Atlantic. The remainder settles out into the ocean or washes out of the air with rainfall. Scientists think that the July 2000 measurements, made in Puerto Rico, equaled about one-fifth of the total year's dust deposits. If these estimates hold true over the long term, then the entire state of Florida receives about three feet of dust every million years.

Machu Picchu

The ruins of Machu Picchu, rediscovered in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, are one of the most beautiful and enigmatic ancient sites in the world. While the Inca people utilized the Andean mountain top (2800 m elevation), erecting massive stone structures from the early 1400's, legends and myths indicate that Machu Picchu (meaning 'Old Peak' in the Quechua language) was revered as a sacred place from a far earlier time. The Inca turned the site into a small (12 square kilometers) but extraordinary city. Invisible from the Urubamba River valley below and completely self-contained, surrounded by agricultural terraces sufficient to feed the population, and watered by natural springs, Machu Picchu seems to have been utilized by the Inca as a secret ceremonial city. The Spaniards never found Machu Picchu, even though they suspected its existence. The mountain top sanctuary fell into disuse and was abandoned some forty years after the Spanish took Cuzco in 1533. Supply lines linking the many Inca social centers were disrupted and the great empire came to an end. This simulated natural color ASTER image covers 12 x 15 km, was acquired on June 25, 2001, and is located at 13.1 degrees south latitude and 72.5 degrees west longitude.