A Snowball's Chance

Thought for the day: When you pray for rain, better carry an umbrella. 

[image courtesy of seniorark.com]

And if you pray for rain in the middle of a drought, maybe you should carry an umbrella that can also save that precious water, like this inventive fella. Waste not, want not, right?

If you think about it, umbrellas, like parachutes, have something in common with human minds. They all function best when they're open.

When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. [Eckhart Tolle]

That uncertainty, that willingness to accept that what one believes to be true may, in fact, not be true, is what I mean by keeping an open mind. Even so, sheer logic often tells us that some things are so off-the-chart improbable that we pretty much accept the fact that they're never going to happen. For example, when I walk out our front door tomorrow morning, I find it highly unlikely that a mountain would have sprung up in our front street overnight, or that the Atlantic Ocean would suddenly be lapping at our front steps, and what's more, I think most people would agree that such a ridiculous scenario goes way past improbable and hovers somewhere above the downright impossible. It's also highly unlikely that the U.S. Olympic swim team could swim laps in the middle of the Sahara Desert... during a drought.

                                                                           Or is it...?

[the Sahara Desert.- courtesy of wikipedia]

The Sahara desert is more than three and a half million square miles of sand, which is comparable to the area of China or the United States. That's a LOT of sand. (FYI: Even so, it's only the third largest desert in the world... behind Antarctica and the Arctic.)

Anyhow, In August of 2014, right in the middle of a relentless drought, something highly unlikely happened in this unforgiving desert. Something very improbable, verging on the impossible.

In Tunisia, in the middle of the drought, a lake was born in the Sahara desert... virtually overnight.

[image courtesy of morguefile]

A man named Mehdi Bilel trekked through the sandy expanse to attend a wedding, and when he returned home via that same route just three days later... he found that a 2.6-acre crystal clear turquoise blue lake, 10 to 18 meters deep, had miraculously appeared. Needless to say, at first he thought it was a mirage... (Wouldn't you?)

But it wasn't a mirage. As highly unlikely as it was, as improbable as it was, as nigh on impossible as it seemed, the lake was real.

The clear water soon turned a murky green, and the authorities issued a warning that the water might not be safe. They said because of all the phosphorus mining in the area, it could be contaminated or radioactive. Undeterred, the locals continue to flock to the water, which they've dubbed Gafsa Beach, or Lac de Gafsa, and they still contend that the lake was created supernaturally as a blessing to the people. And the lake, an unexpected and blessed refuge from the desert heat, has become a bit of a tourist attraction.

Geologists say a minor earthquake could've fractured an underground aquifer, allowing the water to rise to the surface. But no tremor registered, and no evidence of an aquifer has been found.

 Sometimes, something as unlikely as a lake in the middle of a desert has to be seen to be believed:

For clarification, this isn't the only lake that mysteriously appeared in the Sahara in 2014. On November 11, a lake also materialized in the Enuga State of Nigeria. It's now revered as a place of healing, and people travel from far and near to bathe in and drink the water. It's also not the first time this lake appeared in Nigeria. One of the elders in the area said the lake has actually appeared three times over the past 80 years ... always in the midst of the driest, hottest times... and then disappeared. Nigerian legend holds that if a righteous man scratches the ground on that spot while at prayer, the healing water will magically begin to appear.

Who knows? A natural geological occurrence with a simple explanation, or something supernatural, as the people there believe?

All I know is there's a snowball's chance in hades that it'll ever snow there.

                                                             Um, never mind.

Yep, it snowed in the Sahara last week.  In a small Algerian town... and it snowed there in December, too. In this world, I reckon just about anything is possible. 

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't. [Mark Twain]

Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.