Author: Finn Randall

I am in Peru in South America. I visited a town named Huacachina. It is a desert oasis. 

There are barely any plants surrounding Houchachina because water is very scarce. However, there is a natural spring, so plants can grow near it for about 100 feet in one direction and 10 feet in another.

There are many tall, short, wide, steep, big, and small dunes surrounding Huacachina. If you go into the dunes and you look around you in every single direction, you can’t tell which direction to go back to the oasis also! My uncle even said “only one moon? I was expecting at least two”(he was not there) my brother said “ the whole time I could only think of the “Dune” soundtrack.” 

Huacachina has tall dunes that are like walls. People in dune buggies like to do things like snowboarders might do on a halfpipe. Or just go straight down or up. People use the dune buggies to get to dunes so they can 

…People like to sand board down a variety of dunes there, especially excited tourists. I did that bravely and it was really fun. I had a wipe out while riding on a snowboard down one of the dunes, but I was okay, and another time I went down on a really steep dune. I almost wiped out, but I had a crazy recovery. 

Now you know about huacachina

Next up NAZCA LINES

My family was going on a big hike on the Kepler track in the Fiordlands, New Zealand. I rode in a helicopter to get to the starting point. I noticed during takeoff and landing that the helicopter pushed all the plants in a ripple effect. Helicopters are common in the Fiordlands because it has rough terrain. Some reasons helicopters are needed is so they can check invasive species traps, monitor the wildlife, rescue hikers or maintain the cabins and huts.

When in flight, gravity and momentum act upon a helicopter similar to an airplane. The blades push certain amounts of air down making it go up and making it go down but without the blades it can’t go up or down.

At the very top of the summit, it was too high for plants to grow so it was just rocks. Near the top, the plants were grasses, but once you got lower down, it turned into forests with moss and ferns.

The fiordland is full of mosses, trees, mountains, and limestone. I saw mosses and ferns everywhere in Fiordland! The fiordlands have a lot of avalanches that clear land and make it easy for moss and ferns to grow. They have bogs and marshes too.  

During lunch, we met a bird called the Kea, which is green with a grey beak and some blue feathers on its wings and grey feet. The Kea is an alpine parrot. Conservationists and wildlife guides can identify them by tiny ankle bracelets that go around their legs so that they know which bird is which. The Kea we saw jumped away from us at first, but then it started to go towards us. It went over to where we had our food and stole an apple. We didn’t see that bird for the rest of the day. Kea’s are clever, keen, friendly, and curious. Our guide, Helen, was a conservationist who handfed endangered chicks and then released the grownups back into the wild to breed. 

The fiordlands were created by volcanic activity, tectonic plate activity, and glaciers. I saw where rock slides had occurred making a slanted path. It was very dangerous and you had to be careful not to start another rock slide that could kill you.

The Kepler Track was named after Johannes Kepler. He discovered that the planets orbit around the sun with an oval shaped orbit and he was the first person to explain how human’s see. 

 I went on a hike to the Rob Roy glacier track and I thought it was amazing. I thought it was amazing because where I come from you don’t see glaciers that often. When I went on the Rob Roy glacier track,  I had to hike a long long time to get there but when I got there, I realized it was totally worth it. There were 16 waterfalls and an icy blue river. I researched and figured out why the glacier was so blue. When glaciers form, many layers of snow accumulate without melting and compress on top of each other year after year. When all the snow gets compressed, it turns into ice, making a glacier. Sometimes the glacier ice gets so heavy and dense that it squeezes all the air bubbles out making it look blue. This is because ice absorbs a little bit of red light. When the ice becomes really dense, light travels deep into the ice before bouncing and refracting back out, leaving a little bit of a bluish tint. (Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center.)

 About 10% of Earth’s land is covered in glacial ice! But 12,000 years ago, 32% of Earth’s land was covered in glacial ice- that was in the last Ice Age. Almost 69% of Earth’s freshwater is in ice caps and glaciers. When I went on the hike, the Rob Roy glacier was melting. I know it was melting because I observed it running into waterfalls that flowed into a river. 

 When glaciers melt the water can destroy lakes and reservoirs causing the amount of freshwater available to decline.

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Also it causes a chain reaction that we can’t stop because when it melts it makes more heat because the white ice reflects the sunlight but without the white ice it won’t bounce back so the glacier melts even faster and we can’t stop it. We can slow it down though by not making as much greenhouse gas and saving energy. People are the main reason global warming is happening. If the glaciers melt, it could cause other problems too, like releasing diseases that have been frozen in there for millions of years.

 It was cool to visit, but you have to be really careful. there were signs warning about avalanches and people die every year because of them.

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