O the beauty, o the surprise
    Around us
The Earth is like
    The largest flower vase
On this holiest Earth
    See thousands holiest land
Glittering as charming gems
    In Mother Earth's hair band.

The Earth! Our beautiful planet. It's the only world we know, yet there is so much we don't. There are so many mysteries and awe-inspiring creations around the world, both natural and man-made. Humankind has created and built everything using the resources that the Mother Earth provides. Our Mother Earth takes the responsibility to protect and preserve those historical creations, for thousands of years. All of them attracted thousands of tourists from around the world. People want to feel connected to the glorious past. The past helps us to understand the socio-economic structure of the ancient times. The Earth itself protects them from devastating natural calamities. In 2013, massive flash floods swept through Uttarakhand. Kedarnath, the temple and town, also bore the brunt of nature's fury, but the shrine survived. A massive boulder blocked the path of the water and saved the temple from being washed away. Mother Earth does not wait for any instructions from the human race. It does what needs to be done. Above all else, Mother Earth is the epitome of our existence. Pyramids of Giza, the oldest and largest of the wonders and the only one of the seven substantially in existence today. It is located in greater Cairo, Egypt. It reflects the rich heritage and ancient culture of Egypt.

The hanging gardens of Babylon is a remarkable feat of engineering with an ascending series of tiered gardens containing a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and vines, resembling a large green mountain constructed of mud bricks. It was said to have been built in the ancient city of Babylon, near present-day Hillah, Babil province, in Iraq.  The Hanging Gardens were built alongside a grand palace known as the Marvel of Mankind, by the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (who ruled between 605 and 562 BC), for his median wife Queen Amytis, because she missed the green hills and valleys of her homeland. The bases of the tiered sections were sufficiently deep to provide root growth for the largest trees, and the gardens were irrigated from the nearby Euphrates.

The rise of technology and industry may have distanced us superficially from nature, but it has not changed our reliance on the natural world. Most of what we use or consume on a daily basis remains the product of multitudes of interactions within nature, and many of those interactions are imperiled. Mother Earth protects us like a mother protects her child, with utmost affection and love.

The third wonder I love to bring up here is The Temple of Artemis or Artemision, also known less precisely as the temple of Diana. It was a Greek temple dedicated to an ancient, local form of the goddess Artemis. She was familiar to Romans as goddess Diana. It was located in Ephesus, in present-day Turkey. In the 7th century BC, it was destroyed by a flood. Its reconstruction began around 550 BC. This project took ten years to complete. This version of the temple was destroyed in 356 BC by Herostratus in an act of arson only foundations and fragments of the last temple remain at the site.

Everything humans have needed to build these magnificent monuments and wonders was provided by Mother Earth. Ironically, some of these historical wonders have been destroyed using the very resources that once were used to build them.

The temple of Zeus at Olympia was an ancient Greek temple in Olympia, Greece, dedicated to the god Zeus. This astonishing Greek temple is a blend of human imagination and engineering marvel. The temple, built in the second quarter of the fifth century BC, was the very model of the fully developed classical Greek temple of the Doric order. The temple is located approximately 500 metres (0.3miles) south-east of the Acropolis, and about 700 metres (0.43miles) south of the centre of Athens, Syntagma Square. Its foundations were laid on the site of an ancient outdoor sanctuary dedicated to Zeus. The temple suffered over the centuries and much of its materials were re-used in other buildings so that today only fifteen of the temple's columns are still standing two in the South-west corner and thirteen at the south-east corner.

The temple housed the renowned statue of Zeus. The gold and ivory statue was approximately thirteen meters high, and was made by the sculptor Phidias. The statue's completion took approximately thirteen years and was one of classical Greece's most revered artistic works.

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus is one of the greatest engineering marvels humans ever achieved. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or Tomb of Mausolus was a tomb built between 353 and 350 BC in Halicarnassus (present Bodrum, Turkey) for Mausolus, a native Anatolian from Caria and a Satrap in the Achaemenid Empire, and his sister-wife Artemisia II of Caria. The structure was designed by the Greek architects Satyros and Pythius of Priene. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus was destroyed by an earthquake.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of the Greek sun-god Helios, erected in the city of Rhodes, on the Greek island of the same name, by Chares of Lindos in 280 BC. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, it was constructed to celebrate its successful defense against Demetrius Poliorcetes, who had besieged it for a year with a large army and navy. According to most contemporary descriptions, the Colossus stood approximately thirty-three meter high approximately two-thirds the height of the modern Statue of Liberty from feet to crown-making it the tallest statue in the ancient world. It collapsed during the earthquake of 226 BC, although the parts of it are perfectly preserved.

Last but not least, the seventh ancient wonder of the world -The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Lighthouse of Alexandria, sometimes called the Pharos of Alexandria, was a lighthouse built by the Ptolemaic Kingdom, during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (280 - 247 BC), which has been estimated to be at least a hundred metres (330 ft.) in overall height. Also known as the Pharos Lighthouse, the Lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the world's tallest structures for hundreds of years. In 1994, a team of French archaeologists dove into the water of Alexandria's eastern harbour and discovered some remains of the lighthouse on the sea floor. Extant Roman coins struck by the Alexandrian mint show that a statue of Triton was positioned on each of the building's four corners, and a statue of Poseidon or Zeus stood atop. Historians believe that things like earthquakes and tidal waves caused the downfall of that Lighthouse and were finally destroyed by earthquakes by the beginning of the 1400s.