Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And I'm Regent's Park
in London joined by Tom from "/Tom."
Awesome channel, check it out. This camera belongs to Tom and Hazel
is operating it right now. Yeah, that's her giving a thumbs up, which
I'm sure just look like a blur, but the point is we're gonna do information today.
Right now, Tom, I'm in London. Which is in England. And it's also in
the United Kingdom. Which is in Europe. Okay, and we've also
got another term - Great Britain. Well, let's unpack all these terms
and today learn about
geography. I may have failed geography.
Can I find someone else?
Now, if we're going to talk about geography, I think we should go all the
way back to a time
when there was no geography. That's right. Way before YouTube existed,
our solar system was nothing but a mist of dust and gases,
what is known as a solar nebula. But then,
about 4.6 billion years ago something
majestic happened. We don't know exactly what caused it,
but some scientists believe that the shockwave of a nearby supernova
hit our nebula, causing it to start spinning
and contracting. Now, as things collected together, their overall gravity got
stronger and they pulled more stuff in it. And boom,
we've got a Sun. A half billion years later,
and the disk of junk circling around the Sun starts coming together in its
own way,
into what we now call the planets. One of these planets I've actually
visited and it's called Earth. But before we get ahead of ourselves,
what the heck is the Moon doing there? I mean, here's the problem. When you look at
all the terrestrial planets, all the planets near us, near the Sun,
they all have very similar structure and they'll have the same big metal core
and they all have very similar densities. But the Moon
is very not dense. And it doesn't have
a similar structure, it doesn't have a huge dense metal core.
In fact when we visited them and brought back dust and rocks to analyze what the
Moon was made out of,
we found that the Moon was made out of the same stuff that you find in
Earth's crust and mantle but not Earth's
core. This discovery gave rise to a pretty awesome idea
that the moon is actually made out of what used to be
on Earth. About 4.52
billion years ago there used to be another planet
called Theia. It was a little bit smaller than Mars but it had an unfortunate
orbit. It was fine for millions of years but eventually and
what did happen to it was that it collided with Earth.
Now, it's believed that the collision happened quite slowly
and the centers, the cores of both Theia and Earth
fused into one. And material from the mantle and crust of Earth
wasn't just scattered but it was forcefully ejected,
literally launched into outer space. It circled around
Earth and scientists believe that it took only about a week
for all that Earth material out in space to coalesce
into what we now call the Moon. Oh, and by the way, if
that's how the Moon formed, it was such a strong collision
the actual axis that the Earth spun on was tilted
23.5 degrees, which to this day
is why we have seasons.well
Wow.
Alright, so four billion years ago the continents as we know them
began to emerge. You know, these pieces of the Earth's crust that have cooled down
and are floating around on Earth's molten liquid insides.
Now, they move and they've been in constant motion since they began but
they move
very, very slowly. Every 300 to 500 million years,
the continents all converge into what's called one
big supercontinent. All the land in the entire Earth
altogether and the rest of it covered in ocean. The most recent supercontinent is
kind of a famous, it's called
Pangaea. But scientists believe that there may have been four, five, six or even more
supercontinents that existed
before Pangaea. What's really mind-blowing
is the fact that eventually there's going to be another Pangaea, another supercontinent.
And based on calculations, the Earth at that time
will look like this. But like I said, these land masses are moving very very
slowly
and so for that reason it is worth learning their names
as they are now. Which brings us back to the question of
England, United Kingdom, Great Britain,
British Isles and what all these terms mean. Let's begin
zoomed out. The British Isles and Ireland are a collection of
6 thousand islands off the coast of Europe. The term
Great Britain refers to the largest of these islands.
Now, Great Britain contains three separate countries: England,
Wales and Scotland. If we add Northern Ireland into the mix,
we're now looking at what is known as the United Kingdom or the
UK. The Republic of Ireland is a separate country that is not part
of the United Kingdom. And, by the way, England is where London is
which is where Summer in the City was. Which brings us back to Regent's Park.
And
as
always,
thanks for
watching.
Could you guys stand still for a second?
To learn more about Great Britain,
Ireland, overseas territories and even Canada,
you really must check out CGPGrey's
explanation video, if you haven't seen it already. This guy's incredible.
You can also check out the channels belonging to the people who helped me with the intro
and outro for this video. We've got Tom and
"Dude! Where's My Challenge?"