• How many meteoroids hit the Earth on a daily basis?
What country dug the deepest hole on the planet…
just to prove they could do it?
From deep underground to high above the clouds, here are 15 of the craziest facts about our
planet Earth.
15 – Earth’s rotation is slowing • You’d never notice it in your normal
life, but the Earth’s rotation is slowing over time.
• It slows and speeds up in cycles of just a few milliseconds.
• You won’t feel it, but geologists predict that the cycle will result in an uptick of
damaging earthquakes in 2018.
14 – Desert makes up one-third of Earth’s land area
• About 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, leaving only 29 percent
for land.
• And of that 29 percent, about one third is covered by desert, or about 10 percent
of the Earth’s total surface.
• That may seem like a lot, but “desert” just means a place that doesn’t get precipitation.
The entire continent of Antarctica is a desert, because it’s too cold for snow to fall there.
13 – Earth’s core is as hot as the Sun • Preliminary estimates of the Earth’s
core temperature had it around 5 thousand degrees Celsius.
• But more advanced techniques – which involve subjecting a piece of iron to a huge
amount of pressure and also blasting it with lasers – have more accurately placed the
Earth’s core temperature around 6 thousand degrees – roughly the same temperature as
the Sun.
12 – Driest place on Earth • The Atacama Desert in Chile gets an average
of less than an inch of rain per year.
• But despite these arid conditions, more than 200 species of plant have been found
to grow in the area.
• And if the area does get some rainfall, the entire area explodes into flowers for
a short time, in a phenomenon known as “desierto florido,” or “flowering desert.”
11 – Yellowstone National Park is a giant volcano.
• Yellowstone National Park isn’t just any old American landmark.
It’s a active supervolcano that collapsed in upon itself during its last eruption.
• It last erupted about 640 thousand years ago, with an eruption 25 hundred times stronger
than the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980.
• The active volcanic activity continues today – the park’s geysers and hot springs
are evidence of it.
10 – Three of Earth’s rivers are legal persons
• In the United States, multinational corporations are legally considered individual people.
• In India and New Zealand, rivers are considered people.
• Specifically, the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in India, and the Whanganui River in New Zealand,
were granted the legal rights of a human person, in response to the an urgent need to reduce
pollution in said rivers.
9 – ISS time travel • The International Space Station moves
in low Earth orbit at a rate of about 17 thousand miles per hour.
• And that means it orbits the Earth several times a day.
In a single Earth day, the ISS astronauts see about 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets per day.
That works out to about a sunrise every 90 minutes.
8 – Earth is bombarded by meteoroids every day
• Every day, about 4 billion meteoroids fall to Earth.
• Most of them are miniscule, and will burn up to nothing in the atmosphere before ever
actually making contact with the ground.
• Only one meteorite impact has ever been verified by scientists as actually causing
an injury – in 1954, an Alabama woman had an eight-pound meteorite crash through her
roof, bounce off her radio, and hit her in the hip.
7 – Earth is surrounded by orbiting man-made objects
• In addition to the billions of tiny meteoroids out there, the Earth is also surrounded by
22 thousand pieces of man-made space junk.
• But of that 22 thousand pieces, only about five percent are actually usable objects.
The rest is literally junk.
• The debris field is growing all the time, to the point where it needs to be tracked
to prevent collisions. 6 –Flat Earth was never the accepted theory
• Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell put it best in 1997: “With extraordinary few exceptions,
no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward
believed that the Earth was flat.”
• The ancient Greeks and Romans both came to scientific consensus, among their most
educated, that the Earth was round.
• The perception that anyone popularly believed otherwise throughout human history is actually
a fabrication in itself.
• That lie dates back to the 19th century, used to discredit religious scholars by making
them appear ignorant and out of touch with reality.
5 – 100% of the ocean floor has been mapped • Much of what lies in the ocean is a mystery
to humans.
But we know what the bottom of it looks like… sort of.
• We have the main features of the ocean floor mapped out to a rough resolution, so
we can see features larger than 5 kilometers in size.
• But how much of the ocean floor do we have mapped out in useful detail to detect,
say, airplane wreckage?
About .05 percent.
4 – Earth has a subterranean water reservoir • Deep in the Earth’s mantle, there is
a reservoir of water about three times the size of all of Earth’s surface oceans combined.
• This discovery has caused scientists to rethink the origin of Earth’s oceans.
Initially, it was thought that water arrived on Earth’s surface via an icy comet.
• Now it seems plausible that water simply oozed up to the surface of the Earth over
time.
3 – Earth’s deepest hole • The Cold War between the United States
and U.S.S.R. resulted in technology races on a number of fronts.
• The Space Race and arms race are the two most publicized races… but both nations
were also racing to see who could dig the furthest into the Earth’s crust.
• The result is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a hole 12 kilometers – or about 7 and a
half miles – deep in the Earth’s crust.
• The hole mostly yielded nothing of note… except for some microscopic, 2 billion-year-old
fossilized plankton. 2 – No moon means shorter days
• Earth’s Moon does more than just sit there and help light up the night sky.
• Without the moon’s gravitational effect on the Earth’s rotation, the Earth would
spin much faster, and a day would only last about 6 to 8 hours, instead of 24.
• Also, the tides would be much smaller, and nighttime would be MUCH darker.
1 – Very little of Earth’s water is usable by humans
• Sure, the Earth is covered by about 71 percent water.
• But nearly all of that water is salt water – basically useless for human consumption.
• Only about .003 percent of that water can actually be used as drinking water.
The rest is either salty ocean water, or too contaminated to be used.