Discovering these facts can give you a new perspective on our beautiful planet Earth.
Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined.
Antarctica is the largest desert in the world due to its extremely low annual rainfall.
The longest border of France with another country is with Brazil. French Guiana is a province of France, located in the northeastern corner of South America.
Depending on where you are, dust in the air can come from Africa. Dust from the Sahara Desert often drifts over to the Amazon. In fact, without that dust, the Amazon rainforest might not even exist. The soil there is quite nutrient-poor, and the dust acts as a form of fertilizer. Two colossal but opposing geological features – one vibrant and full of life, the other sparse – are intricately linked.
Australia is larger than the Moon.
The Earth is incredibly smooth, despite Mount Everest reaching 8.85 km above sea level and the Mariana Trench being 11 km deep. However, the distance of 19.85 km on a sphere with a diameter of 12,742 km is minuscule. Only 0.156% of the planet’s circumference contains all the elevations. The surface of a billiard ball has a tolerance for smoothness of approximately 0.222% of its surface circumference. Thus, the Earth is smoother than that familiar white billiard ball, even when placing Mount Everest next to the Mariana Trench.
On the globe, the U.S. state of Alaska appears quite small. However, it is actually enormous. It is larger than the combined areas of Montana, Texas, and California.
There are 14 mountains, belonging to 2 mountain ranges, that exceed 8,000 meters in height. All are located in Asia.
The distance between New Zealand and Australia is nearly the same as the distance between the Netherlands and Libya, simply because Europe is quite small.
FedEx, the world-renowned shipping company, chose Anchorage – a city in southern Alaska – as its global transportation hub. This is one of the few places in the world that is within a 10-hour flight from the three largest global markets: North America, Europe, and Asia. Who would have thought that a place considered so remote is actually the center of the world?
Relatively speaking, we live on the skin of an apple. This is in reference to the thickness of the Earth’s crust in relation to its volume.
The Australian tectonic plate is drifting northward faster than other plates. The entire continent is moving north and slightly clockwise at a rate of about 6.8 cm per year. This speed is fast enough for GPS systems to continuously adjust to remain accurate. In several hundred million years, Australia may collide with Asia, creating a mountain range even taller than the Himalayas when this event occurs.
The country with the most time zones is… France! This is due to the many islands and regions around the world considered part of France. The United Kingdom also has a range of overseas territories, but unlike France, they do not consider these places part of the same nation.
This is not a composite image; this phenomenon is called Lahaina Noon, occurring twice a year in Hawaii, USA. It is when the sun is directly overhead, causing objects to appear shadowless. Due to the Earth’s constant rotation, the Lahaina Noon phenomenon can sometimes occur over the ocean, in deserts, or in locations that are difficult to observe, or simply go unnoticed.
The northernmost point of North America is in Greenland, which belongs to Denmark. This means a European country has its northernmost point located outside of Europe.
