Comment #1

Todd — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:51:41 GMT

And if you want to see all those things for yourself, you simply need to buy the Discovery Channel's most excellent series, Planet Earth, on DVD. It is breathtaking.

Original Blog Entry: top 10 amazing earth facts

angelm — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:37:31 GMT

10. The Atmosphere

Many layers of atmosphere coat our planet including the mesosphere, ionosphere, exosphere, and the thermosphere, but it s the troposphere, closest to the planet itself, that supports our lives and is, in fact, the thinnest at only about 10 miles high.

9. Deserts

Believe it or not, most of the Earth s deserts are not composed entirely of sand. Much, about 85% of them, are rocks and gravel. The largest, the Sahara, fills about 1/3 of Africa (and it is growing constantly) which would nearly fill the continental United States.

8. The Big Blue Marble

The Earth is, in fact, not really round. It is called an oblate spheroid meaning it s slightly flattened on the top and bottom poles.

7. Salty Oceans

If you could evaporate all the water out of all the oceans and spread the resulting salt over all the land on Earth, you would have a five hundred-foot layer coating everything.

6. Lakes and Seas

The largest inland sea (or, sometimes called a lake) is the Caspian Sea which is on the border of Iran and Russia.

Just paying the bills...

5. Mountains

The Andes Mountain range in South America is 4,525 miles long and ranks, as the world s longest. Second Longest: The Rockies; Third: Himalayas; Fourth: The Great Dividing Range in Australia; Fifth: Trans-Antarctic Mountains. For every 980 feet you climb up a mountain, the temperature drops 3-1/2 degrees.

4. Deep Water

The deepest lake in the world is in the former USSR and it is Lake Baikal. It has a length of 400 miles, a width of roughly 30, but its depth is just over a mile: 5,371 feet down. It is deep enough, so is speculated, that all five of the next largest lakes: The Great Lakes could be emptied into it.

3. Shaky Ground

Earthquakes can be catastrophically destructive and many a year are deadly. However, the Earth releases about 1 million a year, almost all are never even registered.

2. Hot, Hot, Hot

Most people believe that Death Valley, California, U.S.A. is the hottest place on Earth. Well, occasionally it is, but the hottest recorded temperature was from Azizia in Libya recording a temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius) on Sept. 13, 1922. In Death Valley, it got up to 134 Fahrenheit on July 10, 1913.

1. Dust in the Wind

Experts from the USGS claim that roughly 1,000 tons of space debris rains down on Earth every year.

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