Archive

Topic: Earth

Fact Earth’s core is roughly as hot as the surface of the Sun About 5,400 degrees Celsius, a few thousand kilometres beneath your feet. 1 min read Fact The Amazon is fertilised by dust from the Sahara Millions of tonnes a year, blown across an ocean. 1 min read Fact Antarctica is a desert The driest continent on Earth is buried under most of its fresh water. 1 min read Fact Earth’s atmosphere was poisoned by its own life Oxygen was a pollutant, and it caused one of the largest extinctions in history. 1 min read Fact Mount Everest is not the tallest mountain, by two different measures It wins on altitude and loses on height, and loses again on distance from the centre of the Earth. 1 min read Fact The Sahara was green within human history Lakes, hippos, and rock paintings of people swimming. 1 min read Fact A lake in Cameroon suffocated 1,700 people in one night No eruption, no earthquake. The water simply exhaled. 1 min read Fact There was a period when fallen trees may not have rotted It could be why we have coal at all. 1 min read Fact Honey found in Egyptian tombs was still edible Thousands of years old, and chemically it had barely moved. 1 min read Fact Wild almonds can kill you Domestication of the almond was a matter of finding the one tree that would not. 1 min read