Top 10 Amazing Earth Facts. Our World As well known and well traveled as our planet is, there are still new things being discovered every day. In fact, most of our oceans haven’t even been explored yet which is why when new depths are located; they often come with hundreds of new species. Rain forests offer up new animals and plants as often as we can explore them. The Earth is constantly changing, shifting, and exposing new secrets for humans to marvel at. 10. 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.
Believe it or not, most of the Earth’s deserts are not composed entirely of sand. 8. The Earth is, in fact, not really round. 7. 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. 10 More Amazing Weather Phenomena. Our World As a follow up to Cedestras brilliant list of 20 amazing and unusual weather phenomena, I have decided to make a list with 10 more items. Our atmosphere shows off so many strange and wonderful displays, but often times these brilliant phenomena happen so rarely, and in places all over the world (insert lame ‘once in a blue moon’ pun here). Now then, onto the list! Lunar Corona Formation This item, a personal favorite of mine and one that’s amazing in itself starts off the list.
A Lunar Corona formation is formed through a mix of thin cloud and small droplets in the air. These small droplets scatter the light rays from the moon creating this sort of multicolored moon halo. There are various different names for fogbows; mariners call them sea dogs, pilots call them cloudbows, some people call them white rainbows because of their lack of color (they do have some red and blue in them though, sometimes).
Triple Sunrise Illusion Aliens! WHAT DOES IT MEAN?! 10 More Amazing Wonders of the Natural World. Our World On our previous list, Top 10 Amazing Natural Wonders, we covered a variety of amazing places. With this list we are showing some more amazing wonders which are less about places and more about formations and events. Be sure to add your own favorites to the comments for all to enjoy – preferably with links to images. An ice circle is a rare phenomenon that occurs in slow moving water in cold climates. It consists of large discs of ice that rotate slowly in the water. It is believed that they form in eddy currents. Red tide is a common name for a phenomenon more correctly known as an algal bloom (large concentrations of microorganisms), an event in which estuarine, marine, or fresh water algae accumulate rapidly in the water column and results in discoloration of the surface water.
Columnar Basalts are rock formations resulting from the quick cooling of lava flow. A sun dog is a particular type of ice halo. Penitentes are a snow formation found at high altitudes. Jamie Frater. Top 10 Unusual Islands. Our World This is a list of islands that are somehow unusual or notable. The ranking from ten to one is somewhat arbitrary, in my opinion, since each island is unique in its own way and ratings can’t really apply (it would be kind of like asking which piece of music is better, “Stairway to Heaven” or “Eine kleine Nachtmusik”). So this one is really more like a grocery list than a “countdown from ten to one” list. The islands listed were chosen in part for their obscurity, which is why (for example) Easter Island is not on the list — everyone has heard of that one!
The westernmost of the eight major Hawaiian islands, Ni’ihau (pronounced NEE-ee-how) is distinct from the other seven in that it is completely privately owned, having been purchased by Elizabeth Sinclair from the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1864. Another westernmost island, this time the westernmost in the Aleutian Islands chain in Alaska. Monuriki is a small, uninhabited island in the Mamanuca Island group in Fiji. 10 Strange Things About The Universe. Space The universe can be a very strange place. While groundbreaking ideas such as quantum theory, relativity and even the Earth going around the Sun might be commonly accepted now, science still continues to show that the universe contains things you might find it difficult to believe, and even more difficult to get your head around.
Theoretically, the lowest temperature that can be achieved is absolute zero, exactly ? 273.15°C, where the motion of all particles stops completely. One of the properties of a negative-energy vacuum is that light actually travels faster in it than it does in a normal vacuum, something that may one day allow people to travel faster than the speed of light in a kind of negative-energy vacuum bubble. One prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity is that when a large object moves, it drags the space-time around it, causing nearby objects to be pulled along as well.
Relativity of Simultaneity This is similar to arranging tiles evenly on a floor. Deepest Cave, Call of the Abyss. Top 10 Amazing Earth Facts. Nemesis (hypothetical star) More recent theories suggest that other forces, like close passings of other stars, or the angular effect of the galactic gravity plane working against the outer solar orbital plane, may be the cause of orbital perturbations of some outer Solar System objects.[6] In 2011, Coryn Bailer-Jones did an analysis of craters on the surface of the Earth and reached the conclusion that the earlier findings of simple periodic patterns (implying periodic comet showers dislodged by a hypothetical Nemesis star) to be statistical artifacts, and found that the crater record shows no evidence for Nemesis.[7] However, in 2010, A.L.
Melott and R.K. Bambach found evidence in the fossil record confirming the extinction event periodicity originally claimed by Raup & Sepkoski in 1984, but at a higher confidence level and over a time period nearly twice as long.[8] The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) failed to discover Nemesis in the 1980s. If it does exist, the exact nature of Nemesis is uncertain. Top 10 Plants That Will Kill You.
Our World Ok, I know I wasn’t supposed to do any more plant lists, but I couldn’t help myself. By killer plants I do not mean as in Top 10 Carnivorous Plants, plants that kill little insects, and the occasional rat, but plants that are well known to kill people. All plants contain some toxins as protection against predators. We already know, from Top 10 Poisonous foods we love to eat, that even apple seeds contain traces of cyanide. In this list we are going to look at some plants that contain such high doses, of toxins to which humans are sensitive, that some can kill you in a matter of hours.
White snake root, also known as White Sanicle or Tall Boneset, is a highly poisonous plant, native to North America. Doll’s eye, also known as White Baneberry, is a flowering plant native to Eastern and Northern North America. Angel’s trumpets are flowering plants, native to the tropical regions of South America, but found around the world. Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Your online source - How Are Volcanoes Formed. Solar Eclipses for Beginners. Introduction What is an eclipse of the Sun? What causes eclipses and why? How often do eclipses happen and when is the next eclipse of the Sun? You'll learn the answers to these questions and more in MrEclipse's primer on solar eclipses.
Before we learn more about the eclipses of the Sun, we need to first talk about the Moon. Phases of the Moon Phases of The Moon The Moon is a cold, rocky body about 2,160 miles (3,476 km) in diameter. New Moon > New Crescent > First Quarter > Waxing Gibbous > Full Moon > Waning Gibbous > Last Quarter > Old Crescent > New Moon (again) The phase known as New Moon can not actually be seen because the illuminated side of the Moon is then pointed away from Earth. To many early civilizations, the Moon's monthly cycle was an important tool for measuring the passage of time. Geometry of the Sun, Earth and Moon During an Eclipse of the SunThe Moon's two shadows are the penumbra and the umbra.
The Moon's Two Shadows The Moon's shadow actually has two parts: 1. 2. The Motion In The Ocean: How Waves Are Formed. 8(r) Ocean Tides. Introduction An ocean tide refers to the cyclic rise and fall of seawater. Tides are caused by slight variations in gravitational attraction between the Earth and the moon and the Sun in geometric relationship with locations on the Earth's surface. Tides are periodic primarily because of the cyclical influence of the Earth's rotation. The moon is the primary factor controlling the temporal rhythm and height of tides (Figure 8r-1). The timing of tidal events is related to the Earth's rotation and the revolution of the moon around the Earth. The second factor controlling tides on the Earth's surface is the Sun's gravity. Figure 8r-2: Forces involved in the formation of a spring tide. When the gravitational pull of the moon and Sun are at right angles to each other, the daily tidal variations on the Earth are at their least (Figure 8r-3).
Figure 8r-3: Forces involved in the formation of a neap tide. Types of Tides Figure 8r-4: Cyclical tidal cycles associated with a diurnal tide.
Top 10 Amazing Holes In The Earth. Our World In man’s search for mineral wealth, many enormous holes have been dug. In addition, nature occasionally produces some astounding holes. This list is a pick of the ten most spectacular natural or manmade holes in the face of the earth. Many thanks to rushfan for sending in the images for this list. Click the images for a larger view. Chuquicamata is an open pit copper mine in Chile. It is the mine with the largest total production of copper in the world – though it is not the largest copper mine. The Udachnaya Pipe is a diamond mine in Russia. In 2007, a 300 foot deep sinkhole swallowed a dozen homes in Guatemala – killing 2 and causing thousands to be evacuated. The Diavik Mine is a mine in the Northwest territories of Canada. Mirny Diamond Mine Siberia The Mirny Diamond Mine is 525m deep and has a diameter of 1200m.
The Great Blue Hole is an underwater sinkhole off the coast of Belize. Bingham Canyon Mine Utah Monticello Dam California Kimberley Diamond Mine South Africa Turkmenistan.