Interesting Facts

22nd April is Earth day. (It's also Jelly Bean day, which makes it a great day to be on planet earth.) Happy Earth Day Earthlings.  :)

Life on Earth could be at threat from a catastrophic "supervolcano". (Two massive piles of rock, the size of continents, are crashing together as they shift at the bottom of Earth's mantle, 1,800 miles (2,900km) beneath the Pacific Ocean. Seismologists believe is due to erupt in between 100 and 200 million years' time.  Phew!)

There are more than 210,000 miles of water pipes that serve 23m properties across England and Wales. (This is a length equivalent to eight times the circumference of the Earth. According to OFWAT (the economic regulator of water and sewer companies in England and Wales) it would cost £100bn to replace them all.)

Today is Earth Day. History of Earth day.

China produces almost the entire world supply of rare earths. (China produces more than 95% of the world's rare earth metals, which are used in high-tech goods like mobile phones, computers and flat screens TVs. They include: Scandium; Yttrium; Lanthanum; Cerium; Praseodymium; Neodymium; Promethium; Samarium; Europium; Gadolinium; Terbium; Dysprosium; Holmium; Erbium; Thulium; Ytterbium; Lutetium . Try pronouncing that lot!)

According to the Population Reference Bureau, about 107 billion people have lived on Earth. (They calculated it using stats and guesses from when Homo sapiens first walked the earth, about 50,000 years ago, and assumed that 50,000 years ago there was a population of 2.  I bet there was a humdinger of an argument about that statistic.) How many people have ever lived? Year Population Births / 1,000 Births since previous date Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates 50,000BC 2 - - 8,000BC 5,000,000 80 1,137,789,769 AD1 300,000,000 80 46,025,332,354 1200 450,000,000 60 26,591,343,000 1650 500,000,000 60 12,782,002,453 1750 ...

The Kepler space telescope has confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system. ( Spinning around its (sun like) star about 600 light years away, Kepler-22b is 2.4 times the size of the Earth, putting it in a class known as "super-Earths", and has a year of 290 days.   The near-surface temperature is presumed to be about 22 degrees Celsius, but don't pack your bags just yet, as scientists do not know whether the planet is rocky, gaseous or liquid, so you wouldn't know what to pack - diving gear, climbing gear or breathing apparatus. Kepler is NASA's first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours, and cost the US space agency about $US600 million, but it has already uncovered 1,094 more potential planets.   They aren't the only ones looking of course, French astronomers this year confirmed the first rocky exoplanet to meet key requirements for sustaining life.  To infinity and beyond!  Co...

Today, 23rd September 2011, a huge, 6 ton satellite (the size of a bus), may crash into earth at 18,000 mph. (The satellite was launched in 1991 by the space shuttle Discovery, it was decommissioned 2005.  Nasa has warned there could be a 500-mile trail of debris, and, according to the Guardian, calculations put the British Isles within the impact path.  The odds of being hit by a piece of flying debris are 3,201 against, but this means you are 4,000 times more likely to be hit by space debris, than to win the National Lottery in the UK.  Cheerful thought.) Update - it crashed into the ocean off the US coast, so anyone who clicked on "scary", you can relax now - until the next time.  :)

Experts from the University of Bern in Switzerland, believe that the Earth was originally orbited by two moons. (The researchers are attempting to explain why the far side of the Moon has a thick, mountainous crust while the near side is flat. The mountainous far side of the moon:- The smoother near side of the moon:- The theory is that the smaller moon was absorbed into the larger when they smashed together in slow motion, around 4.4 billion years ago.

The surface area of the Earth is 197,000,000 square miles. (And no matter how much of it belongs to you right now, you'll end up with approximately 12 sq ft of it.)

You would weigh less at the Equator! (But not much less! While standing at the equator you are further away from the bulk of Earth’s mass than at the poles which results in less than a pound! But it's a pretty instant diet.)

Astronomers have worked out that there is a miniscule chance that Venus or Mars could collide with Earth. (Luckily they also figured it won't happen for at least a billion years, although if you're reading this in a billion years time, that's probably not much comfort.) PS - Joe Breezer was well ahead of them all:- I'm lost in space What a perfect place Two worlds collide Into the stars I'm lost in space Without a trace Two worlds collide Like Venus and Mars

The deepest that humans have ever drilled into the Earth is 12,261 metres (40,230 ft) . ( The drilling took place on the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Some interesting things were discovered within the earth's crust, as the drill made its way approximately halfway through the earth's crust it exposed rocks that were 2.7 billion years old, and along the way they found a fractured area of rock 3 to 6 miles beneath the surface that had been thoroughly saturated with water. Temperatures eventually reached 180 °C (360 °F), making deeper drilling prohibitively expensive.)

Dr Alan Boss from the Carnegie Institute believes there could be around one hundred billion earth like planets in our galaxy. (He says many of these worlds could be inhabited by simple life forms. A bit like earth then.)

Fewer than a half of the world’s maritime boundaries have been agreed. (Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, all countries have rights to resources up to 200 nautical miles from their shoreline. This recently resulted in Russia planting a flag on the seabed of the North Pole. Personally I think that if someone can walk there, without the aid of any machinery, they are quite entitled to plant a flag, of course they didn't so they aren't.)

Some people still believe the earth is flat. (The modern hypotheses supporting a flat Earth originated with English inventor Samuel Rowbotham (1816-1884). Based on his interpretation of certain biblical passages, Rowbotham published a 16-page pamphlet, which he later expanded into a 430-page book, Earth Not a Globe, expounding his views. According to Rowbotham's system, which he called "Zetetic Astronomy", the earth is a flat disk centered at the North Pole and bounded along its southern edge by a wall of ice (Antarctica), with the sun and moon 3000 miles (4800 km) and the "cosmos" 3100 miles (5000 km) above earth. Nowadays, the term "flat-earther" is used to describe someone who is spectacularly - and seemingly wilfully - ignorant. Flat-earthers call spherical-world believers "globularists". That would make me a globularist then.)

According to the Peace Corp's website, of all the water on earth, 97.5 percent is salt water. Of the remaining 2.5 percent of fresh water, some 70 percent is frozen in the polar ice caps. The other 30 percent is mostly present as soil moisture or lies in underground aquifers. (This means that less than 1 percent of the world's fresh water (or only about 0.007 percent of all the water on Earth) is readily accessible for direct human use.)

75 % of the earth is covered with water. (Next time I'll come back as a dolphin.)

The Queen is planning to create an underground network to extract heat from the earth’s natural warmth and cut energy bills at Buckingham Palace. (Well well!)

The population of the Earth has more than doubled since 1950.