Planet Earth facts

Planet Earth facts: all 18, explained

1. Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined.

   Canada is often said to hold more than half of the world’s lakes, with estimates of over two million. Many formed when glaciers scraped the land during the last ice age.

   Source: List of lakes of Canada (Wikipedia) · Fact card

2. Russia spans 11 time zones.

   Russia stretches more than 9,000 kilometres from Kaliningrad in the west to the Pacific coast in the east. When it is evening in Moscow, it is already the next morning in Kamchatka.

   Source: Time in Russia (Wikipedia) · Fact card

3. You can float without trying in the Dead Sea.

   The Dead Sea is about ten times saltier than the ocean, which makes the water so dense that people float easily. Its shore is also the lowest land on Earth, more than 400 metres below sea level.

   Source: Dead Sea (Wikipedia) · Fact card

4. Mauna Kea is taller than Everest, measured from its base.

   Everest has the highest summit above sea level. But Hawaii’s Mauna Kea starts deep on the ocean floor, and from base to peak it is over 10,000 metres tall, compared with Everest’s 8,849 metres above sea level.

   Source: Mauna Kea (Wikipedia) · Fact card

5. A lightning bolt is hotter than the surface of the Sun.

   Lightning can heat the air around it to about 30,000 °C, roughly five times hotter than the Sun’s surface. The sudden heating makes the air expand explosively, which is the sound of thunder.

   Source: Lightning (Wikipedia) · Fact card

6. Most of the ocean floor has never been mapped in high detail.

   Oceans cover about 71% of Earth’s surface. Only around a quarter of the seafloor has been mapped at high resolution with modern sonar, though international projects are working to map it all.

   Source: Seabed 2030 (Wikipedia) · Fact card

7. The Sahara was green a few thousand years ago.

   Between roughly 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, the Sahara had lakes, grasslands and animals like hippos. Rock art in the desert shows cattle and swimmers. Shifts in Earth’s orbit changed the monsoons and dried the region out.

   Source: African humid period (Wikipedia) · Fact card

8. Some living trees are older than the Egyptian pyramids.

   A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains, known as Methuselah, is more than 4,800 years old. It was already growing when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.

   Source: Methuselah (tree) (Wikipedia) · Fact card

9. Antarctica is the largest desert in the world.

   A desert is defined by low precipitation, not heat. Antarctica gets very little snow or rain each year, making it the largest desert on Earth, bigger than the Sahara.

   Source: Antarctica (Wikipedia) · Fact card

10. Australia is wider than the Moon.

    Mainland Australia is about 4,000 kilometres from east to west, while the Moon’s diameter is about 3,475 kilometres.

    Source: Australia (Wikipedia) · Fact card

11. There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way.

    A 2015 study estimated about 3 trillion trees on Earth. The Milky Way is thought to contain somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars.

    Source: Tree (Wikipedia) · Fact card

12. Lightning strikes somewhere on Earth about 44 times every second.

    Satellite data suggests around 1.4 billion lightning flashes a year worldwide, most of them over land near the tropics.

    Source: Lightning (Wikipedia) · Fact card

13. Not a single bridge crosses the Amazon River.

    The Amazon flows through thinly populated rainforest, and its banks flood and shift. Ferries carry people and goods across instead.

    Source: Amazon River (Wikipedia) · Fact card

14. Most of the world’s fresh water is frozen.

    Only about 2.5% of Earth’s water is fresh, and most of that is locked in ice caps and glaciers, especially in Antarctica and Greenland.

    Source: Fresh water (Wikipedia) · Fact card

15. Tiny ocean plants make about half of the oxygen we breathe.

    Phytoplankton, microscopic plant-like organisms near the ocean surface, carry out about half of the photosynthesis on Earth.

    Source: Phytoplankton (Wikipedia) · Fact card

16. The Pacific Ocean is bigger than all of Earth’s land put together.

    The Pacific covers about 165 million square kilometres, roughly a third of Earth’s surface and more than the area of all the continents combined.

    Source: Pacific Ocean (Wikipedia) · Fact card

17. The deepest part of the ocean is deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

    The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is about 10,900 metres deep. If Everest were placed at the bottom, its peak would still be more than 2 km underwater.

    Source: Challenger Deep (Wikipedia) · Fact card

18. Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a supervolcano.

    Yellowstone’s geysers and hot springs are heated by a huge magma system below. The volcano has had three enormous eruptions in the past 2.1 million years.

    Source: Yellowstone Caldera (Wikipedia) · Fact card