Facts About Earth

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 have not even been explored which is why when new depths are located; often come with hundreds of new species. Rain forests offer new animals and plants as often we can explore them. Our Earth is constantly changing, shifting, and exposing secrets for humans to marvel at. It may took many years and many great minds to solve those problem of getting through Earth’s atmosphere into this wide expanse of space beyond. Here are some amazing facts about our home that you may not be aware of.


10. The Atmosphere
Many layers of the atmosphere coat our planet including the: mesosphere, ionosphere, exosphere, and thermosphere, but it is 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 totally composed entirely of sand. Much, about 85% of it, are rocks and gravel. The largest, is the Sahara Desert, fills about 1/3 of Africa which would nearly fill the continental United States.
8. The Big Blue Marble
The Earth is, in fact, not really round. It's called an oblate spheroid meaning it is slightly flattened on the top and to the bottom poles.
7. Salty Oceans
If you could evaporate all the water out on all of the oceans and spread the resulting salt all over the land on Earth, you would have a five hundred-foot layer coating everything.
6. Lakes and Seas
The largest inland sea is the Caspian Sea which is on the border of Iran and Russia.
5. Mountains
The Andes Mountain range in South America is 4,525 miles long and ranks, it is te world's longest mountain. 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 the length of 400 miles, a width of roughly 30, but its depth is just over a mile is 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 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. as 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.