How deep is the deepest lake on Earth?

Lake Baikal is a narrow lake in Siberia, not far from the Mongolian border. The lake is about 636 kilometers long and 80 kilometers wide. It is the eighth largest lake in the world. But the first in terms of quantity of water.

But Lake Baikal is not known only for its size, but for its depth. At a certain point, the bottom of Lake Baikal is more than 1,642 meters below its surface.
If three Empire State buildings piled one on top of the other at the bottom of Lake Baikal, the building above would not reach the surface of the lake!

With an area of 31,494 km², Lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake in Asia and, as mentioned earlier, the deepest in the world. It contains 23,600 km³ of water, equivalent to 20% of the world's freshwater.

.

What is the cold pole?

The "cold pole" is a region of Siberia that is considered the coldest place on Earth outside Antarctica. Temperatures in this part of Siberia are generally much lower than in the North Pole itself about 2,400 kilometers away, partly due to the high altitude of this region.

Temperatures at the North Pole are probably not below minus 52 °C (-61.6 °F).

But in Verkhoyansk, a settlement near the "cold pole," the temperature often drops below -62.2 °C (-79.6 °F). The temperature once reached a minimum of -67.8 °C (-90.04 °F)!

Interestingly, in summer the temperatures around the cold pole can be quite hot. Once a temperature of 37 °C (98.6 °F) was recorded in Verkhoyansk, giving this place a temperature range of 105 °C (221 °F), the highest on Earth!

A few hundred kilometers from Verkhoyansk is the village of Oymyakon, the coldest place on Earth that is permanently inhabited. The lowest temperature recorded in Oymyakon (though not considered official) has been -71.2 °C (-96.16 °F) below zero.

But undoubtedly the coldest place on the planet (and the other "coldest pole"), is in Antarctica, specifically in the Antarctic station of Vostok, which recorded on July 21, 1983 a temperature of -89.2 °C (-128.56 °F)!

.

What's the biggest lake in the world?

The Caspian Sea is the largest lake on Earth. It is four times larger than Lake Superior, the second largest lake. However, the Caspian Sea was once much larger, and today, its area continues to decline.

The Caspian Sea is surrounded by Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

An inland sea once covered the region around the Caspian Sea. Its exact magnitude is unknown, but it reached at least as far as the Aral Sea in the east, and the Azov Sea in the west.

In more recent times, the Caspian Sea filled an enormous depression between the borders of Russia, Turkmenistan and Iran. This region, the largest exposed depression on earth, has an area of more than 520,000 square kilometers. The Caspian Sea now fills only 371,000 km² of that depression. The coasts of this sea went 400 km into what is now the mainland.

In more recent years, the level of the Caspian Sea has dropped by about 20 metres. Its surface is 28 metres below sea level.

The salinity level of the Caspian Sea is one third that of the ocean.

.

Where are the highest sand dunes in the World?

The central part of Algeria, in the Sahara desert, is a region of large quantities of sand. The sand is accumulated by the wind in massive dunes.

In some places, these dunes are so large that the ridges of neighboring dunes can be five kilometers away. One particular sand dune in this region is the highest in the world, reaching a height of 420 meters, higher than the Empire State Building in New York!

Huge sand dunes are not only found in the desert. There is a sand dune near the village of Arcachon, in France, which is about 100 meters high.

.

Where did the rainiest day on Earth occur?

What was the most rainy day on a place on Earth?

In an average year, New York City receives approximately 1.07 m of rain, about 0.83 m in Chicago, while in Los Angeles it is less than 0.30 m per year. Could you believe that there is a place on Earth that receives more rain in a single day than the three previous cities receive in a year?

Reunion is an island of 2,212 km² in the Indian Ocean, 640 km east of Madagascar. This densely populated island, administered by France, is very mountainous, with peaks over 3,000 metres high.

In March 1952, it rained on Reunion Island like it has never rained anywhere else in the world in modern times. In just 24 hours, a place in Reunion at 4,000 meters above sea level received an astonishing total of 1.84 m of rain!

That's more than the rain many places in the world receive in a year, and more than the rain you receive in some places in a decade. The weight of rainwater that fell that day in Reunion was about 8,320 tons per acre!

.

What's the biggest seed in the world?

Why is the sea coconut (coco de mer) considered the largest seed in the world?

Sea coconut grows on palm trees found only in the Seychelles and the Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean.

The sea coconut is sometimes called the "double coconut" because it looks like two coconuts joined together. The name 'sea coconut' comes from the fact that some of these coconuts often fall from palms in the ocean and are transported by sea currents to distant shores.

Seychelles coconuts take about ten years to mature and can measure 45 cm long when at their peak. Since each coconut contains only one seed, some scientists consider the coconut itself to be a seed.

This makes the sea coconut the largest seed on Earth. These "double coconuts" can weigh more than 20 kilos, and some have weighed as much as 25 kilograms!

.

What's called thundering smoke?

Why were Victoria Falls given the name "thundering smoke"?

To begin with, these Victoria Falls have nothing to do with Lake Victoria.

This waterfall is located in the Zambezi River, which flows along the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Anyone who has seen Victoria Falls knows that it offers one of the most spectacular views of nature.

Near the falls, the Zambezi River runs through many tree-covered islands. At its widest point, which is a kilometre and a half, it is thrown into an abyss between two walls of pure rock.

The waterfalls are considered an extraordinary spectacle because of that narrow and rare abyss into which the water falls. So you can see the fall with the naked eye. The water falls a total of 110 meters to the bottom of the abyss.

.

What's Africa's snowy peak?

Are there snowy mountains in Africa?

In 1848, a German explorer reported the discovery of a snow-covered mountain in central Africa, only a few hundred kilometers from the Equator line.

Europeans mocked the idea that such a mountain might exist, until other explorers saw the snowy peak for themselves a few decades later.

This peak is Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa at 5,895 meters. Its name means "Mountain of the frozen demons", although the base of the mountain is 'cooked' in a characteristic equatorial climate, ice and snow often cover the top of the mountain.

The snowy peak of Mount Kilimanjaro can be seen from as far away as 300 kilometers, which is often a strange sight in a region with such a hot climate.

Mount Kilimanjaro was originally part of the British colony of Kenya. However, it was included in the neighboring German colony (now the nation of Tanzania) as a birthday present from Queen Victoria of England to the German ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm.

.

What causes an echo?

Sound travels in waves, in the same way that waves of water travel in the ocean. When you make a sound, the sound waves travel through the air. You will first hear the sound when those waves reach your ear.

However, if sound waves hit an obstacle such as a building or the walls of a cave, they will bounce off the air because such objects do not absorb sound. Instead, they reflect or bounce the sound back, and you will hear it a second time. This second sound is called an echo.

If it is only an obstacle that reflects the sound, you will hear only one echo, a simple echo. But if many surfaces reflect the echo bouncing from surface to surface, like in a valley or canyon surrounded by mountains, you hear the sound of the echo over and over again, but it gets weaker with each repetition. This repeated echo is called a compound echo or reverberation.

Heavy clouds close to the ground can also reflect sounds and create echoes.

Echoes can measure how far a person is from the surface that the echoes bounce off, as the sound waves travel at about 300 m per second.

.

What if the Antarctic ice melted?

The continent of Antarctica, which covers the entire South Pole, has an area of 14,107,637 km².

Antarctica is the highest continent on Earth, with an average altitude of 2,000 meters above sea level. Its territory is home to about 80% of the planet's freshwater. It is also the continent with the lowest average humidity on Earth and the lowest average temperature (-17 degrees Celsius).

Only a few portions of the continent are free of a permanent ice cover. Most of Antarctica is covered by a gigantic indlandsis; the average thickness of the ice covering the continent is 1,600 meters; the maximum recorded thickness is 4,776 meters, in the Adellia Land.

It is difficult to imagine how much water must be frozen in Antarctica to form a 1.6 km thick ice sheet over an entire continent.

It is estimated that if the Antarctic ice sheet melted, the released water would raise the level of the oceans by about 72 meters, flooding a quarter of all the world's dry land.

.

.

Where is the coldest place on the planet?

 The average temperature in Antarctica, a cold desert with little precipitation, is -17 degrees Celsius.

It is quite cold, but it is not by far the lowest temperature remembered on the Antarctic continent.

In 1960, Russian scientists working at the Vostok Antarctic station, more than 1,200 km from the South Pole, recorded a temperature of -89.2 degrees Celsius!

Although hard to believe, they are 11 degrees cooler than dry ice (solid carbon dioxide).

.

Where is the lowest place on Earth?

Dead Sea

The Mariana Trench is the deepest known marine trench and the deepest place in the earth's crust. But if we leave aside the Mariana Trench, which is in the ocean, what is the lowest place on Earth below sea level?

There are a number of sites on Earth where the land is below sea level.

The Valley of Death, in California, and around the Dead Sea in Israel, to name just two acquaintances. But none of these depressions, or low places, can compare to a huge depression in Antarctica that is covered with ice.

Somewhere in Antarctica, above 1,800 meters above sea level, the ice covering the land is 4.3 km thick.

This means that the terrain itself is about 2,500 meters below sea level! By comparison, what is officially considered the lowest place on Earth, the Dead Sea, is only 422 metres deep.

.

What is the largest ocean current in the world?

An ocean current is a marine stream moving through a larger body of water. Just as a river moves through the earth, an ocean current, to put it simply, is a "river" of water moving through the ocean.

One of the largest and most famous ocean currents is the Gulf Stream, which flows from the Gulf of Mexico through the east coast of the United States to the coasts of northern Europe. Thanks to the warm Gulf Stream, Europe's climate is not as cold as it should be.

But the largest ocean current is not the Gulf Current, but the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a large flow of moving water circulating around Antarctica.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current has a width ranging from 300 km to 2,000 km. Its average speed when passing between South America and Antarctica is a little more than one kilometer per hour.

This current acts as a shield against other warm water currents that could affect the permanent ice of Antarctica.

The flow of the current is estimated to be about 10 billion cubic feet per second, three times that of the Gulf Stream and 2,000 times that of the Amazon, the largest river on the planet.

.

Where is Mount Erebus?

Mount Erebus aerial vista

 It is the most natural thing that when you think of a volcano, you imagine lava, steam, smoke, and extreme heat.

But there is a great volcano in the last place you would expect to find the heat of the fire, and that place is on the coldest continent, Antarctica.

Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth. It is located less than 1,500 km from the South Pole. The volcano is not exactly on the mainland but on the island of Ross, close to the coast. The Antarctic ice sheet connects the island and Mount Erebus to the mainland.

The summit rises 3,794 meters and was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, however no one climbed to the top of the mountain until 1908.

On Ross Island, apart from Mount Erebus, there are also 3 other inactive volcanoes, one of them called Mount Terror.

.

Where is the world's largest glacier?

In short, a glacier is an enormous mass of ice and snow that forms when the amount of snow that falls is greater than the amount that melts.

Glaciers usually move slowly from mountain slopes or through valleys. When the end of a glacier reaches the sea, it breaks into icebergs.

It is no surprise that the largest glacier on the planet is in Antarctica, the famous "frozen continent". There are a lot of huge glaciers in Antarctica, some more than 160 km long. The largest of them all is the Lambert Glacier.

This huge ice sheet is about 65 km wide, and stretches 435 km long. Imagine the Lambert Glacier as a gigantic sea of ice moving from Paris in France to Amsterdam in Holland.

.

What's the loneliest place on Earth?

 The cold continent of Antarctica contains about 10% of all the land in the world.

Antarctica is the most remote and difficult place to access on our planet. It is possible to visit any other continent, except Antarctica, without crossing more than 160 kilometers of sea. But Antarctica is 800 km beyond any other continental land.

Antarctica is undoubtedly the loneliest place on Earth. On the other hand, in the Northern Hemisphere, vast areas of Canada, Alaska, Russia, Greenland and Scandinavia are above the Arctic Circle. This means that thousands of people, despite the cold, live in this polar region.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica covers the Antarctic Circle in its entirety. In this region, there are no trees, few animals and no human being lives permanently in the entire continent.

.

What's the windiest place on Earth?

Commonwealth Bay

The highest wind speed remembered in the United States was over 370 km/h.

This speed was recorded in Mount Washington, New Hampshire. But it was a rather unusual reading, and winds with just half that speed are rare anywhere in the United States, but not in a certain part of Antarctica.

In Commonwealth Bay, on the Antarctic coast, winds regularly exceed 240 km/h. It is the windiest place on Earth.

Obviously it does not take into account the tornadoes and hurricanes that hit other parts of the planet, but we are talking about a place that throughout the year has persistent high-speed winds.

Can we imagine the cold of Antarctica with winds of 240 km per hour?

With winds of 'barely' 80 km per hour, a temperature of zero degrees C would feel like -56 degrees C.

.