Several Interesting Facts About Planet Earth
Unique Planet Earth
Planet Earth is just one of eight (according to the latest data) planets in the Solar System. It can be called unique at least because it is habitable. Throughout the history of humanity, people have studied it and still do not fully understand all its processes. Our planet still holds many mysteries. And we continue to be amazed by those discoveries about Earth that have long become public knowledge.
1. Scientific data indicates that Earth formed from the solar nebula about 4.54 billion years ago. Life on the planet appeared approximately 4.25 billion years ago, shortly after its formation.
If the history of Earth were represented as a 24-hour segment, dinosaurs would have gone extinct at 23:41, and human existence would have begun at 23:54 and 43 seconds of that same day.
If we were to travel back 4.5 billion years, we would see our planet as red-yellow, not blue. As a result of the collision between Earth and Theia, there would have been a ring of debris around the planet, from which the Moon was formed. The Moon back then would have shone almost as brightly as today’s Sun and would have influenced the gravity of our planet 25 times stronger.
2. Earth is actually not a sphere.
This name for the geometric shape of our planet is a scientific consensus. In reality, Earth has the shape of a flattened sphere – an oblate spheroid or geoid. The planet is flattened at the poles and forms the "waist" of Earth — the equator, which is 40,075 km long. The difference in the diameter of Earth at the poles and around the equator is 43 kilometers.
3. Because of this anomaly, in some regions, the force of gravity is greater or less than in others. One such place is Hudson Bay in Canada. However, the difference is very small, only 0.005 percent. The force of gravity at the poles of Earth is greater than at the equator. A person weighing 68.4 kg at the North Pole would weigh 400 grams less at the equator.
4. This also explains another interesting fact: the highest mountain peak in the world, taking into account the shape of the Earth, is not Mount Everest, as is commonly believed, but the inactive volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador.
5. 99% of the gold on Earth is located in its core. The Earth's core contains enough gold to cover the entire surface of our planet to a depth of almost 45 centimeters.
6. The inner core of Earth has a radius of about 1,220 kilometers, which is comparable to 70% of the radius of the Moon. Additionally, based on geophysical and geochemical methods, there is a suggestion that the inner core of our planet is approximately as hot as the Sun, at about 5,500 degrees Celsius.
7. Earth consists of iron, oxygen, and silicon. If the planet were divided by its composition, it would look like this: 32.1% iron, 30.1% oxygen, 15.1% silicon, and 13.9% magnesium. Most of the iron is actually found in the Earth's core – 88%. As for the Earth's crust, it contains the most oxygen – 47%.
8. The solidity of the Earth's crust is relative. Earth is the only planet in the Solar System with moving tectonic plates. Without such a phenomenon, Earth would have "overheated" and would resemble something like Venus. The average speed of lithospheric plate movement on Earth is about the same as the growth rate of human fingernails. Initially, there was one continent on Earth, known as Pangaea, which existed 335–175 million years ago, and later split into Laurasia and Gondwana, which subsequently divided into the continents we have today. According to scientists' forecasts, in 250–300 million years, all continents will merge back into a single entity, forming a supercontinent called the Last Pangaea.
9. 70% of the Earth's surface is not land. It is water. When humans first looked at Earth from space, it received its second name – the Blue Planet. The remaining 30% is occupied by the so-called continental crust, with an average thickness of 35–45 km, reaching up to 75 km beneath mountain ranges.
10. 97% of the water on our planet is contained in seas and oceans, and all of it is undrinkable due to high salinity and a large number of minerals. Of the remaining 3% of water, 70% is found in mountain glaciers and polar ice caps, and another 20% is in Lake Baikal. The remaining fresh water is either in the form of moisture in the soil or deep underground in inaccessible aquifers. If all the ice were to melt, the sea level would rise by almost 60 meters.
11. The World Ocean occupies about 70.8% of the surface of our planet, but humans have explored only 5% of it. According to some experts, there may be hidden deposits of precious metals in the seas, particularly at least 20 million tons of gold.
12. The Earth's atmosphere extends up to 10,000 km. It consists of several layers: the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. Up to 50 km from the surface, it is denser, and as you move away from it, the density and pressure decrease. In fact, 75% of the Earth's atmosphere is contained within the first 11 km from the planet's surface. The exosphere – the highest layer – serves as the "gateway" to outer space, where there is no atmosphere at all. The exosphere mainly consists of hydrogen with very low density, helium, and a number of heavier molecules – nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
Human breathing becomes impossible at an altitude of 9 kilometers, although oxygen is present in the atmosphere up to about 115 kilometers.
At an altitude of 19 kilometers, we encounter a phenomenon known as
Armstrong's Line
(Armstrong Limit). It is at this height that a person must be in a spacesuit, as due to low pressure, water boils at body temperature.
Kármán Line
— is an imaginary line located at an altitude of 100 km above sea level. The International Aeronautical Federation recognized this mark as the boundary between the atmosphere and outer space.13.Every day our planet is sprinkled with cosmic dust — about 100 tons of interplanetary material, mostly in the form of dust, settles on Earth.
14. 38,000 artificial objects have been launched into Earth's orbit since the launch of Sputnik-1 in 1957.
22,000 of them are larger than 10 meters. Every day, at least one of them falls back to Earth.
15.The rotation of Earth around its axis actually takes not 24 hours. A complete rotation of the planet takes 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. This is called a sidereal day or stellar day, as astronomers refer to it. We can conclude that, in this case, a day is actually 4 minutes shorter, and this time will accumulate, causing day to turn into night and night into day after a few months. But it is important to remember that Earth is rotating around the Sun. The speed of Earth's rotation around the Sun is 107,826 km/h. The rotation of the Moon and the Sun is synchronized. The Sun itself is constantly shifting from its position by about one degree. If these two movements are combined, it results in exactly 24 hours.
16. It is believed that the driest place on our planet is the Atacama Desert in Chile, where there has been no precipitation for several thousand years. However, there is a place on Earth where it has not rained for 2 million years, and that is the McMurdo Dry Valleys located in Antarctica. Additionally, this is where the strongest winds on the planet blow, reaching speeds of up to 320 km/h.
17. It may seem that the Sahara Desert and the Amazon rainforest are separated by half the globe. However, it turns out that the wind carries 40 million tons of dust from the Sahara to the Amazon every year.
18. The coldest place on the planet is Antarctica. In winter, temperatures can drop to -73°C. The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at the Vostok Station in Russia in 1983, which was -89.2°C.
19. Lightning strikes the Earth about 100 times every second (which amounts to 8.6 million times a day).
One lightning strike can heat the air to 30,000°C. The benefit of lightning lies in its ability to extract nitrogen from the air and direct it into the ground. This is a free and effective source of fertilizer. In Egypt, thunderstorms occur no more than once every 200 years.
20. On October 31, 2011, the population of Earth reached 7 billion people. According to UN estimates, by 2050, the population of our planet will reach 9.2 billion.
