You’ve lived on Planet Earth all your life, but how much do you really know about the ground underneath your feet?
You probably have lots of interesting facts about Earth in your brain already, but here are 7 unknown facts about Earth that you should definitely know.
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The Atmosphere
Many layers of atmosphere coat our planet including the mesosphere, ionosphere, exosphere, and the thermosphere, but it’s the troposphere, closest to the planet itself, that supports our lives and is, in fact, the thinnest at only about 10 miles high.
Deserts
Believe it or not, most of the Earth’s deserts are not composed entirely of sand. Much, about 85% of them, are rocks and gravel. The largest, the Sahara, fills about 1/3 of Africa (and it is growing constantly) which would nearly fill the continental United States.
Salty Oceans
If you could evaporate all the water out of all the oceans and spread the resulting salt over all the land on Earth, you would have a five hundred-foot layer coating everything.
Lakes and Seas
The largest inland sea (or, sometimes called a lake) is the Caspian Sea which is on the border of Iran and Russia.
Mountains
The Andes Mountain range in South America is 4,525 miles long and ranks, as the world’s longest. 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.
Speed of Earth
The Earth’s surface rotates on its axis at 1,000 miles per hour. Consequently, the planet travels through space at 66,700 miles per hour. Strange but true!
Longer Days Ahead
We have approximately 24 hours in a day, but it is expected that after about 250 million years, a day will last 1.5 hours longer due to the slower rotation of the Earth around its axis.