GLOBE TROTTING
SHORT BUT SWEET
The shortest place names in the United States are L, a lake in Nebraska; T, a gulch in Colorado; D, a river in Oregon flowing from Devil’s Lake to the ocean; and Y, a city in Arkansas. Each is named after its shape.
In Europe, E is a river in Perthshire, Scotland; there are villages called Å in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and there’saYin France.
The Pacific Caroline Islands has a place named U, and a peak in Hong Kong is called A.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
Hawaii’s Mount Waialeale is the wettest place in the world—it rains about 90 percent of the time, about 480 inches per year.
It is illegal to swim in Central Park, New York.
At the deepest point (6.8 miles), an iron ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor.
The largest wave ever recorded was near the Japanese Island of Ishigaki in 1971, at 279 feet high.
The surface of the Dead Sea is 1,312 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, which is only 47 miles away.
The Dead Sea is in fact an inland lake.
The water in the Dead Sea is so salty that it is far easier to float than to drown.
The volume of water in the Amazon River is greater than the next eight largest rivers in the world combined.
In 1908, the Moskva River in Russia rose 30 feet, flooding 100 streets and 2,500 houses.
The world’s longest freshwater beach is located in Canada.
Over the years, the Niagara Falls have moved more than 7 miles from their original site.
The Angel Falls in Venezuela are nearly 20 times taller than Niagara Falls.
The Nile River has frozen over only twice in living memory—once in the ninth century, and then again in the eleventh century.
Rio de Janeiro translates to “River of January.”
The farthest point from any ocean is in China.
The world’s largest delta was created by the River Ganges.
New York City contains 572 miles of shoreline.
The East Alligator River in Australia’s Northern Territory was misnamed. It contains crocodiles, not alligators.
The mythical Connla’s Well, home to the Salmon of Wisdom, is the legendary source of Ireland’s Shannon and Boyne Rivers.
The Atlantic Ocean covers the world’s longest mountain range.
BUT NOT A DROP TO DRINKNo rain has ever been recorded falling in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.
DISASTER ZONE
Two minor earthquakes occur every minute somewhere in the world.
One of the greatest natural disasters of recent centuries occurred in 1976 when an earthquake hit Tang shan, China, killing three-quarters of a million people.
In 1992 a series of thunderstorms in southeast Queensland spawned two of the most powerful tornadoes in recorded Australian history, including the only Australian tornado to be given an F4 classification.
In 1896, Britain and Zanzibar were at war for 38 minutes.
Eighty-two percent of the workers on the Panama Canal suffered from malaria.
In May 1948, Mount Ruapehu and Mount Ngau ruhoe, both in New Zealand, erupted simultaneously.
The background radiation in Aberdeen is twice that of the rest of Great Britain.
Lightning strikes the Earth about 200 times a second.
On January 15, 1867, there was a severe frost in London, and more than 40 people died in Regent’s Park when the ice broke on the main lake.
COLD AS ICE
Antarctic means “opposite the Artic.”
The northernmost country claiming part of Antarctica is Norway.
Underneath the great icy plains of the Antarctic, little pools of unfrozen water can sometimes be found.
It snowed in the Sahara Desert on February 18, 1979.
The largest iceberg recorded, in 1956, was 200 miles long and 60 miles wide, larger than the country of Belgium.
The Novaya Zemlya glacier in Russia is more than 250 miles long.
The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was -94°F in Siberia.
The Eskimo language has more than 20 words to describe different kinds of snow.
Ten percent of the salt mined in the world each year is used to de-ice the roads in America.
Dirty snow melts quicker than clean snow.
On March 30, 1867, Alaska was officially purchased from Russia for about two cents an acre. At the time, many politicians believed this purchase of “wasteland to be a costly folly.”
During winter, the skating rinks in Moscow cover more than 250,000 square miles of land.
NAME GAMES
200 million years ago, the Earth contained one land mass called Pangaea.
The country of Benin changed its name from Da homey in 1975.
Maryland was named after Queen Henrietta Maria.
Tokyo was once called Edo.
In 1825, Upper Peru became Bolivia.
The southwestern tip of the Isle of Man is called the Calf of Man.
The city of Edinburgh is nicknamed “Auld Reekie” meaning “Old Smoky.”
The DC in Washington, DC, stands for District of Columbia.
The inhabitants of Monaco are known as Monegasques.
A person from the country of Nauru is called a Nau ruan; this is the only palindromic nationality.
There is a town in West Virginia called Looneyville.
New York was once called New Amsterdam.
Greenland—named this to attract settlers—was discovered by Eric the Red in the tenth century.
The southernmost tip of Africa is not the Cape of Good Hope, but Cape Agulhas.
Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.
Spain literally means “the land of rabbits.”
Mount Everest was known as Peak 15 before being renamed after Sir George Everest, the British surveyor-general of India, in 1865.
A 453-foot-tall building in New York City is called the Lipstick Building because of its oval shape and façade of red enamel and granite. The top portion of the building is designed to appear retractable, like a lipstick.
Icelandic phone books list people by their given name, not their surname.
SIZE MATTERS
Canada is larger than China, which is larger than the United States.
The world’s largest national park is Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada.
The world’s largest exporter of sugar is Cuba.
England is smaller than New England. There is no point in England more than 75 miles from the ocean.
The United States, which accounts for 6 percent of the population of the world, consumes nearly 60 percent of the world’s resources.
Discounting Australia, which is generally regarded as a continental landmass, the world’s largest island is Greenland.
As the Pacific plate moves under its coast, the North Island of New Zealand is getting larger.
France contains the greatest length of paved roads.
There are more Samoans in Los Angeles than on American Samoa.
POPULATION GROWTH
The number of births in India each year is greater than the entire population of Australia.
The only country to register zero births in 1983 was the Vatican City.
TIME TO MAKE HISTORY
Benjamin Franklin was first to suggest daylight savings time.
Captain Cook was the first man to set foot on all continents except Antarctica.
Florida first saw the cultivation of oranges in 1539.
England’s Stonehenge is 1,500 years older than Rome’s Colosseum.
Numbering houses in London streets only began in 1764.
The tree on the Lebanese flag is a cedar.
There are three Great Pyramids at Giza.
The inhabitants of Papua New Guinea speak about 700 languages (including localized dialects, which are known to change from village to village), approximately 15 percent of the world’s total.
The world’s first national park was Yellowstone.
Sixty percent of all U.S. potato products originate in Idaho.
New York’s Central Park opened in 1876.
Within a few years of Columbus’s discovery of America, the Spaniards had killed 1.5 million Indians.
Hawaii officially became a part of the United States on June 14, 1900.
The Tower of London, during its lifetime, has served many purposes, including a royal menagerie.
The Tibetan mountain people use yak’s milk as their form of currency.
In the Andes, time is often measured by how long it takes to smoke a cigarette.
The Spanish Inquisition once condemned the entire population of the Netherlands to death for heresy.
ART AND CRAFTS
The Incas and the Aztecs were able to function without the wheel.
Obsidian, used by American Indians for tools, weapons, and ornaments, is dark volcanic glass.
The state flag of Alaska was designed by a 13-year-old boy.
THE LAY OF THE LAND
The most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust is aluminum.
More than 75 percent of all the countries in the world are north of the equator.
Less than 1 percent of the Caribbean Islands are inhabited.
Mountains are formed by a process called orogeny.
The city of Istanbul straddles two separate continents, Europe and Asia.
At the nearest point, Russia and America are less than 3 miles apart.
The Scandinavian capital of Stockholm is built on nine islands connected by bridges.
La Paz in Bolivia is so high above sea level that there is barely enough oxygen in the air to support a fire.
The Forth railway bridge in Scotland is 3 feet longer in summer than in winter, due to thermal expansion.
If you travel from east to west across the former Soviet Union, you will cross seven time zones.
In the north of Norway, the sun shines constantly for about 14 weeks each summer.
The Polynesian country of Niue is a 106-square-mile limestone rock emerging 197 feet from the Pacific.
Yugoslavia is bordered by seven other countries.
The fastest tectonic movement on Earth is 240 millimeters per year, at the Tonga microplate near Samoa.
A quarter of Russia is covered by forest.
PRECIOUS METALS
Fulgurite is formed when lightning strikes sand.
Until the eighteenth century, India produced almost all the world’s diamonds.
There is about 200 times more gold in the world’s oceans than has been mined in our entire history.
South Africa produces two-thirds of the world’s gold.