The Best Interesting Random Facts
An oasis is a green, fertile area surrounded by desert. Some oases are supplied with water by underground springs. Others receive their water from streams that bring rainwater down from nearby mountains. An oasis usually has palm trees and tropical fruits and vegetables. Some small oases are used as resting points for travelers crossing the […]
The earth’s atmosphere is the envelope of gases that surrounds our planet and revolves with it. Most of the gases are within about 300 miles of the earth’s surface, but a thin atmosphere extends some 22,000 miles! Up to a height of 60 miles above the earth, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen. About […]
In the morning of May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens was the fifth highest mountain in the state of Washington. Then it erupted. It became a fierce, active volcano, and it blew 1,300 feet of its top right into the air. In the morning, it was 9,677 miles high, and by midnight it was only […]
A volcano erupted on August 27, 1883 on the tiny Indonesian island of Krakatoa in the South Pacific. The eruption was so powerful that it caused a tidal wave, or huge wall of water, as tall as a 9-story building. The wave wiped out 163 villages on Krakatoa, killing 36,380 people. It even washed ashore […]
The biggest living thing on earth isn’t the whale, it’s a tree! The California Big Trees are a kind of sequoia tree growing in Sequoia National Park in California. Some of these giants grow to a height of 270 feet. The redwood trees are taller, sometimes reaching heights over 350 feet, but the Big Trees […]
Near Hillsboro, Ohio, is a large mound of earth that stretches a distance of a quarter of a mile. It seems to be just another of the burial mounds built in the Midwest by the Indians who lived in the area long before the white man came. It isn’t. There is something very special about […]
The Bay of Fundy, which separates both Maine and New Brunswick from Nova Scotia in Canada, has the highest tides in the world. They rise and fall anywhere from 10 to 60 feet in an hour! The energy generated by these tides is so great that Canadian engineers are talking about building a dam on […]
The Seychelles coconut, found only in the Seychelles Islands near Africa, produces the largest seeds in the plant kingdom. The fruit of this palm tree looks like two coconuts joined together, the reason for its other name, the “double coconut.” Because the coconut contains just one seed, scientists consider the entire fruit to be the […]
Cactuses are thrifty plants that live in dry regions. They may not get much moisture where they live, but they manage to make the most of what they do get. Since the cactus’s long roots lie close to the surface of the ground, they can catch water from desert rains. And since the roots have […]
Dry ice is the name given to carbon dioxide, a gas, when it freezes into a solid state. Dry ice is used to refrigerate food. It is called “dry” ice because when it melts, it doesn’t melt into a liquid like ordinary “wet” ice does. Dry ice melts into a gas. Foods that have to […]
You’ve seen quicksilver many times without knowing it. The thermometer you use to take your temperature contains a drop of quicksilver, for quicksilver is just another name for mercury! The quick in quicksilver came from an old word that meant “living.” In earlier times, mercury was called “living silver,” because of the odd way it […]
Travelers in swampy areas have often seen a strange bluish flame that appears suddenly, moves along the ground, and disappears as suddenly as it appeared. Sometimes, this light is seen in graveyards too. In earlier times, people thought that the flame was a spirit, or a light carried by a spirit, and many superstitions grew […]
You may have seen the small, moss-like plants called lichens covering rocks or the branches of old trees. Though you’d never guess it from looking at these plants, lichens are really two plants in one: a fungus and an alga. The fungus and alga in a lichen live so closely together that you’d need a […]
The unusual baobab trees of Africa have trunks so wide, often approaching 35 feet in diameter that entire native families live in them. These trees are second in size only to the giant sequoias of California, but they have such a soft pulp inside their trunk that they can easily be hollowed out and used […]
The average city in the United States might receive 25 to 45 inches of rain in a year. New York receives about 43 inches, and Dallas about 32 inches. But a mountainous region on the island of Kauai, in Hawaii, receives 460 inches of rain in an average year. In Kauai, the wettest place on […]
When water changes to ice, it becomes lighter. It is the only substance on earth that is lighter as a solid than as a liquid. This means that when the water in a lake freezes, the ice floats to the top, and fish swim beneath it. It is very, very rare for a lake to […]
Most trees begin life as a seed and continue to grow as long as they live, some for hundreds or even thousands of years. The history of a tree, its age, plus events that took place as it grew, can all be revealed by studying its trunk after it is cut down. A tree grows […]
When you think of a desert, you may picture vast areas of totally barren, shifting sands. But only a small part of most deserts is completely barren. By and large, most of the world’s deserts look just like the parts of the United States that we call deserts, with rocks, cliffs, and a great variety […]
They aren’t shaped like drops at all. They are perfectly round. You may have just discovered this, but a man named William Watts heard about it way back at the end of the 1700s. He made a fortune with the knowledge. He had a high tower built, and from its very top he dropped small […]
Like gold, silver comes in many different forms. It comes as pure silver when it is found as nuggets, slabs, and in wires. The wires are sometimes thick, but sometimes they are as fragile and thin as the electric wires you have in your house. This is supposedly the finest silver you can find. However, […]
Although we use tomatoes as vegetables, they are actually classified by botanists as fruits because they contain seeds inside their juicy, pulpy tissue. In fact, the tomato is considered to be a berry, much like the strawberry, blackberry, and raspberry. Aside from tomatoes, several other foods that we usually term vegetables are considered fruits. These […]
The Cuyahoga River passes through much of the industrial area that surrounds Cleveland, Ohio. For decades, factories, cities, and towns got rid of their sewage and industrial waste, by dumping them into the river. From time to time, conservationists and other people worried about pollution complained. Indeed, many people complained. The river didn’t look as […]
The earth rotates around its axis, an imaginary line drawn through the North and South Poles. The other planets also spin around their axes, but not all planets spin in the same direction that the earth spins. The earth rotates in the same direction that it moves around the sun. Venus spins in the opposite […]
Weather records that include the size of a snowfall have been kept for only about 100 years, so we don’t know the size of the heaviest snow of all time. But in 1921, the heaviest daily snow on record struck Silver Lake, Colorado, dumping 76 inches of snow on that town in 24 hours! The […]
Just as your parents today might put a fence around your property to keep out unwanted guests or animals, Emperor Shih Huang Ti built a wall to keep out China’s enemies in 221 B.C. But his wall, the longest in the world, was 1500 miles long, or about the distance from New York City to […]
A type of star called a black hole isn’t really black. It’s giving off light just like any other star. But this light can never reach us, so the star looks “black.” Imagine a huge star that runs out of gas to burn after billions of years of shining. As the star runs out of […]
In 1586, fifteen Englishmen settled Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, to establish England’s claim to the island. The following year, 117 additional settlers, men, women, and children, arrived, only to find that the original fifteen men had disappeared without a trace. Then three years later, in 1590, an English supply ship came […]
Radio Waves follow the curve of the earth’s surface. You might think that such a radio signal would shoot straight up and into outer space. It would, were it not for the mirror-like effect of something called the ionosphere. The ionosphere makes up a large portion of the earth’s atmosphere starting at from 50 to […]
When you look up into the sky at the sun and the moon, they appear to be pretty equal in size. But that is far from true. The sun is actually 400 times larger than the moon, with a diameter of 865,000 miles as compared to the moon’s 2,160 miles. Why then do they look […]
The Sahara Desert, whose name comes from the Arab word sahra, meaning “wilderness,” is by far the biggest desert on earth. Though the exact boundaries of the Sahara are hard to define, this African desert stretches more than 3,000 miles at its longest point, and in most places is over 1,000 miles wide. The Sahara […]
If you were to see a banana plantation, you’d probably say “yes,” bananas do grow on trees. But although banana plants certainly look like trees, growing up to 30 feet tall, they’re really giant shoots, the banana plant is an herb, not a tree! In fact, the banana is the largest plant on earth without […]
When the Vikings first visited the west coast of Greenland they found that the Eskimos who lived there used heavy stones to anchor their boats. The Vikings were amazed to see that when these stones were dropped in the water, they became nearly invisible. Today this mineral is called Cryolite. Greenland is the only place […]
To answer that question takes a lot of “ifs.” If the earth were completely dry, with no oceans separating continents, you, as a person, could walk around our planet, traveling day and night at a steady pace, in less than a year. If, however, you were a tidal wave, you could cross the earth in […]
When flowing water hits against any kind of barrier, it twists away and spins around rapidly with great force. This creates a whirlpool. Whirlpools can occur in a small area where a piece of land juts out into a river, causing the water to swirl around. They can also occur in the middle of the […]
During the 4,600,000,000 years that the sun has been shining, it has been burning up 22 quadrillion tons of hydrogen and changing it into helium every year. Scientists estimate that the sun has enough of a supply of these gases to keep shining for another 5,000,000,000 years. How do they know this? Astronomers have been […]
If you wanted to get away from it all, the best place on earth to go would probably be a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean called Bouvet Island. This island was discovered in 1739, but not a single person lives there today. Bouvet lies about 1,050 miles away from the nearest piece of […]
