World

The highest wind speed ever recorded on earth was 231 miles per hour. It was recorded at Mount Washington, New Hampshire. But that was a very unusual reading, and winds even half that high are rare everywhere in the United Stated, but not in one place in Antarctica. In Commonwealth Bay, along the coast of […]

The continent of Antarctica contains about 10 percent of all the land on earth. Yet Antarctica is the most remote, hard-to-get-to place on our planet. Its possible to visit every continent except Antarctica without ever crossing more than about 100 miles of sea. But Antarctica is everywhere at least 600 miles from the nearest continent! […]

A glacier is a large mass of ice and snow that forms where snow falls at a greater rate than it melts. Glaciers usually move slowly down the slopes of mountains or through valleys. They break up into icebergs when they reach the sea. It shouldn’t be surprising that the largest glacier on earth is […]

Whales weighing as much as 100 tons live in the waters near Antarctica, and some seals spend part of the year on that continent. Penguins and some other birds also spend part of the year in Antarctica or the waters nearby. But the only creature that lives on the continent of Antarctica year-round is an […]

The Arctic tern might just as well be called the “Antarctic” tern. As this sea bird, related to the gull, spends about three months of each year in the Antarctic region and about three months in the Arctic. It spends the rest of the year traveling from one end of the globe to the other. […]

Most birds are built for life in the air, but penguins are far better equipped for life in the water. These flightless birds use their wings as paddles when they’re swimming, enabling them to “fly” through the water. And they can “fly” indeed, some penguins travel more than 22 miles an hour when swimming underwater, […]

Islands have been known to appear and disappear due to volcanic eruptions. The Aurora Islands, which were supposed to lie in the South Atlantic within about 1,000 miles of the continent of Antarctica, appeared and disappeared a number of times over the course of several decades. But their disappearing act wasn’t due to volcanoes, the […]

When you think of a volcano, you think of bubbling lava, steam, smoke, and heat. But there’s a large volcano in the last place you would expect to find heat, Antarctica, the coldest continent! Mount Erebus is the earth’s most southerly volcano. It’s located less than 900 miles from the South Pole. It’s not really […]

An ocean current is a stream of water moving through a larger body of water. Just as a river is a stream of water moving through land, an ocean current is a “river” of water moving through the ocean. One of the major ocean currents is the Gulf Stream, which flows out of the Gulf […]

There are a number of places on earth where the land is below sea level. In Death Valley, California, and around the Dead Sea in Israel, for instance. But none of these depressions, or low-lying places, can compare to a huge depression in Antarctica that is covered with thick ice. Scientists have found that at […]

The coldest temperature ever recorded at the South Pole was more than 102 degrees below zero. That’s plenty cold, but it’s not the coldest temperature ever recorded on the continent of Antarctica. In 1960, Russian scientists working at an Antarctic base called Vostok, more than 750 miles from the South Pole, recorded a temperature of […]

The continent of Antarctica, which surrounds the South Pole, has an area of more than 5 million square miles. Only a few hundred miles of the continent are free from a permanent cover of ice. The ice cap that covers Antarctica is more than 6,000 feet thick in many places. At some points, it’s over […]

That depends upon what part of the ocean you’re talking about. Even the Pacific, the largest ocean, is just a few hundred feet deep at some points. On the average, the Pacific is about 14,000 feet deep. But at one point its more than twice as deep as that! The Marianas Trench is an underground […]

If You’ve ever enjoyed the book or the film Mutiny on the Bounty, then You know the story of the British ship Bounty and its cruel Captain Bligh. The story is true. The tiny Pacific island of Pitcairn is proof. In 1787, William Bligh was sent to the Pacific to bring, back a tropical fruit […]

Bikini is an atoll in the Pacific, a ring of about 20 islands that includes Bikini Island. Bikini first came to public attention in 1946, for two entirely different reasons. In July, 1946, the United States conducted tests of the recently invented atomic bomb at the Bikini atoll. A number of old ships were anchored […]

The nation of Tonga consists of 150 islands spread over 100,000 square miles of ocean in the South Pacific. The total area of these islands is just 270 square miles, and Tonga’s 93,000 people live on only 45 of the islands. The English explorer James Cook discovered these islands in the eighteenth century and called […]

Tuvalu means “cluster of eight islands” in the language of the natives who live there. This tiny nation actually consists of nine islands in the South Pacific, but only eight of them are inhabited. The islands form a chain about 360 miles long. The total area of the nine islands is less than ten square […]

Saipan is a 15-mile-long island in the Pacific Ocean, about 1,200 miles south of Japan. If you like weather with temperatures that hardly vary from one day to the next, then Saipan is the place to go. During a nine-year period at one place on Saipan, the temperature never rose higher than 88 degrees, and […]

Nauru is an island in the Pacific, almost on the Equator. Its total area is about eight square miles, making Nauru the smallest completely independent republic in the world. Nauru also called itself the “richest republic on earth.” The tiny nation’s wealth came from the guano, or seabird manure, that covers the island. Guano is […]

An atoll is a horseshoe-shaped or ring-shaped coral reef enclosing a lagoon. Atolls are formed by the skeletons of sea creatures called corals. These corals live in colonies, and their skeletons collect over the course of years to form a reef. Then sand collects on the reef, and vegetation eventually follows. The largest atoll in […]

Bougainville is the largest island in the Solomons, a group of South Pacific islands North East of Australia. Some of the island natives use an alphabet of only 11 letters, the shortest alphabet on earth. This alphabet includes the same five vowels as our alphabet: a, e, i, o, and u. But there are only […]

The people who live on the remote island of Ponape in the Pacific are simple farmers and fishermen. There are no cities of any size on the island. However, the ruins of an ancient city suggest that Ponape may once have had a much larger population than it does today. This city, called Nan-Matal, is […]

July 4 is a special day in the United States. But to the people of the new nation of Kiribati, July 12 will always be Independence Day. For on that date in 1979, Kiribati joined the community of nations. Kiribati consists Of about 35 small islands spread over some 2 million square miles of territory […]

New Caledonia is a French colony that consists of about 25 islands in the South Pacific, some 750 miles off the coast of Australia. Most of the islands are very small. The single large island, called New Caledonia, has an area of 6,530 square miles, about the same size as all the Hawaiian Islands put […]

If someone were to ask you the name of a certain hill on North Island, New Zealand, you could probably take the person to the top of the hill in less time than it would take to answer the question. As this hill has a native name that consists of 85 letters, making it the […]

Waitomo Cave, an underground cavern on New Zealand’s North Island, never sees daylight. But there’s plenty of “natural light” in this cave, produced by thousands of tiny glowing worms! Visitors to Waitomo Cave descend into a cavern 100 feet long and 50 feet wide. They then ride a boat along an underground river. All around […]

If New Zealand is “New,’ then where is “Old” Zealand? These large Pacific islands were sighted by a Dutch explorer in 1642. They were named after Zeeland, a region of the Netherlands along the North Sea. British explorer James Cook was the first to land in New Zealand in 1769 and the discovery of gold […]

Like its neighbor Australia, New Zealand is a land with animals all its own, or, at least, birds of its own. Originally there were no mammals at all in New Zealand aside from two kinds of bats. There are no land snakes, either. But there are plenty of birds, more than 250 kinds that can […]

For years, people have reported seeing a strange, cat-like creature in the sheep-grazing areas of eastern Australia. The creature is described as either black or striped like a tiger, standing about three feet high. A man who chased one of these “tigers” in a truck claimed that it ran at a speed of more than […]

You might expect to find the world’s largest cattle ranch in Texas. But you would do better to look halfway around the world in Australia. A cattle ranch at Alexandria Station, in Australia’s Northern Territory, once covered some 7.2 million acres, or about 11,250 square miles, an area about the size of New Hampshire and […]

Livestock raising is the main industry of New Zealand, and sheep are by far the most important animals raised in this Pacific Ocean nation. There are more sheep in New Zealand, in relation to the human population, than in any other nation on earth. With only 3 million people, New Zealand is home to some […]

In Australia, it’s easier to find a sheep than another person. Australia had a sheep population of some 148 million in the 1980s. The human population was about 14.4 million, So there are about ten times as many sheep in Australia as there are people! Its not surprising, then, that Australia leads the world in […]

Australia is the most arid continent on earth. About two-thirds of Australia receives less than 20 inches of rain a year, and only 10 percent of the continent receives more than 40 inches. In parts of Australia, rainfall may total less than 5 inches a year! The “Australian Desert” is a name sometimes given to […]

Australia is a nation of big cities, at least in terms of area. Sydney, the most populous city in Australia, is also one of the largest cities on earth, covering about 670 square miles. By comparison, New York City has an area of 320 square miles, and Pittsburgh an area of just 56 square miles! […]

Australia is not just the land of strange animals. There are also birds in Australia that can be found nowhere else on earth. One of these is the emu, a big bird that cannot fly. The emu looks much like the ostrich, and after the ostrich it’s the largest bird on earth, sometimes standing five […]

Ayers Rock, an immense rounded rock with a flat top, rises from a plain near the center of Australia. The rock is almost 2 miles long. It has a circumference of 5.5 miles and is 1,100 feet high. Ayers Rock contains gem-like minerals that reflect the sun, making the huge rock one of the most […]

Long ago, animals could travel to and from Australia by way of a land bridge that connected the continent with other landmasses. Later this bridge was submerged by the ocean, and Australia’s animals were “stranded” on the continent. Animals in Australia then developed independently from the animals in the rest of the world. That’s why […]

You probably can name some of the world’s longest bridges. But do you know where to find the world’s widest bridge? It’s the Sydney Harbor Bridge, in the Australian city of Sydney. This steel-arch bridge, built in 1932, has a total length of 3,770 feet and a span of 1,670 feet, making it one of […]

A coral is a small sea creature, related to jellyfish and sea anemones, that secretes a hard, stony substance to form its skeleton. The skeletons left behind by colonies of these creatures can eventually form islands or long ridges called coral reefs. One reef, or series of reefs, is so large that its more like […]

Australia is the world’s sixth largest nation. Even so, fewer than 15 million people live in this vast country. The average population density of Australia is just 4.8 persons per square mile, one of the lowest on earth. Most Australians live in settlements that are far more crowded than the nation’s population density suggests. About […]

Lake Eyre is Australia’s largest lake. It is 110 miles long and up to 40 miles wide, with a total area of about 3,700 square miles. But Lake Eyre is sometimes much smaller than that, and it sometimes isn’t a lake at all! Lake Eyre is filled with water for part of the year, and […]

When European explorers first set foot on Australia, there wasn’t a single rabbit on that continent. Yet within two centuries, rabbits abounded in Australia to such an extent that Australia was the world’s number-one producer of rabbit pelts, and was desperately trying to stamp out the creatures. Rabbits were introduced in Australia around 1860. These […]

In January, 1936, a prison in the Australian city of Geelong experienced a jailbreak of a most unusual kind. There have been many instances of convicts breaking out of jail. But on this occasion, someone broke in! During the night, the culprit sawed through a lock and then lowered himself down a rope 30 feet […]

The citizens of West Germany are the world’s greatest beer drinkers. But people in some parts of Australia drink more beer than any other people on earth, more than 60 gallons a year! So it makes sense that the world’s longest bar can be found in the Australian city of Mildura. The bar is 298 […]

A waterspout is a tornado that occurs at sea. Sometimes a waterspout results from a tornado that begins on land and then moves over the sea. Sometimes a waterspout develops at sea. As in a tornado, the winds in a waterspout swirl in a funnel-shaped column. When the lower tip of this column reaches the […]

Australia’s name comes from the Latin word australis, “southern.” It was given this name because Australia is the only continent, besides Antarctica, that lies wholly in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia is also the world’s smallest continent. It has an area of almost 3 million square miles, only three-quarters the size of Europe. The continent of […]

When Columbus set sail in 1492, he was searching for a shorter route to the Indies, a group of islands now known as Indonesia. That’s why the Caribbean islands he discovered became known as the West Indies. Indonesia, Columbus’s original goal, is the largest archipelago, or chain of islands, in the world. This island chain […]

Before the 19th century, the island that is now called Singapore was a swampy area inhabited by only a few fishermen. Then in 1819, an English businessman named Sir Stamford Raffles decided to build a port on the island of Singapore. Stamford worked for the East India Company and planned the port to handle the […]

Japan and India make more films each Year than any other nations on earth, more than 500 each. France and Italy each make more than 200 films in an average year. But surprisingly enough, the fifth ranking nation in film-making is the Philippines! The Philippines might be called the “Hollywood of the Pacific”, as while […]

Laos is a landlocked nation in Southeast Asia. It is about twice the size of Pennsylvania. The country is largely covered by mountains and jungles, and most of the people live in the western part of Laos, near the Mekong River. Although various tribes live in the mountains of Laos, more than half of the […]

Khone Falls, on the Mekong River in Laos, are no more than 70 feet high. So these falls can’t compare in height with most of the world’s well-known waterfalls. But Khone Falls are wider than any other waterfall on earth, 6.7 miles wide! The amount of water that flows over Khone Falls varies at different […]

Beginning in the ninth century, the Khmer people ruled a vast empire in Southeast Asia. The Hindu kings of the Khmers built their capital at Angkor, in the northern part of what is now the nation of Cambodia. Covering about 40 square miles, Angkor was a great city of palaces and temples. It had a […]

The city we call Bangkok, the capital and largest city of Thailand, is known as Krung Thep by the people who live there. Its official name is “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon”. But this, too, is a shortening of an older name, which consists of those two words and 10 others. Some believe that “Bangkok” derived […]

Burma is almost exactly the same size as Texas. But while Texas has a population of less than 15 million, Burma is home to more than 33 million, making it the twenty-fifty most populated country on earth. Burma is in Southeast Asia. It shares borders with China, Laos, Thailand, India, and Bangladesh. The northern part […]

Each year, about 35,000 people around the world die from the bite of poisonous snakes. More than half of them are in India, but the nation that suffers most from poisonous snakes is Burma. Out of a population of 3.3 million, about 5,000 people in Burma die from snakebite each year. That’s an average of […]

In the United States and many other countries, a person would never wear white clothes to a funeral. Black is our color of mourning. But in Japan, black clothes would be out of place at a funeral, the Japanese color of mourning is white! Many Americans and Europeans think that black cats are unlucky. But […]

The city of Kamakura, southwest of Tokyo, was once the capital of the shoguns, the military rulers of medieval Japan. It was also a religious center for some Buddhist sects and was the site of many ancient temples. The Kencho-ji in Kamakura is the oldest Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan. It was built in 1253. […]

Japan has suffered many earthquakes during its history. One quake that occurred in this century is known as the “Great Quake” because of the great damage it did to the Tokyo region, the most populous in Japan. On September 1, 1923, a powerful earthquake and the fires that followed it destroyed most of Tokyo and […]

Mount Aso is a 5,223-foot peak on the island of Kyushu, Japan. The mountain was once a volcano, but it’s now a caldera, a crater formed when the cone of a volcanic mountain collapses. The caldera of Mount Aso is the largest volcanic Crater on earth, measuring more than 17 miles across. Its total circumference […]