Few Interesting Facts about Earth

Here are few facts about our home planet called Earth.

1. El Azizia in Libya is the hottest place on earth till date. It recorded a temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius) on Sept. 13, 1922 -- the hottest ever measured. In Death Valley, it got up to 134 Fahrenheit on July 10, 1913
2. And the coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was -129 Fahrenheit (-89 Celsius) at Vostok , Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.
3. The Nile River in Africa is 4,160 miles (6,695 kilometers) long.
4. By size and volume Caspian Sea is the largest lake in the world, located between southeast Europe and west Asia.
5. World's highets water fall is in Venezuela. The water of Angel Falls in Venezuela drops 3,212 feet (979 meters).
6. Climbers who brave Mt. Everest in the Nepal-Tibet section of the Himalayas reach 29,035 feet (nearly 9 kilometers) above sea level. Its height was revised upward by 7 feet based on measurements made in 1999 using the satellite-based Global Positioning System.
7. A place called Arica, in Chile, is the driest place on earth. It gets just 0.03 inches (0.76 millimeters) of rain per year. At that rate, it would take a century to fill a coffee cup.
   Lloro, Colombia is the wettest place on the earth. It averages 523.6 inches of rainfall a year, or more than 40 feet (13 meters). That's about 10 times more than fairly wet major cities in Europe or the United States.
8. About 97 percent of the world's water is in the oceans. Oceans make up about two-thirds of Earth's surface, which means that when the next asteroid hits the planet, odds are good it will splash down.
9. The Pacific Ocean covers 64 million square miles (165 million square kilometers). It is more than two times the size of the Atlantic. It has an average depth of 2.4 miles (3.9 kilometers).
10. The shore of the Dead Sea in the Middle East is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) below sea level.
11. Can rocks float? The answer is "Yes". They sometimes can. In a volcanic eruption , the violent separation of gas from lava produces a "frothy" rock called pumice, loaded with gas bubbles. Some of it can float, geologists say. For more details, please read this.
12. USGS says roughly 1,000 tons of material from outerspace enters the earth atmosphere every year and makes its way to Earth's surface.
13. The solid inner core of earth -- a mass of iron comparable to the size of the Moon -- spins faster than the outer portion of the iron core, which is liquid. A study in 1996 showed that over the previous century, the extra speed caused the inner core to gain a quarter-turn on the planet as a whole. So the inner core makes a complete revolution with respect to the rest of Earth in about 400 years. Immense pressure keeps it solid.
14. Moon used to be much closer to Earth in the past! A billion years ago, the Moon was in a tighter orbit, taking just 20 days to go around us and make a month. A day on Earth back then was only 18 hours long. The Moon is still moving away -- about 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) a year. Meanwhile, Earth's rotation is slowing down, lengthening our days. In the distant future, a day will be 960 hours long!