Category: Earth

By Anupum Pant

The people, cattle and every other living being in Spearfish, South Dakota was stunned by an event that happened in the morning of January 22, 1943. It was 7:30 in the morning and there was a lot of snow around. The temperature was touching -20 degrees centigrade. In a span of just 2 minutes (by the time it was 7:32) the temperature suddenly rose up to 7 degree centigrade above zero! in Fahrenheit scale, the one used in US, this was a 49 degree rise in temperature in just 2 minutes. This was the fastest temperature change ever witnessed in the history of man kind.

The thermal shock wasn’t just a surprise to the living beings. The rapid temperature change was enough to crack the windows of cars and apartments too.

The “high” temperature, or a balmy temperature if you may call it that, did not last too long. Just like it came, it went back to being -20 in less than an hour. But by that time, people say that the snow on one side of the buildings was melted, while the other side was full of snow.

This change happened due to something called the Chinook wind – which means “snow eater.” These warm winds apparently poured down a nearby mountain and raised the temperature of the place very rapidly. Once it was past the town, the temperatures dropped back to natural levels.

via [Wikipedia]

By Anupum Pant

Until very recently, till the year 1979, we humans had no real explanation as to why the oceans were actually salty. If a kid ever asked that to the teacher, the teacher just tried go to the next question.

It was hypothesized that the rivers got in a lot of salts into the ocean and made them salty. However, that was a flimsy argument given the size of all the rivers and the cumulative size of all the oceans.

Later in the year 1979, while researchers were doing their job at around the East pacific rise (a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along the floor of the Pacific Ocean), the were greeted by mysterious vents in the ridge that were spewing big black columns of material into the ocean. These black dust like thing was later found to be a massive amounts of tiny crystals being thrown into the oceans by these hydrothermal vents.

It was found that the whole volume of water in all the oceans across the world cycled in and out of the earth through vents, into the tens of thousands of magma chambers, every 6-8 million years and carries enough chemicals back to the surface for these millions of years.

via [NatGeo]

By Anupum Pant

Manhattan is a place packed with innumerable skyscrapers and is probably a paradigm that proves how efficiently people can be packed in a city. Or is it? Well, what if I tell you that there is a place which is four times as densely populated as Manhattan and has exactly zero skyscrapers.

50 kilometres from the coastal town of Baru, amidst the beautiful Caribbean lies an island called Santa Cruz del Islote, so tiny that Google maps detects no land around that place. It’s 0.012 square kilometres in area, or just 0.004 square miles. Just water shows even when you are at the maximum zoom level on Google maps. However, shifting your view to terrain, you’ll see a tiny island dotted with hundreds of houses.

In that small area of land, 2 hours away from the mainland, in between the vast Caribbean sea, live a whopping 1200 people. That is a population density of about 100,000 people per square kilometre (300,000 people per square mile). That’s easily 4 times the density of people in Manhattan.

When fishermen first discovered this island about 150 years from now, they loved it because there were no mosquitoes here. Slowly  homes started filling in and before they knew, the island was absolutely packed. Today there are 90 homes, 2 shops a school and a restaurant in the island. The most open place in the whole island where people can gather is the size of half a tennis court!

The community is tightly knit, there are no crimes, homes are never locked and of course there’s no place for a police station here, literally. Every one who lives here, quite starkly unlike the people of Manhattan, are very happy with their simple lives.

Interestingly, there’s no place for even a cemetery, so people who die are taken to a nearby island to bury.

via [News.com]

By Anupum Pant

850 kilometres south of Adelaide is a town called Coober Pedy which looks mostly like a desert from the outside. A birds eye view of it would look something like this.

That is because besides a few establishments on the surface like the police station, schools and hospitals, a majority of the town lives underground. Underground they have bars, homes, churches and what not. People walking outside are often cautioned to not walk without looking where they are walking because it is apparently very easy to fall into a pit there…

They live underground mostly because it is too hot on the surface. Temperatures easily reach 40 degrees centigrade and there’s almost no humidity – about 20%.

Here are some images from Amusing planet. Do visit them to see more…

 

By Anupum Pant

It’s the year 2015, with so much technology and advancement around us, it’s almost impossible for us to imagine that there is no real road connecting the northern and the southern part Americas.

The pan american highway spanning from Alaska in the north to the southern most part of Argentina, is the longest highway in the world and is about 48,000 km long. But somewhere in between this road is a gap which is next to impossible to traverse by land. This gap of 60 miles in reality is so long that only a few enterprising adventurers have been able to cross it in a land vehicle. Everyone else has to either take the sea-route or an international flight to the other side. The gap is called “The Darien gap.”

The region spanning the southern part of Panama that borders Colombia and is exactly where this gap lies. Theoretically, the gap can and has been crossed by great adventurers after months of hard-work, hacking the dense parts of this dangerous tropical forest, but there still isn’t a normal road for others to do it. Besides the dense, untouched and dangerous rainforest, this area of about 10,000 square miles is dotted with guerilla rebel groups and several natives who don’t make it easy to cross.

[read more]

 

By Anupum Pant

There’s green house gases and then there’s this nasty substance called cryoconite which not many of us have heard about. I certainly heard about it for the first time in a documentary I was watching the other day called chasing ice.

The texture and colour of this substance intrigued me and I wanted to find out more about it.

Cryconite is a dark sooty substance formed due to many man-made and natural pollutants coming together. Dust from as far as Asia, various rock particles, soot and microbes contribute to the formation of this substance. It comes and sits on the ice at and around the poles. A dark patch on the pristine white ice.

As it is dark, it absorbs the heat of the sun much better than the white ice. As a result, it melts ice much faster. So, wherever you have these black marks in the ice, they melt and go down to form certain patterns in the ice which look like the following.

Besides the green house gases we are making, this evil sooty substance is another one of those things that is making the ice at the poles and around it melt much faster.

Global warming is real. Take my word for it, or the statements of thousands of acclaimed scientists around the world. Don’t let anyone else convince you otherwise.

By Anupum Pant

Somewhere in the Pacific ocean lies a massive island of filth – That’s the largest garbage dump in the world. And it’s called the great pacific garbage patch.

The whole science of why this garbage dump got naturally created there can be attributed to the rotation of earth and certain winds which cause the ocean to turn in certain ways at certain places. These big rotational movements in the oceans around the world are called gyres.

Actually there are two of them in the pacific ocean. One is in between Japan and Hawaii. And the other is in between California and Hawaii. But the ocean turn in a certain way that connects these two massive dumps with a highway of filth.

The one between California and Hawaii is about the size of Texas! Captain Charles Moore found this great pacific garbage patch in the year 1997…

More about it from brain stuff.

By Anupum Pant

Dark Lightning might sound like a science fiction oxymoron, but it is real. NASA’s fermi gamma ray space telescope, launched back in the year 2008. It’s mission was to study high energy bursts coming from far away places in the universe. However, soon the telescope picked up something no one had expected. It detected positrons, anti-matter equivalent of electrons originating from earth.

Lightning expert Joseph Dwyer from Florida institute of technology explained that it was only a tiny beam of anti-matter burst that the telescope detected. Extrapolation of that data indicated that about 100 trillion positrons were sent off by a thunderstorm. It wasn’t very clear what was producing antimatter and sending it to space.

Scientists answer was that dark lightning was causing this. According to them, hi speed electrons colliding with the air produce gamma rays. These rays then transform into a pair of matter and antimatter – Electron and positrons. And a nuclear fission like feedback loop starts. This can’t be seen by us. Telescopes in the sky have been recording gamma ray flashes since the 1990s and the Fermi had next detected positrons.

And recently when Dwyer’s plane accidentally entered a thunderstorm, their equipment in the plane detected antimatter. This time, it was such that the phenomenon couldn’t be explained by any known theory. Insides of thunderstorms which have been very energetic areas in our own planet haven’t been explored before. Now its time to send those balloons equipped with detectors to learn more, they say. [Nature]

By Anupum Pant

Some graduate students, running a NASA experiment captured a series of strange sounds about 36 km above the earth’s surface. They had sent a balloon equipped with a recorder that could record sounds much below our hearing range (in frequency).

The origin of these sounds isn’t known yet. They say it might be coming from crashing ocean waves, wind turbulence, gravity waves, clear air turbulence, and vibrations caused by the balloon cable.

Now since you can’t hear it, you have to speed it up so you can hear it. Here’s the recording sped up about 1000 times.

By Anupum Pant

In a part of Poland there’s a forest called the crooked forest which has about four hundred pine trees which grow with their bases crooked at about 90 degrees. These pine trees are surrounded by several other pine trees which grow fine. There have been several theories about what might have caused the weird bent in only about 400 of these trees. Some seem bizarre, others seem quite plausible. But there’s not a single one which absolutely explains the whole phenomenon.

 

[Unusual places]

By Anupum Pant

It takes time to get your head around what really is the United Kingdom, England and Great Britain. This CGP grey video is your one stop shop to know everything about it. So, sit back, watch carefully and take notes.