Tag: huge

World’s Largest Building Has a Climate of Its Own

By Anupum Pant

A place where planes like the Boeing 747, 767, 777 and 787 are built, has to be huge. But this Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, home to 30,000 workers (working in 3 shifts), is so huge that the inside of the building has a climate of its own. It is the largest building on Earth. If you get a chance, you must not drop a chance to take the 90-minute tour of this factory (it costs $15 per adult). Here are a few things to note about it…

The size: The volume of this factory is 472 million cubic feet or 13.3 million cubic meters. That is enough to fit the whole Disney land and still be left with a 12 acre place to park the vehicles. In other words, it could fit 800 standard sized hockey rinks. Or it could fit in 75 football fields. Or it can hold about 12 empire state buildings! You get an idea how huge it is, right?

Largest Digital Mural: Being huge comes with its own side effects – another world record. The doors, like the building, are huge too. The factory has 6 doors, where each of them is 82 feet in height and 300-350 feet in width! You could bring in an NFL field (as in, fit the length of it) in through one of these. But what is more interesting about these doors is that they are covered with a 100,000 square feet of digital graphic. This is the largest digital mural in the world – printed by SuperGraphics, Seattle. It took the workers 27 days to install the digital mural.

Small City: Had this place been slightly larger, it could have had enough space to fit in a country – The Vatican city. Still, it isn’t small. The building is like a small city with it’s own fire department, security force, fully equipped medical clinic, electrical substations and water treatment plant. To move around in this little city, the employees use 1,300 bicycles.

Its own Climate? Now, since it is like a small city, it has to have its own climate, right? Yes. When the building was first built, clouds got formed inside and some say it even rained inside (mostly, not true). But rainbows have definitely been seen inside.
The temperature inside the building is controlled by those 1 million bulbs that are used in there. During winters, the bulbs bring warmth and during summers the doors are opened and air circulating fans are switched on to let the fresh Everett breeze come in.

Bonus fact: The network of 26 overhead cranes have about a total of 39 miles of ceiling rails inside the factory!

Eye of the Sahara – A Geological Mystery

By Anupum Pant

Unlike the great wall of China, this huge eye-like geological formation in the Sahara desert is actually visible from the space. In fact, it wasn’t even discovered before the space age.

The Richat Structure, or as some say, eye of the Sahara, is a deeply eroded and a slightly elliptical formation in the Sahara desert near Ouadane, west–central Mauritania. The whole structure is approximately 50 km wide and has several concentric formations. Since it is so large, it wasn’t identified till the astronauts saw it from the space. Here’s a google satellite image of the structure.

Some other times, people have also called it the Blue eye of Africa. That is because in some images taken by the NASA, the geological formation looks blue in colour.

Although the formation itself is an incredible thing to watch, there’s something more astounding about it. No one till date has been able to explain the reason behind the formation of this huge blue eye in the centre of the desert.

Since the formation is very circular (not too elliptical), some say that it was formed due to a asteroid strike. That theory however has been debunked and  it was said that it was probably formed due to a volcanic eruption. And as there is no evidence of any igneous or volcanic rock in that place, the volcanic eruption theory doesn’t work too.

Other interesting point of view is that the almost equidistant concentric rings from the centre might be so symmetrical because they were probably man-made. Also, the whole formation seems to fit the description of Atlantis given by Plato. Although it seems highly improbable that this was the city of Atlantis, it is still a very interesting way to look at it.

Anyway, there’s a lot to be studied about it, but the inaccessibility of the place makes it harder. Maybe in the near future, scientists might be able to find what actually caused this geological formation.

via [GigalResearch]

A Natural Explosion That Knocked 80 Million Trees

By Anupum Pant

In the year 1908 (June 30), a remote part of Siberia experienced something really mysterious and really huge. It was an explosion that took place at about 5-10 km altitude in the air which was estimated to be as powerful as 1000 (or 185 according to NASA) Hiroshima bombs!

No one could ever figure out what really caused it. However, scientists were pretty sure that it was either a huge meteorite of about 100 feet (some say 1000 m) in diameter which crashed into the earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated, or it just bounced off the earth’s atmosphere like a huge skipping stone. Besides the scientific theories, there are a number of other “UFO and alien” stories that have been associated with this event. This was called the Tunguska event.

The sheer size: The explosion was utterly gigantic. So big, that it is still considered to be the most powerful natural explosion in the known history. The shock-waves from the explosion knocked people off their feet, and these people were 40 miles away from where the explosion happened. It wasn’t just people, 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 square kilometres were knocked down in a radial pattern (with trunks pointing away from the epicentre). 80 million! Wow!

It caused a mini earthquake and a NatGeo article says that the lake Checko could have been created due to this impact.

Eyewitness’ account:

Suddenly in the north sky… the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire… At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing. The earth trembled.
[NASA website]

Had this taken place above a metro city, the city would have been completely levelled by the event. But that is highly unlikely because cities take up a very small fraction of area on the earth’s surface. Moreover, very rarely do such events happen.

What is very likely is that such an event could happen over the part which covers 70% of the earth’s surface – the ocean. Such an event could create a huge Tsunami causing a lot of destruction on land.

Pando – An Organism That Weighs 6 Million KG

By Anupum Pant

Blue whales weigh about 150 tons each. That is a 150,000 kg animal we are talking about! Incredible! It is the largest animal to have ever lived on earth. Yes, bigger than any of the dinosaurs. Just for the perspective, the heart of a blue whale can weigh about 600 kg and is almost the size of a Volkswagen Beetle car. A human can fit in its arteries. But, if you thought no other organism can be heavier than a blue whale, you are in for a surprise.

The heaviest organism we’ve ever found, lives in the Fishlake national forest, Utah. In fact, the organism itself is the forest. This forest is a Vatican-city-sized forest which looks like it has several identical trees in a normal forest. Only what looks like identical trees in a normal forest, is actually a single huge tree.

The absolutely humongous tree is known to have come out of a single seed about 80,000 years back. With time, it went on to spread its roots and has cloned itself by popping out about 47,000 other extant clones.

Since it is a single huge tree, it indeed acts like a single huge tree. When one of the shoots (tree) is in need of nutrients, the interconnected root system makes sure that the tree gets what it needs. Also, these trees transition from winter to spring simultaneously, just like a single huge tree would.

MinuteEarth explains it better in the video below:

Elephant Bird – The Heaviest Bird Ever

By Anupum Pant

Scientific Name: Aepyornis maximus

No, it isn’t about a bird with a trunk or tusks. Weighing almost half a ton, the aptly named, elephant bird of Madagascar, was the heaviest bird to have ever existed on earth.  It looked like an Ostrich on steroids and of course it was a flightless bird. The number 3 bird in this picture is an illustration of the Elephant bird (around 10 feet in height) [image]

Note: Although we say that it was the heaviest bird to have ever existed, we can only say that because we haven’t been able to find any traces of a larger bird yet.

Interestingly, it wasn’t something that belonged to the Dinosaur era. It went extinct recently, around the 17th or 18th century, probably due to humans hunting it for food. Since cameras did not exist at that time, only written accounts of its sighting have been found.

As logic dictates, a huge bird would lay huge eggs. So, with a volume of about 180 to 250 times that of a chicken egg, measuring about 1 feet in height, its eggs were the largest laid eggs ever; larger than human heads. The shells could hold around 11 liters of liquid. Its eggs were said to have fed whole families. Some of them have been preserved – Some are being auctioned and some are available in museums. National Geographic Society in Washington holds a specimen that has the skeleton of an unborn Elephant bird.