Did you know that Antarctica's 7.2 million
cubic miles of ice holds 70 percent of our
fresh water?
Here are 15 other facts that
are nearly impossible to believe.
We generally think of space as being really
far away, but in reality, it's not actually that far.
The generally accepted altitude of space,
or rather, the imaginary line where space begins,
is the Kármán line.
The Kármán line is of course not a physical
object, but instead just an altitude where an
imaginary line sits that we defined as the border
between space and not space.
It sits at 100 kilometers or 62.1 miles above
sea level.
That might sound like a long way but,
if you could drive on a vertical highway,
it would only take about an hour to reach the Kármán line.
For comparison, if you instead wanted to plan
your road trip all the way to the Moon,
it would take over 4 and a half months.
Yeah, space really isn't that far away.
The biggest issue, really, is just driving straight up.
Although, what's not an issue is falling straight down.
Unless of course you're standing on the ground in
which case you can't really fall anywhere.
Except to the ground I guess.
And, while it takes about an hour to reach space,
if you fell in a hole that went straight to the center
of the Earth it would take over 19 minutes to
reach the bottom of that hole
(or the center of the Earth).
That's long enough for light to travel to the moon
and back over 445 times!
Although, if you counted air resistance into that,
it'd actually take more like 33 hours.
Most of that time you'd be traveling around 120mph!
That's the speed of a small plane!
Something that's even faster than that,
though, are tsunamis!
Tsunamis can travel at speeds nearly 600
miles per hour! That's faster than most airliners!
At that speed, a tsunami could travel across the
entire Pacific Ocean in less than 13 hours!
Of course, this is the speed of the waves out in
the middle of the ocean.
Near the shore, the speed decreases and the
height increases. This is what causes waves to
break. In fact, out in the middle of the ocean,
the tsunamis can be over 300 miles long.
While most tsunamis are only a few feet in height,
tsunamis can occasionally reach heights of over
1700 feet which is taller than the Empire State Building!
Oh, and even though a tsunami can travel across
the Pacific Ocean in just 13 hours, the Pacific Ocean
is actually larger than all the land masses on Earth combined!
In fact, the Pacific Ocean covers about 30 percent
of the Earth's surface!
And combining all the rivers, lakes, and oceans together,
around 71 percent of the Earth's surface
is covered with water!
Perhaps the reason why we've only explored about 5
percent of our oceans.
In fact, around 2000 new marine species are discovered
every year! Compared to mammals which we only discover
about 50 new species every year.
With all this water covering most of the Earth's surface,
it's no wonder the Earth was nicknamed the “Blue Marble”.
Speaking of the Pacific Ocean,
in the western Pacific Ocean,
near the Mariana Islands,
lies the Mariana Trench, which you might know is the
deepest place in the ocean.
The deepest portion of the Mariana Trench has been
named “Challenger Deep”, and for good reason.
You see, down at a depth of over 36,000 feet,
you have that much water stacked on top of you.
And because of this, the pressure at that depth is nearly
8 tons per square inch which is the equivalent of having 3
SUVs sitting on just one square inch! That's enough
pressure to break aluminum and puncture 12 gauge steel!
This is why only 22 missions have been made to those
incredible depths. Compared to the nearly 7000 missions
made to the top of Mt. Everest!
Any submarines that travel to the insane depths of
Challenger Deep have to be specially designed to
not break under nearly 7 miles of water!
That's well over a mile deeper than Mt. Everest is tall!
In fact, submarines can shrink by about 2 and a half inches
from the immense pressure at those depths.
Rather surprisingly though, the temperature at this
depth is generally only about 35 degrees Fahrenheit which
really isn't that cold for being so far from sunlight.
I mean, it can't get too cold anyway, though, because,
believe it or not, there is a limit to how cold anything can get.
The minimum temperature being -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.
The reason nothing can get colder than this temperature,
is because heat is produced by particles
(like atoms and molecules) jostling around,
so the minimum temperature is when the these particles
are perfectly still. This temperature, of course, being
-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit,
which is exactly 0 degrees Kelvin.
Speaking of zero, if you've ever tried to divide a number
by 0 on a calculator, you might have gotten
a “divide by zero error”.
This is because division is the exact opposite of multiplication.
And anything multiplied by 0 is 0.
So the question arises, what is something divided by 0.
Well, if you divide anything by a number between 1 and 0,
the number actually grows. This is the exact opposite of
multiplication where anything multiplied by a number
between 1 and 0 shrinks.
What's interesting is that the size of the resulting number
increases as the dividing number decreases.
Until you of course get to 0 at which point the
resulting number is unknown.
Well, kinda. I mean, it's clearly infinity.
Although, infinity certainly isn't a number.
If you think about it, this does actually make sense.
I mean, if division is the opposite of multiplication and
anything multiplied by 0 is infinitely small, which is what 0 is,
than anything divided by 0 should be infinitely large.
Something that's also large, although not infinitely large,
of course, are blue whales.
Blue whales have a heart that beats only once
every 10 seconds and weighs nearly a ton!
In fact, the heart beat is so loud that it can be heard up
to 2 miles away! Is that why blue whales
don't have stethoscopes?
Although, combined with all the various noises in the
ocean and the fact that humans ears simply don't
work well underwater, you probably wouldn't be able
to hear it yourself. But if the ocean was completely
silent and you had hydrophones for ears,
you most certainly could. I think marine animals
are some of the most amazingly designed creatures!
And yet another amazingly designed marine animal,
are dolphins. Dolphins are very special for many reasons.
The most notable being that they are the second most
intelligent animal on the Earth, second of course to humans.
Although, if you ask me, they're probably actually smarter,
we just won't admit it. I mean, dolphins have even guided
ships through dangerous waters.
When was the last time you had to guide a dolphin?
In fact, dolphins are so intelligent that they even call each
other by name! Not in English of course, but in specific whistles.
Dolphins also only sleep one half at a time.
So while one eye is closed, the other eye is open.
While one half of the brain is sleeping,
the other is wide awake. This is to protect
themselves from danger. How many humans do you know
that sleep while watching for danger?
Dolphins can also tell the difference between metals
while blindfolded! This is of course possible because
of their amazingly designed sonar, or echolocation,
but it's still yet another thing where dolphins exceed
the capability of humans.
I think dolphins are definitely smarter than humans.
Although...I guess, I might just be biased because...
dolphins are rather cute...
and humans really aren't doing a good job
of proving their intelligence.
And speaking of intelligence, dogs are one of the
most intelligent creatures.
They're not quite as intelligent as dolphins though,
but one way they exceed humans is of course in their
sense of smell. A dog's sense of smell is so good
that it can detect a teaspoon of sugar in
a million gallons of water! To put that into perspective,
a million gallons of water is the size of the average pond!
Even though humans aren't as smart as they claim to be,
we still have an amazing design.
A great example of this being our efficiency.
Not how good we are at getting work done,
I mean there's few humans that are good at that,
but instead how efficient our body is. Your brain, for example,
can store about 2.5 million gigabytes of data!
The resolution of the human eye is about 576 megapixels,
and we can detect up to 150 frames per second.
The average pixel uses about 3 bytes of space.
So just in vision alone the human brain can process
the equivalent of 260 gigabytes per second.
That's about the speed of the average computer!
And to do all this incredible work, our brain only
uses about 12 watts of power! For comparison,
the average laptop uses about 50 watts of power.
The average desktop computer can use up to 500 watts of power!
And the most powerful computers on Earth (known as supercomputers)
use up to 10 million watts of power!
Yeah, the human brain is rather efficient!
Speaking of efficiency, swifts, a type of bird,
can stay airborne for up to 10 months!
They have this ability because they of course
eat insects, most of which are in the air.
Swifts also have this ability since they can sleep while flying.
I'm beginning to think that all our computers, airplanes,
and other inventions, aren't actually as
great as we thought they were.
Anyway, there are 206 bones in the human body.
And what's so amazing about this, is that a quarter of these bones
...are in your feet.
That's 26 bones per foot!
Although, over a quarter of your bones are in your hands.
That means over 51 percent of your bones are in your
hands and feet. That's quite a bit when your hands
and feet are only about 2.3 percent the
volume of your entire body.
Oh and remember how dolphins sleep one half
at a time? Well snails aren't quite so good.
In fact, a snail can sleep for up to 3 years!
Snails only live for 3 to 15 years!
So 3 years would be a large portion of their lifetime!
You know something else that is related to lifetime?
Language. Most likely, you've spoken at least one
language for most of your life. And that language
probably still exists today.
But, believe it or not, every 40 days, another language
or dialect goes extinct.
That's 9 languages per year!
That means in just 10 years,
over 1 percent of the current languages will be extinct.
Hey I did it!
I got a Gen-Z to watch 10 minutes of science!