Tag Archives: Earth

Moon

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Moon

The light of the night, the Moon.

  • The fifth biggest moon, or ‘natural satellites’ as they are called, in our solar system is the Moon, and it orbits the Earth.
  • We only ever see one face of the Moon because it takes 27.3 days to complete one revolution on its axis and one orbit around the Earth.
  • Humans only see the Moon because it reflects the light of the sun, and when you can see the moon, it outshines anything else in the night sky.
  • The Moon is believed to have a small, hot core like the Earth, and it contains a significant amount of iron and magnesium as well as other natural materials.
  • The Moon has many craters that will never disappear due to the lack of weather on the rock.

Moon, Full, Bright, Light, reflection, Small, Earth, Clouds, Australia, Planet, Ten Random Facts

  • The Moon has temperatures that range from -153°C to 134°C (-243°F to 273°F) depending on the position of the Moon and the sun.
  • The Moon is responsible for tidal changes on Earth due to the gravitational force it creates, and low tides and high tides occur depending on which side of the Earth the Moon is on.
  • The first spacecraft to visit and observe the Moon was sent by the Soviet Union in 1959, while the first humans to land on the moon was in 1969 in the spacecraft Apollo 11.
  • The Moon is approximately 384,400 km (238,855 miles) from the Earth, although this varies due to the way it orbits the Earth.
  • It is believed that more accidents occur on nights of a full moon since the gravitational force pulls at the brain’s fluids, but no proven evidence exists.
Bibliography:
Choi C, Earth’s Moon: Formation, Composition and Orbit, 2013, < http://www.space.com/55-earths-moon-formation-composition-and-orbit.html>
Moon, Wikipedia, 2013, < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon>

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Mount Rushmore National Memorial

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Mount Rushmore National Memorial

A sculpture in a mountain!

  • Mount Rushmore is in South Dakota, United States of America, and is controlled by the United States National Park Service.
  • Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture carved in the side of the granite mountain, Mount Rushmore.
  • The Mount Rushmore sculpture depicts four US president heads – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
  • Mount Rushmore National Memorial was carved in 1927-1941 by Gutzon Borglum, a notable sculptor, and a team of 400 workers.
  • Mount Rushmore’s carved heads are 18 meters (60 feet) high and make up the  largest sculpture ever carved.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial, South, Sculpture, Record, Carving, four, Presidents, Faces, Stock.Xching, Ten Random Facts, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln,

Mount Rushmore National Memorial
Image courtesy of Stock.Xching
  • The Mount Rushmore sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, made plaster models that were one twelfth the size of the finished sculpture so that the workers had a guide to follow.
  • Dynamite was used to carve 90% of the Mount Rushmore heads.
  • Around 3 million people visit Mount Rushmore every year.
  • After approximately two year’s work on the sculpted Thomas Jefferson, bad cracking was found in the granite, so Jefferson was removed and restarted on the other side of Washington.
  • Each day during construction, the Mount Rushmore workers had to climb 700 stairs before they could start work.
Bibliography:
Mount Rushmore 19 February 2013, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rushmore>
Grant, N 1994, People and Places, RD Press, Australia

Amazon River

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Amazon River

One of the longest rivers…

  • The Amazon River is in South America and crosses most of the continent, and runs all the way across the top of Brazil.
  • The Amazon River is generally named the second largest river in the world.
  • There is a debate about the Amazon River being the second longest river in the world. More accurate measuring systems in recent years suggests that the Amazon River is longer than the Nile (supposedly the longest river), which reaches 5,499 to 6,690 km (3,417 – 4,160 miles) in length, whereas the Amazon River is said to be 6,259 to 6,800 km (3,889 – 4,200 miles) in length.
  • The Amazon River discharges more water than the other top seven largest rivers combined, with an average discharge of approximately 209,000 m3/s (7,381,000 cu ft/s).
  • The Amazon River has the largest river basin in the world being 7, 050, 000 square km (2, 720, 000 square miles) and contains many river systems.

Amazon River, Aerial View, Green, Blue, Landscape, Ten Random Facts, Flickr, CIFOR

Amazon River
Image courtesy of CIFOR/Flickr
  • The Amazon River ranges in width, depending on the season, being 1.6 – 10 km (1 – 6.2 miles) wide in the dry season, and in the wet season the river can reach up to 48 km (3o miles) wide.
  • The Amazon River starts its flooding season in November and continues to around June.
  • The Amazon River is the home to many animals, most notably the Amazon River dolphin (boto) and the anaconda snake.
  • The Amazon River is the home of over 5,600 known fish species.
  • The Amazon River has an underground river, called Hamza, flowing underneath it, which is about 6,000 km (3, 730 miles) in length, and generally follows a similar path to the Amazon.
Bibliography:
Amazon River 10 February 2013 , Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River>

Black Forest

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Black Forest

The forest isn’t black… It’s green!

  • The Black Forest is a forest of many trees on a mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, in South East Germany.
  • The Black Forest is situated on a layer of sandstone and contains mainly pine and fir trees.
  • The Black Forest is known as Schwarzwald in German, and was dubbed by the Romans as the “Black Forest”, due to its very dense growth of trees which makes it very dark in the forest.
  • The highest mountain in the Black Forest is Feldberg, 1, 493 meters (4,898 feet).
  • The Black Forest is the home of the giant earthworm, which hasn’t be discovered in any other region.

 Schwarzwald, Germany, Black Forest, Fir, Pine, Lanscape, View, Flickr, Ten Random Fact, Gerrit van Aaken

Black Forest
Image courtesy of Gerrit van Aaken/Flickr
  • Since the early 18th century, cuckoo clocks have been, and still are, a popular souvenir of the Black Forest.
  • In medieval times the Black Forest contained significant mines, some of which have been re-opened for public viewing.
  • The Black Forest is the home of many rivers including the Danube.
  • The Black Forest measures 150 km (93 miles) in length.
  • A cherry liquor from the Black Forest region was originally one of the significant ingredients in the world famous Black Forest cake, hence the name Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte – ‘Black Forest cherry torte’.
Bibliography:
Black Forest 26 January 2013, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Forest>

Asteroid

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Asteroid

Zooms along the galaxy…

  • Asteroids are gathered rock and metal that orbits around the sun.
  • Asteroids can range from 10 meters (33 miles) to 1000 kilometres in length.
  • Asteroids that have the length 100 meters (328 feet) have a rotation of over 2.2 hours.
  • Newly discovered asteroids are named by the year, the semi-month and the sequence of the semi-month it was discovered.
  • The first asteroid to be discovered was ‘Cerus’ in 1801.
 Asteroid, Ida, Dactyl, Moon, Satelite, NSSDC Nasa, Galileos, 28 August 1993Ida
Photo courtesy of NASA – NSSDC (Broken Link)
  • Asteroids are formed by gravity pulling rocks and metal towards it and are mostly an irregular shape.
  • The asteroid ‘951 Gaspin’ was the first asteroid to have a close up picture of it taken.
  • Asteroids were originally thought to be stars, until space exploration was issued.
  • In, 1993 the asteroid Ida, 31 kilometres (19 miles) in width, was the first asteroid discovered to have its own moon, about two kilometres (one mile wide), and was named Dactyl.
  • All the known asteroids put together aren’t heavy enough to way the same as earth’s moon.
Bibliography:
Asteroid 7 January 2013, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid>

Geocaching

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Geocaching

Geocaching… a worldwide treasure hunt.

  • Geocaching is when you navigate to a particular location using a GPS to find a box or container called a geocache, hidden at a particular set of coordinates.
  • Geocaches are found all over the world and are generally placed in interesting locations by people who love to geocache.
  • The game of geocaching is free to play and the basic rules of geocaching are:  if you take something out of a geocache, put something in; sign the logbook of the geocache; and log your caching experience at the official Geocaching website.
  • The word ‘geocache’ comes from the prefix ‘geo-‘, meaning Earth, and the french word ‘cache’ meaning hidden location and was first used by Matt Stum on 30th May 2000.
  • The sport of geocaching was created by Dave Ulmer on May the 3rd, 2000 due to new GPS technology that had become available the day before.

Geocache, Geocaching, Lunchbox, Container, camo, BikeNFind's Sea Turtle, Travel Bug, Note, Log Book, Dice, Pencil Sharpener, Tailand, Asia, Phuket Town Park, Traditional, GC227BB, Ten Random Facts

  • There are over a dozen categories of geocaches including Traditional Caches, Multi-Caches, Mystery Caches, Letterbox Hybrids, Wherigo™ Caches, Event Caches, Mega-Event Caches, CITO Event Caches and EarthCaches™.
  • There are approximately 2 million current caches worldwide and over 5 million geocachers.
  • The sizes of geocache containers range from as little as 5ml to more than 20 litres and can take the shape of a lunch box container to a fake rock to a teeny tiny box.  They contain a logbook or log sheet, and sometimes small swaps, like coins, toys and stickers.
  • Non-collectible items can be found in geocaches. These are called travel bugs and geocoins and are trackable via the geoacaching website, and are moved from cache to cache by geocachers.
  • Jeremy Irish, an enthusiastic cacher, created the geocaching.com site which became the official website for geocaching on September the 2nd, 2000.
Bibliography:
Geocaching 101 2013, Geocaching, <http://www.geocaching.com/>
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