Highest unclimbed mountain
It is illegal to climb Gangkhar Puensum in Bhutan, so no-one has ever reached the top. It is the highest unclimbed mountain in the world.
Category: Earth science
January weather
According to Las Cabañuelas lore, you can predict the weather for the whole year based on the weather of each day in January.
The shadow of the volcano
What do the bicycle, Marmite, Mormonism, and Frankenstein have in common? A volcano in Indonesia.
Darwin crosses a line
On 17 February 1832 – at the bidding of Neptune, god of the sea – Charles Darwin was blindfolded, his face covered in paint and pitch, and he was dunked into a water bath. He had crossed the line for the first time.
Secret volcano
In 1943 a new volcano arose in Hokkaido. The Japanese government managed to keep it a secret for several years.
Singing sand dunes
In a few places around the world sand dunes make a sound like a sad tuba when you walk on them.
Swimming across North America
It’s theoretically possible to swim across North America from the Pacific to the Atlantic, thanks to a strange creek in north-west Wyoming.
Light of the rocks
Radiocarbon dating only works on organic material, so how do you accurately measure the last time rocks and sediment saw sunlight? Luminescence dating.
Reversing river
Every six months the Tonlé Sap River reverses direction.
Natural nuclear power
Enrico Fermi switched on the first human-made nuclear reactor in 1942, but the first natural nuclear reactor on Earth occurred 1.7 billion years earlier.
Oldest Earth rock
The oldest Earth rock was not found on the Earth.
Da Vinci and Machiavelli steal a river
Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli once teamed up to steal the Arno river.
Punch a hole in the sky
Aircraft can punch cloud holes that are much larger than the plane itself.
Dam the Mediterranean
In 1929 Bavarian architect Herman Sörgel proposed building a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar and shrinking the Mediterranean.
Cities at the bottom of the sea
423,000 people live in Flevoland, a province of the Netherlands. Before 1957, the entire area did not exist.
The Amazon, reversed
The rise of the Andes reversed the direction of the Amazon River’s flow from the Pacific to the Atlantic.