20 Things About Stuff - your
kids might not know
20 THINGS THEY SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT PLANET EARTH
-
The earth travels through space at 490,000 miles an hour or 136 miles per second.
-
It takes the earth 225 million years to travel a full circle of the Milky Way galaxy.
-
If the meteor that smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years had not happened, the human race would not exist.
-
There have been 5 mass extinctions since life evolved on planet earth.
-
99 percent of every species that has ever lived on earth are extinct.
-
Earth should actually be called Ocean or Water as dry land only comprises 29% of the earth surface.
-
Prior to 542 Million years ago, all life on earth consisted of microbes in the oceans.
-
The age of our earth is 4.5 Billion years plus or minus 0.5 Billion.
-
Modern Homo Sapiens have been in existence for less than 100,000 years.
-
The earth has 12 tectonic plates. Mars, Venus and Mercury have none.
-
The greatest proliferation of complex life on earth was the Cambrian Explosion 542 million years ago.
-
Earth is the only planet in the solar system with one moon.
-
The earth is not exactly round. It is wider at the equator by 26 miles.
-
The earth spins at 1,000 miles per hour at the equator.
-
The deepest ocean on earth is the Pacific Ocean, 36,200 feet at the Mariana Trench.
-
The tallest land based mountain on earth is Mount Everest at 20,029 feet.
-
The tallest actual mountain on earth is Mauna Kea in Hawaii at 33,465 feet from ocean bottom to peak. But this is puny compared to Olympus Mons on Mars, a whopping 65,000 feet high.
-
The combined mass of all the termites on earth is larger than the mass of earth’s current 7 billion humans.
-
70,000 years ago after the Indonesia super volcano erupted, the human population nearly went extinct after being reduced to 10,000 -30,000 people.
-
There is evidence beginning to accumulate the earth is entering a new age called Anthropocene, being created by the influence of human activity on the planet.
