20 THINGS THEY SHOULD KNOW

ABOUT PLANET EARTH

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1. The earth travels through space at 490,000 miles an hour or 136 miles per second.

2. It takes the earth 225 million years to travel a full circle of the Milky Way galaxy.

3. If the meteor that smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years had not happened, the human race would not exist.

4. There have been 5 mass extinctions since life evolved on planet earth.

5. 99 percent of every species that has ever lived on earth are extinct.

6. Earth should actually be called Ocean or Water as dry land only comprises 29% of the earth surface.

7. Prior to 542 Million years ago, all life on earth consisted of microbes in the oceans.

8. The age of our earth is 4.5 Billion years plus or minus 0.5 Billion.

9. Modern Homo Sapiens have been in existence for less than 100,000 years.

10. The earth has 12 tectonic plates. Mars, Venus and Mercury have none.

11. The greatest proliferation of complex life on earth was the Cambrian Explosion 542 million years ago.

12. Earth is the only planet in the solar system with one moon.

13. The earth is not exactly round. It is wider at the equator by 26 miles.

14. The earth spins at 1,000 miles per hour at the equator.

15. The deepest ocean on earth is the Pacific Ocean, 36,200 feet at the Mariana Trench.

16. The tallest land based mountain on earth is Mount Everest at 20,029 feet.

17. 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.

18. The combined mass of all the termites on earth is larger than the mass of earth’s current 7 billion humans.

19. 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.

20. 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.