I’m with Her: Celebrating Mother Earth

Here at Kraken, we’re all about the fun, and sometimes obscure, facts about the living, breathing world around us. In honor of Earth Day and the marches supporting science today, we thought we’d dive back into blogging with some facts about the amazing world around us.

Let’s start off with a ocean-related fact since we are an ocean-themed blog and all…

1. Fossil evidence suggests that fish have been on Earth for about 530 million years.
2. The Antarctic ice cap contains about 7.2 million cubic miles (30 million cubic kilometers) of ice. If melted, it would raise sea level by 200 feet (60 meters)!
3. If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you about 42 minutes to get to the other side.
4. Coral reefs support the most species per unit area of any of the planet’s ecosystems,

   

   Image: NASA

   rivaling even rain forests! And while they are made up of individual tiny coral polyps, together coral reefs are the largest living structures on Earth — a community of connected organisms. In fact, the Great Barrier Reef is even visible from space!

5. There are about 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on Earth. And, for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars in the universe.
6. Retreating glaciers are currently contributing to rising sea levels. It turns out that one particular glacier range is contributing a whopping 10 percent of all the meltwater in the world. That honor belongs to the Canadian Arctic, which lost a volume equivalent to 75 percent of Lake Erie between 2004 and 2009.
7. Some 300 million years ago, there was just one continent, a massive supercontinent called Pangea, and thus there was just one giant sea, called Panthalassa.
8. The Amazon rainforest produces approximately 20% of the Earth’s oxygen!
9. The earth’s deepest known point equals to 24.5 Empire State Buildings end to end.
10. There are more living organisms in a teaspoonful of soil than there are people on earth.
11. Every day our planet is sprinkled with fairy dust! On a daily basis, about 100 tons of interplanetary dust drifts down to the Earth’s surface.

    

    Image: NASA

12. The Pacific Ocean is by far Earth’s largest ocean basin, covering an area of about 59 million square miles (155 million square kilometers) and containing more than half of the free water on Earth. It’s so big that all of the world’s continents could fit into the Pacific basin!
13. NASA is currently tracking more than 500,000 pieces of “space junk” orbiting the earth, much of which is man-made.
14. The driest spot on Earth is the Atacama Desert of Chile and Peru. In the center of this desert, there are places where rain has never been recorded!
15. A reservoir of water 3 times the volume of all the oceans is located deep beneath the Earth’s surface.

Lastly, consider what’s changed since the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970: