All facts — Page 3
The complete ONAURE library, newest first. Every fact has an explanation and a source you can check.
1196 facts
Kiribati is the only country in the world that lies in all four hemispheres.
Its 33 islands and atolls are spread over more than 3 million km² of the Pacific Ocean, on both sides of the equator…
Chile is about 4,300 km long but, on average, only 177 km wide.
Squeezed between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, the country runs from the Atacama Desert, one of the driest in the…
At the Strait of Gibraltar, Europe and Africa are separated by only about 14 km of sea.
The narrowest point lies between the southern tip of Spain near Tarifa and the coast of Morocco. On clear days you…
Finland has about 188,000 lakes.
The figure counts lakes larger than 500 square metres. They were carved by glaciers from the last ice age, which…
The Danube flows through ten countries, more than any other river in the world.
It rises in Germany's Black Forest and runs through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria…
Lake Natron in Tanzania is so alkaline that animals that die there end up looking as if they were turned to stone.
The water can have a pH above 10 and is rich in sodium carbonate, the same salt the Egyptians used for mummification…
In Supai, a village at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, mail is still delivered by mule.
The Havasupai tribe's village has no road: it can only be reached on foot, on horseback or by helicopter. Mule trains…
The summit of Everest is made of limestone containing fossils of sea creatures.
These rocks formed on the floor of a sea about 450 million years ago and contain remains of trilobites and other…
Pando, a grove of aspens in Utah, is a single organism with about 47,000 trunks joined by the same root system.
All the trunks are genetically identical clones that sprouted from one root system. Together they cover about 43…
Welwitschia mirabilis, from the Namib Desert, can live more than a thousand years with just two leaves.
The two leaves never fall off: they keep growing from the base for the plant's whole life and gradually split into…
The Tree of Ténéré, in Niger, was the most isolated tree in the world until it was knocked down by a lorry in 1973.
It was a lone acacia in the middle of the Sahara, about 400 km from any other tree, and served as a landmark for…
The Wollemi pine was known only from fossils until it was found alive in Australia in 1994.
A park ranger found it in a remote gorge near Sydney. Fewer than a hundred adult trees remain in the wild, at a…
The fruits of the sandbox tree, Hura crepitans, explode with a bang and fling their seeds more than 40 metres.
As they dry, the capsules build up tension until they suddenly split with a crack like a gunshot. The seeds shoot out…
The coco de mer, a palm from the Seychelles, produces the largest seed in the plant kingdom, which can weigh more than 15 kilograms.
The Lodoicea maldivica palm grows naturally on just two islands in the Seychelles. The fruit takes six to seven years…
Some ginkgo trees survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and are still alive.
In 1945 about 170 trees less than two kilometres from the blast sprouted again. Among them are several ginkgos, a…
Raindrops are not tear-shaped: the larger ones look like hamburger buns.
Small drops are almost perfect spheres. Larger ones are flattened underneath by air resistance as they fall. Once…
The sting of the gympie-gympie, an Australian stinging tree, can cause pain for weeks or even months.
Its leaves and stems are covered with ultra-fine silica hairs that break off in the skin like needles and inject…
Sheltering from the rain under a manchineel tree can blister your skin.
The manchineel, from the Caribbean and Florida, has a milky sap so irritating that rainwater dripping from its leaves…
In the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, the difference between high and low tide can exceed 15 metres.
These are the highest tides in the world. The bay's shape and size make the water slosh at the same rhythm as the…
Uranus was the first planet discovered with a telescope, in 1781.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are visible to the naked eye and had been known since ancient times. The…
Neptune was discovered in 1846 thanks to mathematical calculations, before anyone saw it through a telescope.
Uranus was not following its predicted orbit exactly, as if something were pulling on it. The Frenchman Urbain Le…
Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, is larger than the planet Mercury.
At 5,268 km across, Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, compared with Mercury's 4,879 km. Even so, it…
Titan, a moon of Saturn, is the only moon in the Solar System with a thick atmosphere.
Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth's, and the pressure at the surface is about one and a half times…
The Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, is the human-made object farthest from Earth.
In 2012 it left the bubble of solar wind surrounding the planets and entered interstellar space. It is more than 24…
