Day by day we live our lives, marked by the rotation of our planet giving us our beautiful sunrises and sunsets.
But have you ever wondered about the planet we live on, the Earth?
For all of you wanderers, or all of you who just want to know something new, here’s 15 interesting facts about our brilliant planet.
The planet Earth weighs approximately 5,974,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms (nearly 6 septillion kg), that’s roughly the same amount of weight as 54,807,339,449,541,284,403 (approx 55 quintillion) Blue Whales – the heaviest creature on the Earth itself!
Contrary to popular belief it does not take the Earth 24 hours to complete a single rotation, it actually takes it 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds to complete a rotation and astronomers call this a sidereal day.
A year on Earth is not 365 days as widely thought, but rather 365.2564 days. The extra 0.2564 days is where the extra day that is added onto February every leap year, or every four years, comes from.
Due to the amount of water covering the Earth, it would be one of the brightest planets to look upon from a distance due to the way in which the water would reflect the Sun’s rays.
The Earth consists of 3 different the layers: the Crust, The Mantle and The Core. And each of these three different layers is made up of different elements.
The Mantle is the largest layers of the Earth, approximately 2,970 km thick – this makes up about 84% of the Earth’s total volume.
The Earth’s core consists of two layers, an outer-layer and an inner-layer. Although the specific percentages are unknown, both the outer and inner layers of the Earth’s Core consist of mainly Iron and Nickel.
The outer-layer of the Earth’s core is believed to be liquid, whereas the inner-layer of the Core is believed to be a solid as hot as the Sun!
Due to the unique Nickel-Iron properties of the Earth’s Core, when coupled with the Earth’s rotation, The Earth is surrounded by a powerful magnetic field that protects it from the effects of Solar Wind.
In the past there have been many misconceptions about the Earth, such as when people thought it was the center of the Solar System and that all other planets orbited it! Or when they thought it was flat and that a person could sail off the edge by sailing over the horizon!
The Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down. However it is slowing down so very minimally (approximately 17 milliseconds per hundred years) that it will be about 140 million years before the Earth experiences 25 hour days.
The name Earth comes from a combination of Old English and Germanic and is derived from ‘eor(th)e’ and ‘ertha’ which mean ‘ground’.
Earth is the only planet in our solar system to have water in all three of its forms (Liquid, Solis & Gas).
One third of the Earth’s surface is either partially or totally desert.
The Earth is struck by lightning 100 times per second – that’s 8.6 million times per day!
