Today is Earth Day, an initiative started in 1970 by a Wisconsin senator. He already realized that taking care of the environment had to be high on the agenda. Not without results. Not only is it a day when we still pay extra attention to our planet every year, it has, among other things, ensured that the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act became a reality. Do you want to know why our earth is so special? These are 15 remarkable facts about our planet.
Blue planet
1. Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus… Earth is the only planet in our solar system not named after a Greek or Roman God.
2. The Earth’s rotation (its rotational speed) is getting slower and slower. It is only slowing down by 17 milliseconds per hundred years, which means that we will only have an extra hour in the day in 140 million years, but still, we are apparently slowing down.
3. Earth is also called the blue planet. That’s because we have a lot of water on Earth. You wouldn’t say that on the large built-up mainland, but 70 percent of the globe is covered with water. 3 percent of that water is fresh, 97 percent is salt. 2 percent of that fresh water is frozen within ice floes and glaciers.
First photo from space
4. In terms of material, the planet consists of 32.1 percent iron, 30.1 percent oxygen, 15.1 percent silicon and 13.9 percent magnesium. The core of the earth in particular contains a lot of iron.
5. Asia covers 30 percent of the entire Earth. This while on average many more people live: 60 percent of the world’s population lives in Asia.
6. The first photo of Earth from space was taken in 1946. A weather satellite took the photo. The better, “first” image of Earth was probably taken by NASA’s ATS-III satellite in 1967, because it was in color and showed the entire Earth.
Global warming
7. The diameter of the earth is 12,713 kilometers, but we have never been able to drill deeper than 12 kilometers.
8. Global warming is most noticeable in the ocean. As we wrote recently, a lot of coral and marine life is suffering from climate change. We also see some of it on the mainland, but the sea is currently suffering the most from it (indirectly again with humans).
10. Every winter 1 trillion trillion snowflakes fall from the sky ((1,000,000,000. 000. 000.000. 000.000 pieces no less).
99% extinct
11. We travel around the sun at 107,182 kilometers per hour. In addition, we also beat around the bush. And somewhere that is literally and figuratively, when we look at global warming and how long it takes for some companies to do something about it.
12. Earth collects between 100 and 300 tons of cosmic dust every day. This comes from asteroids, for example. They are actually a kind of micrometeorites (which can also go tens of thousands of kilometers per hour).
13. The moon rotates just as fast as the earth, so we always see the same side of the moon. It is the natural satellite of the earth that regulates ebb and flow, among other things.
14. 99 percent of all animal species we’ve ever known on Earth are now extinct.
15. The Earth’s core is between 5400 and 600 degrees Celsius.
Take action yourself on Earth Day
Do you want to take action yourself, this Earth Day? That can be done very easily. Grab a garbage bag and go for a walk on the beach for plastic and other garbage that doesn’t belong there. Plant a tree or flowers to make insects happy. Buy one bag and make sure you always have it with you to do your shopping, to challenge yourself to never use a plastic bag.
Eat less meat and fish, buy packaging-free products more often and use the bicycle more often instead of the car. If you also regularly go to the market and work paperless, you will already help the earth a lot (and you will probably notice: yourself eventually too). Happy Earth Day!
Laura Jenny
When she’s not tapping, she’s traveling around the wonderful world of entertainment or some cool place in the real world. Mario is the man of her life,…
