A compass needle points north. Almost everyone knows this and almost nobody knows what it means.
It does not point at the North Pole. The geographic North Pole is a…
Children ask why the sea is salty, and the standard answer — rivers carry salt into it and evaporation leaves the salt behind — is correct as far as it…
The Dead Sea Is Not a Sea, and Its Water Is So Dense With Salt That a Human Body Cannot Sink Into It
The Dead Sea produces one of the most recognisable travel photographs there is: a person lying on their back on the surface of the water, reading a newspaper, entirely unsupported.…
Some questions look simple and turn out to have no answer. How long is the coastline of Britain is one of them, and the discovery of why is one of…
Picture a world map. Almost everyone picturing one is imagining the same thing: a rectangle, with a large Greenland floating at the top, Canada and Russia spread enormously across the…
Source: Wikipedia
Look at a map of the Amazon and something is missing, though it takes a moment to notice. The river runs roughly 4,000 miles from the Andes to the…