15 Facts About Earth Sound Too Bizarre to Be True

Okay, it's not actually a sphere, and it wasn't always blue. Inside, it's solid gold, but its surface is covered in viruses. Sound weird? I'm actually talking about the place you call home. No, not your apartment. Planet Earth, it turns out, is hiding a lot of seriously freaky but fascinating things about itself. Days are becoming longer. Because of the effect the our planet is gradually rotating slower and slower. And I mean very gradually, at around 17 milliseconds every 100 years. So, it'll take 140 million years before the world can add a single extra hour to its day. But that also means that when the dinosaurs existed, there were only 23 hours in a day. We live next to a megamoon. At around a quarter of the size of Earth, the moon is pretty enormous relative to other satellites out there. There's nothing quite like this situation anywhere else in the universe. Pluto has a moon that's almost half as big as itself, but it's more like a twin than a satellite. There are more than 150 moons in our solar system, and Earth's is the 5th largest out of the whole lot. Birds can create clouds. When looking for somewhere to roost, hundreds and even thousands of starlings sometimes form into huge flocks that resemble living clouds. The largest ever cloud, or murmuration, contained around 6 million birds. Incredibly, when flying like this, the starlings never bump into each other, because each bird focuses on the movement of 6 or 7 other nearby birds. But exactly how they synchronize everything so well still has scientists scratching their heads. Earth is not quite round. Isaac Newton first suggested that Earth was not a perfect sphere in 1687. Like many of his other ideas, it turned out to be true. Basically, we live on a squashed soccer ball. The world is flatter at the top and bottom and bulges out a little in the middle, like me. But it only bulges by about 13 miles, so its belly is really tiny considering the Earth's size. This unusual shape is caused by the way the Earth spins. Speaking of which… We're all turning at different speeds. Imagine a basketball spinning on someone's finger. A point near the middle of the ball takes longer to spin back to where it started than the spot where your finger is. Earth spins in much the same way. People in the center of Africa are turning at 1,000 mph as the planet rotates, while anyone at the South Pole doesn't really move at all, other than rotating in place. At the same time, we're all moving forward through space equally fast, since the planet is also hurtling around the Sun at 67,000 mph. Antarctica is a desert. Any place that gets very little water each year is considered a desert. The inner regions of Antarctica get just 2 inches of water per year. And because it's roughly as big as the USA and Mexico combined, Antarctica is actually the largest desert in the world. Gravity is not the same everywhere. The rocks, metals, and other minerals and things that make up the planet are packed into the ground more tightly in certain places than in others. This has surprising consequences. Gravity varies slightly depending on where you are. You weigh ½ of 1% less standing at the equator than you do at the poles. In most cases, that's a difference of less than 1 pound. How high up you are also has an effect. So, if you were at the top of Mount Everest, you'd also weigh slightly less. Don't look down! Earth could've been purple before it turned blue and green. One scientist has a theory that a substance existed in ancient microbes before chlorophyll evolved on Earth. The substance reflected sunlight as red and violet colors, which combined to make purple. If true, the young Earth may have been teeming with strange purple colored critters before all the green stuff appeared. Earth's toughest living thing is so small you can't see it. Water bears, also known as moss piglets, are cute little creatures with legs and squashed-up heads that are less than a hundredth of an inch in length. Despite their microscopic stature, they can basically survive anywhere. They prefer bits of wet moss or the bottom of a lake, but they won't complain if you put them somewhere really uncomfortable. They can endure extreme cold and incredible heat and survive both huge pressure and high radiation. Some of the little bears once even managed to survive unprotected in outer space for 10 days without a problem. They handle all these things by rolling up into a ball and hibernating, which reduces their need for oxygen and food. Earth is hotter when further away from the Sun. In July, when we're about 94 million miles from the Sun, the world is about 36 degrees warmer overall than in January, when we're 3 million miles closer. This is because there's more dry land in the northern half of the planet than in the southern half, and land tends to heat up more than water. During the northern summer in July, more land is heated up than in January, so the planet gets a little warmer at this time, even though we're further from our source of heat. We can't dig up most of Earth's gold. 99% of it ended up in the center of the planet several billion years ago, attracted by the iron in Earth's core. We're talking about 1.6 quadrillion tons of gold here. That's enough to coat the entire planet's surface in one and a half feet of the stuff. And if all those meteorites hadn't later smashed into the ground, bringing extra amounts of gold, it would be even more rare. You could fall right through the Earth. If someone could dig a tunnel straight into the center of the planet and out the opposite side, and you were adventurous enough to jump into it, it would take you 42 straight minutes to fall to the other end. You'd speed up as you fell, reaching a maximum speed by the time you reach Earth's core. After the halfway point, you would then fall upwards, getting slower and slower. By the time you reached the opposite surface, your speed would be back to zero. Unless you managed to climb out of the hole, you'd immediately start falling again, back down or up to the other side of the planet. This trip would go on forever, all thanks to the weird effects of gravity. Earth's greatest living achievement is a fungus. The largest single living thing in the world turns out to be a mushroom in Oregon. This enormous honey mushroom lives in Malheur National Forest and covers an area of 3.7 square miles. It could be as much as 8,500 years old. You could be forgiven for missing it, though, since most of it's hidden underground. When the roots of individual honey mushrooms meet, they can fuse together to become a single fungus, which explains how this one got so big. If you could gather together all that mushroomy stuff into one big ball, it could weigh as much as 35,000 tons. That's about as much as 200 gray whales. Hope they like mushrooms! The Sun's heat is beneath our feet. Scientists have figured out that Earth's core is actually as hot as the surface of the Sun — around 10,800 degrees. One of the reasons it's so incredibly hot down there is because Earth is still shedding heat from when it was created billions of years ago. Also, when an object as big as Mars slammed into the young Earth, it not only created the Moon, so goes the theory, but melted the surface of the planet, and a lot of that extra heat is probably still stored inside the core. But there's no need to worry. The planet's core is harder for us to access than it is to probe the surface of Pluto. In fact, chances are we may never develop technology that could physically reach the core. You can eat your way to the core of an apple, though. You can find more viruses on Earth than stars in the sky. Earth is home to around a quadrillion quadrillion, or 10 nonillion, separate viruses. That means they outnumber the total number of stars in the entire universe, and there's enough of them to form a line 10 million light-years long. Aside from being so mind-bogglingly numerous, viruses are downright weird things. We can't say they're alive since they don't have cells and don't need food, but they can reproduce and evolve.