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Earth

What’s the Least Inhabited Place on Earth?

June 23, 2009

A new discovery reveals the least inhabited place on Earth.

The seafloor sediments in the middle of the South Pacific have fewer living cells than anywhere else measured, a new study found.

Oceanographer Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island and colleagues took a boat out to the middle of the ocean and collected cores, or cylindrical samples of sediment, from the bottom of the sea about 2.5 to 3.7 miles (4 to 6 km) deep.

They found about 1,000 living cells in each cubic centimeter of sediment — a tally that is roughly 1,000 times less than in other seafloor sediments.

“People were previously just taking cores in parts of the ocean fairly close to shore and assuming their results were typical of the ocean as a whole,” D’Hondt told LiveScience.

[From Fox News]

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The 2008 “Leap Second” on New Years

December 28, 2008

Wait a second. The start of next year will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone’s control. Time will stand still for one second on New Year’s Eve, as we ring in the New Year on that Wednesday night. As a result, you’ll have an extra second to celebrate because a “Leap Second” will be added to 2008 to let a lagging Earth catch up to super-accurate clocks.

By international agreement, the world’s timekeepers, in order to keep their official atomic clocks in step with the world’s irregular but gradually slowing rotation, have decreed that a Leap Second be inserted between 2008 and 2009.

[From SPACE.com]

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A Plasma Cloak Surrounds the Earth

A detailed analysis of the measurements of five different satellites has revealed the existence of warm cloak of plasma around Earth.
This newfound feature is part of the magnetosphere, a shield of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surround and protect Earth from the onslaught of the solar wind.
The northern and southern polar lights – [...]

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Sun Flares

“The sun’s activity ebbs and flows on a roughly 11-year cycle. It can range from very quiet to violent space storms that knock out power grids on Earth and disrupt radio and satellite communications. The last peak was in 2000, and scientists have in recent months figured the low point was occurring. Fresh sunspots during [...]

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Sun Energy

“How much energy comes to earth from the sun? Yearly, the earth receives 6,000 times more sunlight energy than humans consume.”
[link]

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Oxygen

“In Earth’s crust, oxygen is more abundant than any other element. Oxygen was discovered in 1774 by the British chemist Joseph Priestly and, independently, by the Swedish Chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele; it was shown to be and elemental gas by the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier in his classic experiments on combustion. The element’’s name [...]

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International Space Station

“The space station is located in orbit around the Earth at an altitude of approximately 360 km (220 miles), a type of orbit usually termed low Earth orbit (The actual height varies over time by several kilometres due to atmospheric drag and reboosts [3]). It orbits Earth in a period of about 92 minutes; by [...]

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The Largest US Earthquake

“On March 28, 1964 in Prince William Sound, Alaska, the largest earthquake to hit the United States occurred with a magnitude of 9.2.”
[firstscience.com]

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