Near the village of Katskhi in the Imereti region of western Georgia, there is a natural monolith of rock about 40 meters (131 feet) high known as the Katskhi Pillar. The first mention of it in historical records appears in the 18th-century work “Description of the Kingdom of Georgia” by the cartographer, historian, and geographer […]
Geography
Just as all phenomena exist in time and thus have a history, they also exist in space and have a geography (United States National Research Council, 1997)
The spectacular Northeast Greenland National Park covers almost half of the island and is larger than 165 countries
Established in 1974, it’s a vast protected area located in the northeast of the island, spanning approximately 972,000 square kilometers—about the size of France and Spain combined—making it the world’s largest national park. It occupies nearly half of the island, which has a total area of 2,166,086 square kilometers, surpassing the size of 165 countries […]
Cosmas Indicopleustes, a Greek traveler and geographer, is the sole known medieval author who believed that the Earth was flat
Syrian Greek merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes, born in the 6th century, penned a controversial work ‘Christian Topography’. He rejected the Greek concept of a spherical earth and provided firsthand descriptions from his travels, including maritime trade and Arabian flora and fauna, influencing Western depictions of the region.
The largest cave in the world is so high that it could house 40-story skyscrapers
In the year 1991, a man named Hồ Khanh discovered a cavity in the Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng park on the coast of Vietnam, about 500 kilometers south of the capital Hanoi. As he later recounted, he felt a gust of wind and heard the running of a river inside. The whole park contains numerous caves […]
Why are there firefighters in Antarctica? Fire services at the South Pole
In 1948 an accidental fire destroyed the facilities of Station D, the scientific base that Great Britain had built in Hope Bay, the eastern end of the Trinidad Peninsula. The thing seems to be nothing special except for one detail: this place is located in Antarctica and the devastating effect of the fire not only […]
The mysterious seismic pulse that repeats every 26 seconds, coming from the Gulf of Guinea
Seismic detectors around the world have been capturing a curious and strange phenomenon for decades. Every 26 seconds the earth emits a pulse, a small microseism barely perceptible, that nobody knows why it happens or what causes it. Until recently, no one knew where it came from either. The first to document the phenomenon was […]
The world’s largest globes
A globe is a three-dimensional scale model of planet Earth represented on a sphere where, sometimes, the topography of the surface is shown (obviously exaggerated because, depending on the scale, it would be difficult to see). The circumference of the planet is approximately 40 million meters. The oldest of those that remain is the Erdapfel […]
More than 200 people live in Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, the remotest town in the world, where outsiders are forbidden to settle
Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, 1350 miles from any other inhabited place, is home to 246 people residing in Tristan da Cunha Island. The island, known for its isolation, lacks common diseases, has a communal land system, and is accessed by a monthly supply boat from Cape Town.
Welcome Stranger, the largest gold nugget ever found
Mainly thanks to the cinema we identify the Gold Rush with the one that broke out in 1848 in California and that would last almost a century, bringing together thousands of miners and fortune seekers in a migratory and colonizing phenomenon that, however, was not unique. Around the same time, other countries such as Australia, […]
The spectacular coloured mountains of China and Peru
There are times when Nature seems capricious and turns something that should fall into the category of normal into a visual spectacle that, in the end, serves to draw attention to it and, paradoxically, to protect it. It happens with some of those living beings that we can consider rare and also happens in certain […]