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Okay, I’m gonna make a confession here, and I don’t want you to give me too much of a hard time for it.
I love geography and I love studying maps!
There, I said it. I know, I know…all that comes to mind is NERD ALERT.
But I guess I’m not alone, because these folks seem to be with me!
Let’s have some fun with geography with AskReddit users!
1. Big countries.
“Australia is wider than the moon.
Also, Russia has more surface area than Pluto!”
2. Wow.
“Despite Canada being America’s “neighbor to the north”, the majority of Canadians live south of Seattle.”
3. Center of the world.
“When I worked for FedEx back in the 90’s one of the reasons why they chose Anchorage as a global hub (apart from the fact that aircraft use less fuel due to it being cooler) was that it is one of the only places in the world that is within 10 hours of the three biggest global markets; North America, Europe and Asia!
Who would have thought that a place considered in the middle of nowhere is actually the centre of the world.”
4. Heading south.
“If you took a boat out of Reykjavík and sailed directly south, the first land mass you’d hit would be Antarctica.”
5. A whole lot of water.
“Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined.
The state of Maryland, by contrast, has no natural lakes.”
6. This is cool.
“Depending on where you are, you might have recently noticed a lot of dust from Africa coating your town.
But dust from the Sahara regularly makes it’s way to the Amazon. In fact, without that dust, the Amazon might not even exist. The soil there is pretty nutrient poor, and that dust acts as a form of fertiliser.
Two massive but opposing geological features – one full of life, the other very sparse – yet very strongly connected.”
7. HUGE.
“Texas is large enough that it could fit Copenhagen, Brussels, Zagreb, and Warsaw with their real life distances from each other inside the state lines.
The Great Lakes contain enough fresh water to flood an area the size of Great Britain in over 100 meters of water.”
8. It’s sinking.
“The Dead Sea is currently 429 meters below sea level (and sinking about 1 meter a year).
I did some work in Jordan, and that caused some GPS recievers to mess up, as they thought the negative height was an error.”
9. Out there all alone.
“Perth, Australia is the most isolated metropolis in the world.”
10. That’s wild.
“There are 14 mountains over 8,000 meters tall.
All of them are in Asia.”
11. Do you feel that?
“The Australian tectonic plate is drifting north at a rapid rate relative to other plates.
The whole continent is moving north and slightly clockwise at around 2.7 inches a year, which is fast enough that GPS systems have had to compensate for it to stay accurate.
In a few hundred million years, Australia will probably collide with Asia, creating a mountain range even taller than the Himalayas when it does.”
12. I did not know that!
“Palm trees grow in Ireland, at 53 degrees north.
In Canada at 55 degrees north, there are polar bears.”
13. That is fascinating.
“The Appalachian mountain range formed before the North American continent broke away from Europe, so there’s a little chunk of the Appalachians in France.”
Do you have any cool geography facts up your sleeve?
If the answer is YES, please share them with us in the comments.
We’d really appreciate it!
