Geography Kenneth C. Davis Don't Know Much About Flashcards
There are still many who do not realize that Columbus never reached the shores of the United States of America. His voyages took him around the Caribbean and to the coast of South America. He went to his deathbed thinking he had arrived at some island outpost of China, his original goal. It seems difficult to concede that somebody has discovered a place where 40 million people already live!
You could take pretty much everything you learned or think you remember about dinosaurs man’s evolution in outer space and throw it out the window. During the past decade alone, most of what we learned and excepted as scientific fact A mere 20 or 30 years ago is now either been radically revised or flatly refused. Such basics as the age of mankind and the make up of the universe have gotten major rewrites because of significant discoveries in recent years.
The earth being tilted at 23 1/2° was first discovered in the year 480 BC.
In the year 760 Arabs adopted Indian numerals and developed algebra and trigonometry. In the year 1000 Vikings colonize Greenland and discovered America establishing a county in Newfoundland.
In the year 1275 Marco Polo arrives in China, enters the service of Kublai Khan. And publishes his experiences in China.
1374, Cannibals would not eat the white men from Europe because they thought they were not ripe. They only ate black humans.
1499 Amerigo Vespucci reaches America.
In 1915 Alfred Wegener wrote a book explaining about continental drift. He was written off by his contemporaries as some kind of a crackpot.
Afterwords, in the 1960s it was confirmed and the world knew it is a fact.
People in the United States do not realize that most of the worlds population lives on the other side of the planet.
There are 78 Asian city’s with populations of more than 1 million people each. 17% of the worlds population is in India. Today at least 100,000 people in Bombay pay rent for the right to sleep on a small stretch of sidewalk, and in Bangladesh the median age is only 16 years old in one of
the most poorest countries in the world.
Around the year 1468 Timbuktu became one of the worlds most lucrative slave selling businesses.
Before the Spanish arrived, Mexico had been the center of a succession of Indian civilizations for over 2500 years.
With guns horses and most devastatingly the smallpox virus, the Spanish quickly dominated Mexico Central America and South America, wiping out as much as 90% of the native population estimated between 1.5 and 3 million people.
Americans would be surprised to learn that virtually the whole continent of South America lies east of Savannah Georgia.
Brazil is larger than the contiguous 48 American states. Angel falls in Venezuela is 13 times larger than Niagara Falls and double the size of the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Rainforest has displaced jungle because it sounds more attractive.
A rainforest typically has a high canopy and very little undergrowth, while a jungle is densely undergrowth.
To the Greeks, the Amazons were race of bright female warriors who cut off one of her breast in order to be able to carry their shields or to draw their bows with greater ease; their name derived from the Greek word for Breastless.
The Amazon contains more water now than the Nile, Yangtze and the Mississippi river combined, nearly 1/5 of the earths running freshwater. At its widest point which is near the ocean. The Amazon is 40 miles wide where it meets the ocean.
Antarctica has an ice sheet that is between 6000 and 14,000 feet thick and contains 90% of the worlds ice.
In 1773 Captain Cook came within 100 miles of the continent of Antarctica but was again forced back by ice and frigid conditions so harsh that his men’s blood froze and nails came loose from the ships.
Explorer Robert Scott didn’t quite make it to the south pole on their disappointed return trip Scott’s party had 2 months of starvation scurvy and frostbite. Scott was the first to die and the three others were killed in a blizzard only 11 miles from the next supply station.
Australia. The British decided they needed a new spot to ship the prison convicts. Australia was then known as New South Wales.
The prisoners continue to come for almost 50 years, more than 160,000 of them at all.
Hawaii is a chain of some 130 volcanic islands and islets stretching over 1500 miles in the North Pacific the state is centered on eight main islands.
The world needed to get on one standard time. In 1883 they did it clearly calling it the standard time. They made time zones zones 15° of longitude apart which is 360° divided by 24 hours equals 15°. Because a starting point was needed Greenwich near London was decided to be the international date line in 1883.
I Lewis and Clark’s incredible journey their helper Indian squall Sacajawea died in 1812 at the age of 23. Lewis and Clark completed this remarkable journey with the loss of only a single man to appendicitis.
In 1876 right after Custer’s last stand, the Indians were put on a reservation which is now the Badlands national Park.
It is some 243,000 acres of ravines and sharp ridges of multicolored shell no good for anything. Nothing will grow there.
It’s 115° in summer and -30 in winter.
Frustrated and starving they’re chief food source the bison had been slaughtered into extinction.
Young Indians began a religious revival called ghost dancing around 1889. It was a reaction against white ways and it called for a return to Indian traditions.
The movement turn bellicose into a dangerous element when the ghost dancers were told that your magic shirts would protect them from federal bullets. Long story short they got massacred.
In 1670 the French explore Robert cavalier de LaSalle dissented from the Ohio River thinking it will flow into the Pacific. He reaches the Mississippi river instead and over the course of two hard years follows it to the sea. Claiming the vast territory of the Mississippi basin for France, he names it Louisiana in honor of the French king. Lasalle’s men mutinied and murdered him.
MN: Just think, it took him two years tracing the Mississippi River from Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico!!
How many oceans are there on earth? There is only one ocean, the great sheet of saltwater that all together covers about 72% of the earth’s surface and surrounds the planets great land masses. But In more familiar terms, the one great ocean is divided into four principal parts, each of them known as an ocean.
How much land on earth is tillable? The answer is only 25%.
Where does all the water go at low tide?
In simple terms, the oceans on the side of the earth facing the moon are pulled toward the moon, causing a bulge or high Tide.
Greenland ice covers 4/5 of the island sometimes at Depths up to a mile. Only 5% of the island is habitable.
Where do your corals. come from?
The coral polyp is a tiny sea creature that lives in a shell in fairly shallow waters that are warm and clear. When the polyp dies, the softer parts of the body are washed away, but the skeleton is left behind. New polyps grow on the shells of the dead ones, eventually forming a great mass of coral. Anatole is a coral reef that forms an almost complete circle around the lagoon.
As a sidenote , The earth gets 70% of its oxygen from the corals. The corals are dying because of global warming. What a mess it will be when the planet runs out of oxygen!
In 1991 the remaining 12 Soviet republics all declare their independence, bringing an end to the USSR.
There are people all over the world at the other end of the spectrum, who are barely subsisting. There is a real difference between rich industrial nations trying to sustain their comfort level and poor nations struggling just to survive.
For families in the poorest countries, the issue is simply to get through the next day. They do not have time to worry about the ozone hole and the end of the rainforest or the fact that the cutting of trees for fuel would hasten the spread of deserts and increasing the likelihood of deadly floods.
This also is a recipe for pollution which also will ruin the planet.
Meteorites strike at tremendous speed’s. They have been clocked at speeds of 90,000 miles per second.
If the earth did not spin, the wind would stay and move in little circles, all moving back towards the equator with equal speed. But the energy of the earths rotation, called Coriolis force, Bends the winds to give them their characteristic patterns.
The Atacama desert in Chile has the distinction of being the driest place on earth. In 1971 received rain for the first time in 400 years.
Dust storms. What caused them? During the good years in the 1920s, farmers expanding their holdings, plowing up large areas of grass land, digging more wells, and allowing their cattle to range over wider areas.
Drawing on so much underground water dried land and accelerated the erosion of some of the worlds richest topsoil. When a major drought struck, the remaining soil was blown away by High winds and massive dust storms.
In a few years time, what has been a thriving agricultural region was a dry windblown desert. Hundreds of thousands of farmers were uprooted in the largest force migration in American history. Families in Kansas Oklahoma Texas Colorado Nebraska and other plain states left behind worthless farmland.
The Ozone is highly toxic. Ozone is the only gas in the atmosphere that can screen out the lethal ultraviolet rays of the sun. If I were not for the Sun screen of Ozone, ultraviolet radiation would kill all terrestrial life.
In other studies I have heard it said that we would need a $16 million spacesuit to just walk outside our house.
Mexico City is the worlds largest city. It has doubled in size since 1970, and by some accounts is expected to almost double again by year 2025. It is a seemingly impossible city, congested by traffic and Street Peddlers.
Mexico City is infamous for air pollution. Poison by the sick, brownish cloud of smog largely created by too many cars burning inexpensive fuel, is notorious and a source of exotic and probably quixotic improvement schemes. Part of Mexico cities problem lies with the fact that is one of the worst places in the world to build a city.
Salo Paulo in Brazil passed the 20 million population mark in 1988. The city now the most important manufacturing base in Latin America grew rich on the coffee industry which provided the capital for the cities massive industrial growth. The promise of jobs in those factories has drawn millions of peasants from the surrounding countryside. An estimate at 10% of the city’s people now live in its slums and squatter settlements, with water pollution and a rapidly increasing infant mortality rate among the major problems. The industrialization has also created an acid rain problem in the city, with acid levels 1000 times that of normal water.
One big problem in the world over is that about 40% of the world’s grain goes just to feed livestock. In the United States that figure is 90%! It takes at least 10 calories of feed to produce 1 calorie of steak an inefficient way to make food.
The proverb about the six blind men trying to describe an elephant by feeling different parts of his body. One felt its tail and thought it was a snake. Another grasped its leg and said it was a tree trunk. They just couldn’t get the whole picture, so they were left to grope around the separate parts and imagine what the rest of the elephant looked like.
The planet mercury. Slightly larger than the earths moon, mercury is too small to have its own atmosphere. Without an atmosphere to trap heat, mercury is very cold, even though it is the planet nearest the sun.
Olympus Mons On the planet mars is an extinct volcano. It is 17 miles high and 370 miles across at its base. This means that this mountain is 89,000 feet high!
It takes light 100,000 years to cross from one side of the Milky way to the other. Light from the Andromeda galaxy takes about 2 million years to reach our galaxy.
A crater in southern Australia measures 100 miles across!
Almost every state in the United States of America is named after an Indian name.
On the water speed is measured in knots. A knot is not a distance but a measure of speed equal to one nautical mile per hour, used for measuring the speed of ships. The term is derived from the old sailors practice throwing a knotted rope over the side of the ship. The number of knots that were fed out in a specific period of time determine the ships speed. The knotted rope was weighed at the end with a piece of wood, which is the source of the term ships log, in which the ship speed, position, and other pertinent information were recorded.
Future notes.
There are currently seven billion (7.8) billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived. This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.Feb 4, 2012
50 percent
As a result, over 50 percent of the world’s coral reefs have died in the last 30 years and up to 90 percent may die within the next century—very few pristine coral reefs still exist. The impact of our changing climate on coral reefs was manifested by the third global bleaching event in 2015/16.
