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289 facts in Nature. Click any fact to see its full page.
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✨ Tester 1
Earth's atmosphere weighs approximately 5.5 quadrillion tons.
Mammatus clouds, which look like pouches hanging from the sky, often form on the underside of severe thunderstorm anvils.
The Coriolis effect causes hurricanes to spin counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
Virga is rain that evaporates before reaching the ground, creating ghostly streaks visible beneath clouds.
The South Pole receives about the same amount of sunlight as the Sahara Desert during its summer but remains frozen because of the angle.
St. Elmo's fire is a weather phenomenon where a luminous plasma appears on pointed objects during thunderstorms.
A derecho is a widespread, long-lived windstorm associated with a band of rapidly moving showers and thunderstorms.
Ball lightning appears as a glowing sphere during thunderstorms and can pass through solid objects before dissipating.
El Nino and La Nina are climate patterns caused by changes in Pacific Ocean temperatures that affect weather worldwide.
The driest place on Earth, the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica, has not seen rain for approximately 2 million years.
Microbursts are sudden downdrafts of air that can produce winds exceeding 100 miles per hour and last only a few minutes.
The jet stream is a band of fast-moving air at high altitudes that can reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour.
Waterspouts are tornadoes that form over water and can lift fish and frogs into the air, causing them to rain down on land.
The eye of a hurricane is eerily calm, with clear skies and light winds, surrounded by the most violent part of the storm.
Dust from the Sahara Desert regularly crosses the Atlantic Ocean and fertilizes the Amazon Rainforest.
Hailstones can reach the size of softballs and fall at speeds over 100 miles per hour.
Fog is essentially a cloud that touches the ground.
The highest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 134 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley, California, in 1913.
Snowflakes always have six sides because of the hexagonal structure of ice crystals.
A single thunderstorm can release more energy than an atomic bomb.
Pitch Lake in Trinidad is the largest natural deposit of asphalt in the world and has been a source of road-building material for centuries.
Blood Falls in Antarctica flows a deep red color from iron-rich saltwater that has been trapped beneath a glacier for 2 million years.
Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring gets its vivid colors from heat-loving microorganisms called thermophiles.
The Amazon River carries more water than the Nile, Yangtze, and Mississippi rivers combined.
Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges that occur above thunderstorms, appearing as brief flashes of red light.
The Zhangye Danxia landform in China features mountains with dramatic stripes of red, orange, and yellow caused by mineral deposits.
Frost flowers are thin ice crystals that form on thin sea ice and can cover large areas in delicate white formations.
Fire whirls, or fire tornadoes, form when intense heat creates a rotating column of air that picks up burning debris.
The Waitomo Glowworm Caves in New Zealand are illuminated by thousands of bioluminescent glowworms.
Snow rollers are rare cylindrical snowballs formed naturally by wind blowing snow across flat terrain.
The Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland consists of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns formed by ancient volcanic activity.
Morning glory clouds are rare tube-shaped clouds that can stretch up to 600 miles and roll across the sky.
The Wave, a sandstone rock formation in Arizona, displays layers of geological history dating back 190 million years.
The pink sand beaches of the Bahamas get their color from tiny red organisms called foraminifera.
Sailing stones in Death Valley appear to move across the desert floor on their own, propelled by thin sheets of ice.
The Eye of the Sahara, also known as the Richat Structure, is a 30-mile-wide geological formation visible from space.
Volcanic glass, known as obsidian, can have an edge sharper than a surgical scalpel at the molecular level.
The Spotted Lake in British Columbia evaporates in summer to reveal colorful mineral pools.
Bioluminescent bays glow bright blue at night when microorganisms called dinoflagellates are disturbed by movement.
The Dragon Blood Tree of Socotra Island produces red sap and looks like it belongs on an alien planet.
The Catatumbo Lightning in Venezuela produces lightning nearly 300 nights per year at the mouth of the Catatumbo River.
Lenticular clouds form over mountains and look so much like flying saucers that they are often mistaken for UFOs.
The Great Basin bristlecone pine is one of the oldest known non-clonal organisms, with some individuals exceeding 5,000 years in age.
Frozen methane bubbles trapped under Abraham Lake in Canada create an otherworldly landscape.
Lake Hillier in Australia is bright pink, and scientists believe the color comes from a combination of algae and bacteria.
The Atacama Desert in Chile has regions that have not received any recorded rainfall in over 500 years.
Certain species of bamboo can grow over 3 feet in a single day under ideal conditions.
The world's largest cave, Hang Son Doong in Vietnam, is so large it has its own weather system.
Some caves contain formations called soda straws — hollow stalactites that form one drop of water at a time.
The aurora borealis and aurora australis occur simultaneously at both poles of the Earth.