It’s an Australian tradition to eat sausages at polling places on election day called Democracy Sausages. For many communities, this is the biggest fundraising event of the year.
100 Mind-Blowing Communities Facts
Antarctica is home to the largest ice sheet on Earth. More than six times as large as Greenland, Antarctica is the southernmost continent and is the coldest and windiest place on Earth – with temperatures that can drop as low as -89.2°C and winds that can exceed 320 km per hour. Antarctica is home to the largest ice sheet on Earth, containing a staggering 30 million cubic kilometres of ice. This represents an incredible 70% of Earth’s freshwater and 90% of its ice. As a result, changes to the Antarctic ice sheet can have significant implications for global sea levels and ocean currents. Monitoring the Antarctic ice sheet is therefore of paramount importance and satellite data plays a crucial role in this effort. Data from satellites such as CryoSat, ESA’s ice mission, allow scientists to track changes in the thickness and movement of the ice sheet over time, providing insights into how it is responding to a changing climate. ESA has recently teamed up with NASA and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to carry out an ambitious campaign in Antarctica which involved taking simultaneous measurements of sea ice from ESA’s CryoSat and NASA’s ICESat-2 satellites. This research is essential for informing policy decisions on issues such as climate change and sea level rise, and for developing strategies to mitigate their impact on coastal communities around the world.
In 1962, a laughter epidemic broke out in Tanzania. The outbreak began in a girls’ school and spread to other communities, ultimately affecting 1,000 people and causing the temporary closure of 14 schools.
As many as 80% of Hong Kong’s toilets are flushed with seawater. In the 1950s, Hong Kong found the perfect solution to an overall lack of freshwater and installed a separate water distribution and waste-water management system. This system has since been installed in many coastal communities such as the Marshall Islands. Not only does it save precious drinking water, but it’s also even been found to be better for marine ecosystems!
Three towns in Scotland, Australia, and the US are united by how boring they are. The towns themselves probably aren’t that boring, really, but their names sure are. Dull, Scotland; Boring, Oregon; and Bland, Australia, teamed up back in 2014 to get a much-needed tourism boost by creating the tongue-in-cheek League of Extraordinary Communities. It wasn’t long before the three towns’ union gained a new nickname – the Trinity of Tedium.
Daylight saving time ended on a national level after the war, but individual states and municipalities kept it going until World War II. At the end of World War I, the entire nation went on what was effectively a year-round daylight saving time. After World War II, the entire nation was again picking and choosing daylight saving time. It’s been reported that in Iowa, back in 1964, there were 23 different combinations of dates that communities turned on and off daylight saving time. In 1966, the government officially mandated a standardised daylight saving time for the entire United States, though individual states could opt out. Until 2007, daylight saving time ended in October. It’s been reported that the candy industry lobbied to wait until after Halloween to change the clocks back an hour.