Earth’s poles are moving. This magnetic reversal of the North and South Pole has happened 171 times in the past 71 million years. We’re overdue a flip. It could come soon, as the North Pole is moving at around 55 kilometres per year, an increase over the 15km per year up until 1990.
100 Mind-Blowing Pole Facts
The oceans contain 200,000 different kinds of viruses. Dive deep into this next fun fact: Marine viruses have been found in the ocean from the surface down to 4,000m deep and from the North to the South Pole. Most of these viruses are harmless to humans. However, they can infect marine life such as whales and crustaceans.
At the equator, you would weigh less than if standing at one of the poles. You would weigh less on the equator than at the North or South Pole, but the difference is subtle. Your body itself won’t change, but the force of gravity will, thus reducing your weight.
Beethoven could still hear after going deaf. If you’re wondering how Beethoven still managed to be a great composer even when he was deaf, it was because of this method: He bit onto a metal pole connected to his piano. He then felt or heard his music through the vibration in his bones.
Russian couples and friends do not walk on different sides of a pole or trees.
The North and South Pole are moving. The North Pole moves at around 34 miles per year.
Yuma, Arizona gets over 4000 hours of sunshine a year, making it the sunniest place on Earth. The least sunny place is the South Pole, where the sun only shines on 182 days a year. (Which would you rather live in?)
Earth’s magnetic pole is creeping westward. Unlike our geographic North Pole, which is in a fixed location, Earth’s magnetic north wanders. Until the early 1990s, the magnetic North Pole was known to lie some 1600 km south of true north, in Canada. Yet scientists realised that the location of the magnetic north wasn’t fixed and was drifting at a rate of 15 km a year. Since the 1990s, however, the drift of Earth’s magnetic pole has turned into more of a sprint. Its present speed is around 50-60 km a year and is making a dash towards Siberia at a pace not seen before. Why? Scientists studying the drift of Earth’s magnetic north pole, using data from ESA’s Swarm mission, have pinpointed a change in the circulation pattern of magnetic blobs deep below Earth’s surface. They learned a change in the flow underneath Canada has caused a patch of magnetic field at the edge of Earth’s core, deep within the Earth, to be stretched out. This has weakened the Canadian patch and resulted in the pole shifting towards Siberia.
The Tibetan plateau is Earth’s ‘third pole’. The Tibetan Plateau is often referred to as the ‘third pole’ owing to the amount of freshwater it contains. With over 46,000 glaciers, the Tibetan Plateau holds the largest reserve of freshwater outside of the North and South Poles. These glaciers feed the rivers that run through the region, including the Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers, providing a vital source of water for millions of people in China and Southeast Asia. The Tibetan Plateau’s glaciers, along with other glaciers around the world, are under threat from climate change. Rising temperatures are causing the glaciers to melt at an unprecedented rate, which could have devastating consequences for the people and ecosystems that depend on them. New findings have found that values of ice lost from Himalayan glaciers from 2000 to 2020 were, on average, underestimated by 6.5%. This discovery has critical implications for predicting the demise of the region’s glaciers and for manageing critical water resources.
Most people are aware that Beethoven was deaf. However, the musician figured out a way to hear even after losing the ability to hear sounds. If Beethoven bit into a metal pole that he connected to his piano, then he could hear through a process called bone conduction.
When St. Louis held the 1904 Summer Olympic Games, events included greased pole climbing, rock throwing and mud fighting.
The Tibetan Plateau is known as Earth’s “third pole.”
The dark region on the north pole of Pluto’s moon, Charon, is called Mordor. In July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to fly past Pluto, the formerly ninth planet in our solar system. NASA called on the general public to aid them in giving names to the many new features of Pluto they expected to find, and the general public certainly didn’t disappoint. Not only did they name a dark spot on Charon’s moon after Sauron’s holdout in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but they also named a dark spot on Pluto’s south pole Cthulu from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos!
There’s a sport called “squirrel fishing,” in which participants try to catch squirrels and lift them into the air by using a nut on a fishing pole.