As we celebrate Earth Day on Tuesday, April 22nd, it behooves us to remember just how much we take for granted and what an amazing opportunity it is to live on this loveable ol’ planet.
And it is old. But it still looks pretty great, I think, for all we’ve put it through!
Known as an ‘Ocean World’, Earth is the only planet in the Solar System that is able to sustain life (as we know it). This has, in my humble opinion, been vital. Just over 70% of our planet is covered by water, with 97% of that being salt water, and the rest freshwater. The majority of the fresh water, 68.7% of it, is actually ice or glacier. Those numbers make the Great Lakes seem like puddles by comparison, don’t they?
Antarctica is the coldest and windiest place on earth, with recorded lows of -89.2° C and winds that sometimes exceed 320km/hr! That’ll muss with yer coif!
In contrast is the record-holding Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California, which observed a high of 56.7° C one July afternoon in 1913, and whose average summer temps sit around 45° C. Unfathomable.
Over in the Atacama Desert, which is a 1600 kilometre strip of land just west of the Andes Mountains in South America, they get less than 1mm of rain per YEAR!! Not surprisingly, it is considered the driest nonpolar desert on earth. It has been used to simulate expeditions to Mars. That’s dry! And yet, in typical Earth form, there are still plants and animals that survive there, including a few long-suffering cacti and several creepy little lizards.
Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world—we should all know that—but were you aware that it is continuing to get higher all the time due to the tectonic plate movement that was responsible for forming it in the first place? The educated guess is that every year Everest gets 4mm higher. 4mm? How would you even prove that? At this stage, Mount Everest stands almost 8.9 kilometres above sea level. And still climbing.
And that’s not all—the moon is also moving. The moon is pulling away from Earth by about 4cm each year. However, to put that into perspective, the moon’s diameter is just 40 kilometres more than the drive from Vancouver to Sault Ste Marie along the Canadian side, or about 600 kilometres less than the distance from the west coast of Australia to the east coast. You can see that it might take a while before anyone gets too excited about the slow crawl. (A quick note here: Isn’t it amazing that someone someplace has been able to measure the distance from the earth to the moon and NOTICE that it is moving away from us by 4cm each year? Who thought to keep checking on it after the first measurement?)
Santa Claus’ workshop is understood to be situated at the North Pole but depending on what we are referring to when we use that term, Claus might be a nomad. The geographic North Pole has coordinates (and there’s no actual stick planted at The North Pole, painted to look like a candy cane or barber’s pole.) (I know. I was disappointed too.), but if we are referring to the magnetic northern Pole of the Earth, well, that thing wanders.
The Earth’s magnetic North Pole was thought to be in Canada’s North when the first European explorers mapped out the area in 1831. Canada’s north North. Waaaaay north. Since then, every time explorers and scientists go up to measure where it is, the magnetic North Pole has moved. The center of the Earth is made up of molten metals that are constantly in motion, which means that the Earth’s magnetic field is never static. Therefore, while what we know as The North Pole, is located 871 kilometres north of Alert, Ellesmere Island, the magnetic North Pole is crawling erratically (not in a straight line) across the Arctic Ocean towards Russia. It moves at various speeds (depending on a lot of things that I don’t have space enough to chitchat about) but lately it has been skipping along at about 25 kilometres per year. That is just an average speed!
So, when your GPS periodically tells you that it wants to install an update, let it.
It’s the same story with the magnetic South Pole but that one doesn’t move at the same rate of speed as the magnetic North Pole. Complicated. (However, there IS a candy cane striped ‘ceremonial’ South Pole pole marking the spot that we all know as the mailing address for The South Pole, and it even has a shiny silver ball on the top. Those South Pole folks really know how to make things festive!)
The Earth needs to rotate pretty quickly in an eastward direction in order to provide day and then night and then day (etc.) as it makes its way around the sun in the opposite (counterclockwise) direction. That speed, measured at the Equator, is 1674.4 km/h or, if it helps any, 465.1 metres each second. I don’t possess enough creativity to visualize that. Let’s just agree that we’re moving at a good clip.
Every place on this Earth experiences seasons. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are lucky enough to be moving through Spring, a season which is very obviously different from that of our Winter, our Summer, and our Autumn seasons. At the equator, they have two seasons. The world has a slight wobble to it and therefore it faintly veers off a straight rotational path as the year progresses, producing a wet season and a dry season for those living near that middle band.
Tuesday, Earth Day, is the perfect day to step back and appreciate our planet for its many wonders while we, as individuals, can aim for building better recycling habits, making smarter composting choices, and examining our own ecological footprint. Doing our part.
And all without a whit of motion sickness or fear of being flung off the surface of this very highly favoured planet as it spins. Astounding!
