Extremities of the Earth: The Hottest Place on Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
A blog exploring the hottest place on earth, Death Valley California.
Posted in: 20th century cartography, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Category: Series: Extremities of the Earth
Extremities of the Earth: Farthest Point from the Center of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
If you were asked the location of the furthest point from the center of the Earth, you would likely be inclined to state the summit of Mount Everest as an obvious choice. Looking at the 1862 pictorial map below would seem to confirm that it would be in the Himalayan Mountains of Asia. Fascinatingly, due …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Extremities of the Earth: Largest Active Volcano
Posted by: Julie Stoner
Spewing lava and gas from deep within the earth, volcanoes are one of nature’s most explosive natural features. Thousands of volcanoes dot the planet but only about 1,500 are considered active, meaning they have erupted at some point in the last 10,000 years. The largest of these active volcanoes in both mass and volume is …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Extremities of the Earth: The Longest River (Part 2)
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In Part 1 of this post, we discussed the Amazon River in South America as a contender for the title of the longest river on Earth. While arguments have been made by some cartographers that the Amazon should be given this distinction, it is traditionally held by most that the longest river in the world …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Extremities of the Earth: The Longest River (Part 1)
Posted by: Julie Stoner
The Amazon or the Nile? The debate over which deserves the title of longest river is centuries old. Determining the world’s longest river is not a simple matter of using a measuring tape to find the distance! In this new post in our Extremities of the Earth series, we will explore these two mighty waterways …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Extremities of the Earth: The Northernmost Inhabited Point (Part 2)
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In the previous post of this series, the military installation of Alert in Nunavut, Canada was named the northernmost permanently inhabited point. While this is indeed true, it is only accessible to assigned military personnel. For the adventurers out there, we will have to content ourselves with visiting or living on the island of Spitsbergen, …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Extremities of the Earth: The Northernmost Inhabited Point (Part 1)
Posted by: Julie Stoner
Located in a shifting sea of ice, the North Pole sits at the center of the Arctic Ocean, the literal top of the world. The shifting of the ice makes it impossible to establish a permanent base at the pole, though drifting stations have been created through the decades that are manned for several weeks …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Extremities of the Earth: The Highest Point From Sea Level
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In the previous post of this blog series, Extremities of the Earth, we explored the depths of the lowest natural point on earth. We will now travel in the opposite direction, to the heights of Mount Everest, the highest point on earth from sea level at 29,029 feet (8,848 m) above sea level. The peak …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Extremities of the Earth: The Lowest Natural Point
Posted by: Julie Stoner
It was once thought that the ocean floor was a vast, flat, featureless plain. In the 1840s, explorers began to measure the depth of the ocean and came to the realization that there was as much variety in the contours of the ocean floor as there was on dry land. It is at the bottom …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth