Intellect PlusPhysical geography
1,174 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 20.
Heaps of broken rock can hide permafrost in surprisingly mild climatesThe loose rubble piled beneath cliffs looks like nothing more than debris. Yet cold air sinking through the gaps can keep the inside of a scree slope several degrees colder than i…
The Salish Sea got its name in 1988, and most locals still cannot name itBetween Vancouver and Seattle lies a sea about the size of the Gulf of Riga, home shores for 8.76 million people. It only got a collective name in 1988, from a Bellingham geograph…
For seven years, a European empire was ruled from its own colony in RioFleeing Napoleon's armies in 1808, Portugal's royal court sailed to Brazil and liked it there. Rather than go home, the prince regent promoted the colony to a kingdom in 1815, and…
Tulum was a walled Maya port trading obsidian hauled from 700 kilometres awayPerched on 12-metre cliffs above the Caribbean, Tulum was among the last cities the Maya built, peaking between the 13th and 15th centuries. A shrine on its shore seems to have gu…
Ottoman rulers once used the word Turk mainly for Anatolian peasantsIn the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the elite called themselves Ottomans, and Türk was a label for Anatolian villagers. Only as European nationalism spread did the name gain…
In one creation story, a muskrat's muddy nose built North AmericaSeveral Northeastern Woodlands peoples tell of a world resting on a turtle's back. After a great flood, animals dove for mud; the beaver and loon failed, but the muskrat surfaced …
Hawaii's favourite instrument arrived aboard a ship full of Madeiran cabinet makersThe ukulele is a Hawaiian name for a Portuguese idea. Madeiran immigrants who stepped off the SS Ravenscrag in 1879 were soon giving nightly street concerts, and three cabinet mak…
Italy's only region without coast or foreign border once hid a microstateUmbria touches neither sea nor another country, the only Italian region that can say so. Tucked inside it is the hamlet of Cospaia, which ran itself as a tiny republic from 1440 t…
Some historians argue that calling the Civil War North the Union concedes too muchFor generations, Americans have spoken of the Union versus the Confederacy. In 2015 historian Michael Landis argued the phrasing quietly accepts the secessionist view that the cou…
India runs eight of its regions straight from New Delhi rather than through statesMost of India governs itself through elected state governments, but eight union territories answer directly to the centre, usually through a lieutenant governor or administrator t…
Egypt and Syria merged into one country in 1958, and it lasted three yearsIn January 1958 a delegation of Syrian officers flew to Cairo uninvited and asked Egypt to absorb their country. Within weeks the United Arab Republic existed, with Gamal Abdel Na…
Tudor England nearly doubled its population and flipped its religion five timesBetween 1485 and 1603, England went from roughly 2.3 million people to about 4 million, built its first permanent navy and changed official religion with almost every monarch. Hen…
The University of California began as a merger that wasn't really oneIn the 1860s California had two half-colleges: a private liberal arts school with buildings and students but no money, and a state college with federal money but existing only on …
USC got the name Trojans during a disastrous detour into rugbyBetween 1911 and 1913, USC dropped American football for rugby and was thrashed by more experienced teams while the school's finances wobbled. A Los Angeles Times writer, admiring…
Valdez, Alaska: a town born of a gold-rush con and moved after an earthquakeIn 1898 steamship companies sold Klondike prospectors on a supposedly easier route to the gold fields via Valdez. The glacier trail turned out twice as long and steep as advertise…
Valentinian I ruled all of Rome for barely a month, then split itWhen Roman officials met at Nicaea in 364 to replace a mysteriously dead emperor, one candidate kept refusing, another seemed too boorish and a third lived too far away. They sett…
U.S. News stopped printing its magazine but kept printing its rankingsFor decades U.S. News & World Report trailed Time and Newsweek as America's third news weekly. Then its college rankings, launched in 1983, grew more influential than its journali…
The UN refugee agency was meant to close after three yearsWhen the United Nations set up its refugee office, many member states balked at creating anything permanent, so it was given a three-year lifespan starting in 1951 and a budget of…
The Army engineers who once ran West Point and now run America's damsAmerica's military engineers began with a chief engineer and two assistants fortifying Bunker Hill in 1775, many of the early recruits being borrowed French officers. Today the Ar…
Why America's Interior Department has nothing to do with policeIn most countries an interior ministry means police and internal security. America's version manages national parks, dams, wildlife refuges and relations with Native nations, whic…
Most American hundred-dollar bills may be living outside AmericaThe $100 bill makes up the overwhelming bulk of US cash by value, and Federal Reserve figures from 2017 showed more hundreds in existence than singles. Yet a Chicago Fed study est…
Why Taiwan still writes Kaohsiung while mainland China switched to PinyinFor most of the 20th century, English readers met Chinese names through Wade–Giles, the system behind spellings like Kaohsiung and Chiang Ching-kuo. Mainland China adopted Pinyin …
Wallace Stegner, the Dean of Western Writers, and his famous Stanford studentsWallace Stegner said he had lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada, then spent his career explaining the American West. He won a Pulitzer for Angle of Repose, founded S…
How the Welland Canal lets ships climb around Niagara FallsLake Erie sits 99.5 metres above Lake Ontario, and the only natural link between them plunges over Niagara Falls. Since November 30, 1829, the Welland Canal has carried ships up a…
Westchester County grew from 24,000 people to a million as a pioneer suburbWhen the first federal census counted Westchester County in 1790, about 24,000 people lived there. Railroads, an aqueduct and North America's first modern multi-lane parkway turne…
Why Van Diemen's Land changed its name to Tasmania in 1856By the 1850s the name Van Diemen's Land made English readers shudder. About 73,000 convicts had been shipped there, some 40% of all those sent to Australia, and penal stations lik…
Vancouver Island was first named for two rival captains who got alongWhen a Spanish commander and a British captain met at Nootka Sound in 1792, they failed to settle who owned the coast but liked each other enough to share a name: Quadra and Vanco…
Vervet monkeys shout different warnings for leopards, eagles and snakesA vervet monkey that spots a leopard gives one call; an eagle or a python triggers another, each sound distinct. Infants pick up these alarms just by watching, and the monkeys eve…
Victoria Island is slightly bigger than Great Britain but home to 2,168 peopleStraddling Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Canada's second-largest island covers about 219,191 square kilometres, a touch more than Great Britain. Yet the 2021 census found…
The Hungarian Vizsla nearly vanished twice before winning Crufts in 2010After the Second World War, a search across Hungary turned up only about a dozen purebred Vizslas. From that tiny remnant the copper-coated pointer bounced back, reaching American…
Volcanic ash is really shattered magma, glass and crystal smaller than 2 mmVolcanic ash is not soot. Each grain, smaller than 2 mm, is a shard of rock, crystal or glass, formed when gas bubbles rip rising magma apart or when magma meets water and flashes…- From lava fountains to exploding gas slugs, how volcanoes choose their styleVolcanologists name eruption styles after the mountains that made them famous. Hawaii's volcanoes ooze runny basalt in fountains and curtains of fire, Stromboli pops like a burst …
Wildlife once meant game for hunters; now it includes the rats downtownThe word wildlife used to be close to a synonym for game, the birds and mammals people shot for sport. Today it covers anything living wild that people did not introduce, from dee…- A shipwreck off Wollongong keeps coughing up bottles of 1881 cognacIn 1881 the British clipper Queen of Nations ran aground near Wollongong carrying 24,000 bottles of Hennessy cognac. Police and customs officers saved at least 5,500; locals helpe…
Religion split the Slavs by alphabet: Latin letters west, Cyrillic eastPoles, Czechs, Slovaks, Sorbs and Kashubians share West Slavic languages and, since the ninth century, mostly Roman Catholicism. That conversion brought the Latin alphabet and tie…
Petroleum did not save the whales; whaling actually peaked in the 1960sA popular story says kerosene rescued whales by making their oil obsolete. In fact, commercial whaling hit its peak in the 1960s, long after petroleum arrived. Whale oil had lit L…- The White House press briefing grew out of a reporter loitering at the gatesIn the 1890s, a young reporter named William Price, hoping to land a newspaper job, simply stationed himself outside the White House and questioned visitors as they came and went.…
- The white rhino is grey, and nobody really knows where its name came fromWhite rhinos range from yellowish brown to slate grey, so the name clearly has nothing to do with colour. A popular tale blames English settlers mishearing the Dutch word for wide…
White storks fly around the Mediterranean because warm air will not lift them over waterA white stork flying from Europe to Africa for winter will not take the short route across the Mediterranean. It relies on rising thermals to soar with little effort, and those co…
From 21 wild birds to over 800: the whooping crane's narrow escapeBy 1941 hunting and habitat loss had left just 21 wild whooping cranes, plus two in captivity. North America's tallest bird was a whisker from vanishing. Decades of protection and…
Antarctica's land is nearly lifeless, but its seafloor teems with giantsAntarctica has no native land mammals, reptiles or amphibians at all, and its frozen interior is among the emptiest places on Earth. Yet a single square metre of its seabed can ho…
A covered bowl of parrot eggs could tell a Yoruba king to abdicateYoruba monarchs ruled only while their people approved. If a king turned tyrannical or incompetent, the order to leave the throne might arrive as a symbolic message: parrot eggs i…
The Younger Dryas plunged Greenland back into deep cold in three years or lessAbout 12,900 years ago, as the last ice age was ending, the North Atlantic world lurched back into the cold. Greenland's annual temperatures fell by up to 10 degrees Celsius, a dr…- Did Yucatán get its name from a Maya phrase for I don't understand you?When Spanish explorers reached the Yucatán Peninsula in 1517 and asked what the land was called, the replies may have been a puzzled I don't understand you. That is one of three c…
Zermatt bans combustion-engine cars to protect its view of the MatterhornIn Zermatt, cars with combustion engines are banned so that exhaust haze never dims the view of the Matterhorn. Visitors arrive by train, then ride almost silent electric taxis, b…
Zhejiang University fled across China in wartime while guarding a vast imperial libraryWhen Japanese armies advanced in 1937, Zhejiang University packed up and retreated from Hangzhou, moving again and again until it settled in Guizhou in China's southwest. Along th…
Tiny zooplankton graze most of the ocean's daily plant growthThe biggest grazers in the sea are not whales or fish. Microscopic zooplankton, mostly single-celled hunters, eat an estimated 59 to 75 percent of the ocean's fresh plant producti…- Wonsan endured the longest siege in modern American naval historyFrom March 1951 until 27 July 1953, United States warships besieged and shelled the North Korean port of Wonsan without letup, the longest such siege in modern American naval hist…
WWF's panda logo was modelled on Chi Chi, a lone panda in LondonIn 1961 the new World Wildlife Fund needed a symbol that crossed language barriers and printed well in black and white. The answer was Chi Chi, a giant panda moved from Beijing Zo…
Among China's Yi, weather is said to change within a few milesNearly all of China's nine million Yi live in mountains, often farming steep slopes far from any city. Altitude varies so sharply across their lands that an old saying holds that …
Germany's highest mountain straddles a border and once argued about its own heightThe Zugspitze, named for the paths avalanches carve down it, tops out at 2,962 metres, a figure the summit cafe's lounge now carries as its name. Estimates once varied by nearly 3…
Zulu, South Africa's most common home language, only got written down in the 1800sAbout 13.56 million people speak Zulu as a first language, and over half of South Africans understand it. Yet its first grammar was printed in Norway, its click sounds are unknown…
Magnetite, the mineral that taught people magnetism, also sits in brainsA chunk of naturally magnetised magnetite, called lodestone, will tug small bits of iron toward it, and that is how ancient people first stumbled on magnetism. The same black iron…
On India's Malabar Coast, farmers grow rice below sea levelIn Kuttanad, the lowest point in India, farmers plant rice on land that lies beneath the level of the sea, one of the few places on Earth where that happens. The area, nicknamed t…
A plucky mouse deer supposedly inspired the founding of MalaccaLegend says Parameswara, a prince fleeing an attack on Singapura, was resting under a tree while out hunting when his hounds trapped a tiny mouse deer. The little animal kicked th…
The F-35 grew out of a hunt for a supersonic Harrier replacementThe F-35 began as several cash-strapped programmes stitched together. One was a secret effort to build a stealthy jump jet able to fly faster than sound; others aimed to replace a…- Lovebirds earned their name by pairing for life and sitting closeLovebirds get their name from the way mated pairs bond for life and spend long stretches perched side by side. Weighing just 40 to 60 grams, these African parrots are among the sm…
The English word cay comes from the vanished Lucayans of the BahamasEvery time someone mentions a Florida key or a Caribbean cay, they are using a Lucayan word. The islanders called themselves Lukku-Cairi, people of the islands, and cairi passed i…
Luton's football club is still called the Hatters for a vanished tradeLuton Town fans still go by the Hatters, a nod to the straw hats that made the Bedfordshire town famous. The trade took root in the 17th century, after a band of Scots sheltered b…
Maasai Mara means spotted, after the bushes dotting its grasslandSeen from a distance, the Kenyan plains near the Tanzanian border look speckled with short, bushy trees, so the Maasai called the place Mara, meaning spotted in their Maa language…