Intellect PlusPhysical geography
1,174 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 20 of 20.
Indonesia’s Hindu island sits inside a coral megadiversity triangleBali is Indonesia’s westernmost Lesser Sunda island, a province of Bali plus Nusa Penida and neighbours between Java and Lombok. About 86.4 percent of residents follow Balinese Hi…
A Venezuelan tepui drop still argues over the height crownAngel Falls, Salto Ángel in Spanish and Körepakupai Vená in Pemon, pours 979 metres off Auyán-tepui in Venezuela's Canaima National Park. No other waterfall drops so far without i…
Twenty-six million cubic kilometres of ice sit on AntarcticaThe Antarctic ice sheet blankets ninety-eight percent of the continent across 14 million square kilometres, averaging more than two kilometres thick and holding about 26.5 million…
A 1,300-kilometre finger of ice-covered bedrock islandsThe Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost reach of mainland Antarctica, juts 1,300 kilometres toward South America and covers 522,000 square kilometres, 80 per cent of it under ic…
Italy’s spine keeps Europe’s last big predators in green parksThe Apennines run about 1,200 kilometres down peninsular Italy from the Ligurian Alps at Altare to Reggio di Calabria’s toe. Verdant parallel chains still shelter some of Europe’s…
Ancient ridges that steered colonial America’s westward pushThe Appalachians run roughly 2,050 miles from central Alabama to Newfoundland, a southwest–northeast highland whose roots reach Rodinia’s assembly 1.1 billion years ago. Alternati…
The world’s fourth-largest desert fills nearly all ArabiaThe Arabian Desert covers about 2.33 million square kilometres across almost the whole peninsula—from Yemen to the Gulf and from Oman toward Jordan and Iraq—ranking fourth among E…
Earth’s largest peninsula is roughly India’s sizeThe Arabian Peninsula spans about 3.24 million square kilometres on the Arabian Plate—world’s largest peninsula, comparable to India—with nine countries sharing its deserts and co…
Monsoon gates made this sea Old World trade’s hingeThe Arabian Sea occupies the northern Indian Ocean between Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India, and the Horn approaches. Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb have linked east–west trade since third…
A sea the size of a country shrank to a tenth and dustThe Aral Sea, once Earth’s third-largest lake at 68,000 square kilometres between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, began dying in the 1960s when Soviet irrigation stole its rivers. By 2…
Thirty-six thousand Canadian islands fence the polar oceanCanada's Arctic Archipelago scatters 36,563 islands across about 1,424,500 square kilometres north of the mainland, most of it in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. After Gree…
The smallest ocean is also the planet’s shallow cold capThe Arctic Ocean is the smallest, shallowest and coldest of Earth's five oceans, spanning about 14 million square kilometres around the North Pole, nearly the size of Antarctica a…
The driest non-polar desert is also a fog-fed observatoryChile's Atacama is the driest non-polar desert and the largest fog desert on Earth, a 1,600-kilometre strip wedged between the Andes and the Coast Range. Some weather stations the…
The ocean that split worlds and then braided them againThe Atlantic, second largest of Earth's five oceans, covers about 85 million square kilometres, some 17 per cent of the planet's surface. Its S-shaped basin long divided the Ameri…
Sahara’s dark granite towers make a green island of rockNorthern Niger’s Aïr Mountains rise more than 1,800 metres across some 84,000 square kilometres of Sahara. Unusual dark peralkaline granites punch through the sand, late-summer ra…- Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao share one Dutch Caribbean storyThe ABC islands—Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao—are the westernmost Leeward Antilles, sitting just off Venezuela yet tied to the Netherlands since an 1814 Anglo-Dutch treaty handed th…
Outside Asia, no mountain tops Argentina’s AconcaguaAconcagua rises 6,967.15 metres in Argentina's Mendoza Province, higher than any mountain outside Asia and the second most prominent peak on Earth. Once an active stratovolcano ab…
A shallow northern Mediterranean arm holds 1,300 islandsThe Adriatic Sea splits Italy from the Balkans as the Mediterranean’s northernmost arm, running from the Strait of Otranto to the Po Valley. More than 1,300 islands line mostly it…
An island-studded sea that ferried Greece into AsiaThe Aegean Sea, a 215,000-square-kilometre Mediterranean embayment between the Balkans and Anatolia, links to the Black Sea via the Dardanelles and Marmara. Its island chains, the…
Africa's rift lakes shelter more than 1,500 species of cichlid fishStrung along the East African Rift, the African Great Lakes include Victoria, the world's second-largest freshwater lake by area, and Tanganyika, second-largest by volume and dept…
Fourteen volcanoes stitch Alaska toward KamchatkaThe Aleutians chain fourteen larger volcanic islands and fifty-five smaller ones across some 1,200 miles from the Alaska Peninsula toward Kamchatka, fencing the Bering Sea from th…- Antarctica’s largest island hid as mainland until 1940Alexander Island, west of the Antarctic Peninsula in the Bellingshausen Sea, is the continent’s biggest island—yet explorers thought it was mainland until a 1940 sledge journey pr…
- A 1,200-kilometre arc born where Africa met EurasiaThe Alps stretch roughly 1,200 kilometres across Monaco, France, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia. Tens of millions of years of African–Eurasian c…
Golden mountains where four nations and two rivers meetThe Altai Mountains rise where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan converge, cradling headwaters of the Irtysh and Ob. Belukha tops the system at 4,506 metres. The name’s Turk…
Earth’s widest high plain outside Tibet sits in the AndesThe Altiplano—Quechua and Aymara Qullaw—is west-central South America’s high plain, the most extensive plateau on Earth after Tibet. Averaging about 3,750 metres, it holds Lake Ti…
Six million square kilometres of jungle, mostly in BrazilThe Amazon rainforest blankets most of a 7-million-square-kilometre basin, with roughly 6 million square kilometres under moist broadleaf canopy, over half of Earth's remaining ra…
The Amazon outflows every rival; length still sparks fightsSouth America’s Amazon leads the planet in discharge—about 215,000 to 230,000 cubic metres per second, more than the next seven independent rivers combined—while scholars still ar…
A Polynesian U.S. territory that refused full incorporationAmerican Samoa is a self-governing, unincorporated U.S. territory in Polynesia, forty miles southeast of independent Samoa. Volcanic Tutuila and its neighbours, plus Rose Atoll an…
Classical Oxus still threads Central Asia’s highest desertsThe Amu Darya, the Oxus of Greek and Latin writers, forms where the Vakhsh and Panj meet on the Afghan–Tajik border below the Pamirs, then runs some 2,400 kilometres through one o…
A black-dragon border river between Russia and ChinaThe Amur, called the Heilong or Black Dragon River in Chinese, divides the Russian Far East from Northeast China along much of its 2,824 kilometres. Counting the Argun, it runs 4,…
Asia Minor fed Europe’s first farmers nine millennia agoAnatolia, or Asia Minor, is the westernmost thrust of Asia and makes up most of modern Turkey, hemmed in by the Mediterranean, Aegean, Marmara and Black seas. Around 9,000 years a…
Eight hundred islands, thirty-one lived-in, between three seasIndia’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory, whose capital Port Blair lies about 1,190 kilometres from Chennai, counts 836 islands, only thirty-one inhabited, split by the…
A Burma Sea boxed by islands and still vibrating from 2004The Andaman Sea—once called the Burma Sea—is a northeastern Indian Ocean basin edged by Myanmar and Thailand and screened from Bengal’s open bay by the island chain of Andamans an…
The world’s longest continental range walls South AmericaThe Andes run 8,900 kilometres down South America's western edge, the longest continental mountain range on Earth and the highest outside Asia. Averaging about 4,000 metres, they …