Intellect PlusUK & Ireland: nature
70 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 2 of 2.
The Early Cretaceous tore continents apart and gave the world its first flowersBetween roughly 143.1 and 100.5 million years ago, the Atlantic unzipped, India drifted loose, and the largest volcanic outpouring Earth has ever known flooded the South Pacific f…
The tallest and oldest living trees on Earth are both conifersA coast redwood stands 116.07 metres tall, and a Great Basin bristlecone pine has lived about 4,700 years. Both are conifers, a group with only a little over 600 living species th…
Sedimentary rock covers most land yet makes up just 8 percent of the crustWalk across the continents and nearly three quarters of the exposed ground is sedimentary rock. Dig down, though, and it turns out to be a thin skin: only about 8 percent of the c…
Fog is not precipitation, but on Titan it rains methanePrecipitation means anything that condenses in a cloud and then falls because gravity wins. That rules out fog and mist, which simply hang in the air. Every year about 505,000 cub…
The Permian ended in the Great Dying, the worst extinction on recordThe Permian closed 251.9 million years ago with the largest mass extinction Earth has known. Roughly 81 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species vanished, a collap…
An eighteenth-century experiment turned chalk into fake marble inside a cannon barrelTo test whether pressure transforms rock, James Hall sealed chalk inside an old cannon barrel and cooked it in a foundry furnace. Instead of crumbly quicklime he got something ver…
Before the 1980s, scientists were unsure whether pollution would warm or cool EarthUntil the 1980s it was genuinely unclear whether extra greenhouse gases would outweigh the cooling from airborne soot and particles. The answer is now plain. The air holds roughly…
England’s highest fells sit inside a 1951 national parkThe Lake District in Cumbria shelves sixteen major lakes beneath Scafell Pike (978 metres), Helvellyn (950), and Skiddaw (931)—England’s top three summits. The 2,362-square-kilome…
“British Isles” is geography that Ireland’s government rejectsThe British Isles name an Atlantic archipelago of Great Britain, Ireland, Man, the Hebrides, Orkneys, Shetlands and others—yet Dublin refuses the label as politically loaded. Rock…
Europe's adder ranges farther north than any snakeVipera berus, the common European adder, stretches from Britain to Sakhalin and crosses the Arctic Circle—farther north than any other snake. Folklore paints it as a devilish vill…