Our Planet

7+ meters crocodile? (23+ feet) Sorry but no…

A widely circulated photo over the internet which shows a giant crocodile with a bunch of villagers sitting behind. A story next to the photo saying “the people in a village on the Niger River in Africa were losing fellow villagers at a rapid rate, and called in the army, which shot a 7+ meters crocodile that weighs 1200 kg.“

Crocodiles often suffer from a prevalence of “big fish” stories and over-exaggeration. The photo below was first got shared on Reddit, and it started circulating rapidly since then. When I first saw the photo, I tried to guess the length of the crocodile, because it didn’t seem to me 7+ meters. I thought it was not more than 5 meters.

Falling Back to Earth – Amazing HD Footage From Space

A GoPro video inside a fairing from a recent SpaceX Falcon 9 flight captured some spectacular views as the rocket fell back to Earth. The footage is played in real-time. Watch the amazing video published by the SpaceX channel.

Vulcan Points

Can you imagine an island within a lake that is situated on an island located in a lake on an island? Confused? Well, it is really confusing, but this island does indeed exist: Vulcan Points is the world’s largest island within a lake (Crater Lake) that is situated on an island (Taal Volcano Island) located in a lake (Lake Taal) within an island (Luzon).

Can you see the tiny blue shadow in the south of Manila, the capital city of the Philippines? (In the northernmost island, or Luzon Island.)

NASA celebrates the 50th Year of Spacewalking

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) celebrates 50 years of spacewalking, or Extravehicular Activity (EVA) with a slogan: “#SuitUp”. The United States government agency, which responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research, will be celebrating accomplishments throughout the year 2015.

The Exact Moment of the 2015 Calbuco Volcano Eruption captured by a hiker

The exact moment of the Calbuco Volcano eruption captured by a currently anonymous hiker in Chile. The volcano erupted on April 22, 2015, for the first time in four decades (the last eruption was in 1972).

Lake Baikal: the deepest lake in the World

The world’s deepest lake is Lake Baikal, which has a depth of 1,642 meters (5,387 feet). It is a rift lake in the south of the Russian region of Siberia. Its bottom is at 4,215 feet (1,285 meters) below the sea level. In terms of volume, Lake Baikal is also the world’s largest freshwater lake; it contains roughly 20% of the world’s unfrozen surface freshwater with 23,615.39 cubic kilometers (5,700 cubic miles). It contains more water than that of all the North American Great Lakes combined.

Live HD streaming of Earth from The ISS – See the beautiful Earth from 400 km above

The live streaming of Earth from the ISS is available on YouTube in HD quality.

When I was a child, I always dreamed about going to space, traveling between planets, and watching Earth from space. Back in the 1980s, we were almost sure that around the year 2000, space travel would be so common. Remember TV shows like “Space: 1999”. Unfortunately, the space race lost its momentum during the 1990s and 2000s.

Calbuco volcano erupts (Chile) – amazing video

Calbuco volcano erupts: the stratovolcano in southern Chile has erupted twice for the first time since 1972 and the people have been evacuated from the area. It is the first eruption of the stratovolcano in 43 years; it results in a huge ash cloud over a mountainous area in the south of Chile.

The amazing footage from the area shows a huge column of lava and ash being sent several kilometers into the air.

Maps can be deceptive

Australia - Greenland overlay (featured)

Yes, maps can be deceptive. The standard maps we see every day use Mercator Projection, a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It was developed for navigational purposes and has often been used in world maps. But, like all the other types of projections, it can be deceptive.

In fact, every map tells lie, since it’s impossible to transform perfectly the three-dimensional world into two-dimensional surfaces like paper or computer screen.

Map projections are necessary for creating maps and every map projections distort the surface in some fashion (a map projection is a systematic transformation of the latitudes and longitudes of locations on the surface of a sphere or an ellipsoid into locations on a plane).

Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems.

If Earth had rings like Saturn, this is what it would look like

What if Earth had rings like Saturn? What it would look like? Probably, our sky would look amazing. The rings would look quite different from the cities and latitudes across the world. It’s interesting to imagine how it would affect the culture throughout time. It would have influenced religion, mythology, navigation, etc.