Facts about Earth

Bowling ball: The Earth has a smoother surface than a bowling ball (if you scale it down to the same size)
Sunlight: All sunlight reaching Earth is 8 minutes old
Lightning: There are 8.6 million lightning bolts on Earth every day
Volcanoes: There are almost 500 volcanoes on Earth. 90% of all volcanic activity takes place in the ocean
Shape: The earth is not round; it is more of a flattened spheroid
Tectonics: The continents on Earth move about 2 cm every year (up to 4 cm in some places)
Highest point: The highest mountain on earth, Mount Everest, is 8,848 meters high
Deepest point: Earth’s deepest point in the ocean is the Mariana Trench, which is 10,924 meters deep
Gold: 99% of all Earth’s gold lies in the Earth’s core
Inner core: The Earth’s inner core is a solid metal sphere that is 5,150 – 6,371 km deep (wide) and 3,300-4,000 degrees hot

Fact: 99% of all Earth’s gold is located in the Earth’s core

More facts about Earth

Countries: There are 192 countries on Earth
Visibility: China’s air pollution is visible from space – but the Great Wall of China is not
Population: The world’s population is growing by just over 1% and will be 9.2 billion in 2050 (it’s around 7.1 billion today)
Gravity: Gravity is not the same everywhere on Earth. This means that you don’t weigh the same everywhere

Day: A 24-hour day on Earth only lasts 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds – not 24 hours
Year: A year on Earth lasts 365 and ¼ days. The quarter days are added together every four years to form a leap year, which lasts 366 days
Rotation: The earth is moving slower and slower; for every century, 1 milisecond is added (although the delay is not completely smooth)
Liv: Life (as we know it) has only existed on Earth for 150-200 million years; and since the Earth is around 5 billion years old, this is only about 5-10% of the Earth’s lifespan
Non-residential: In about 1 billion years, Earth will be uninhabitable for all forms of life due to the increasing heat of the sun
Water: In about 2 billion years, there will be no water left on Earth; it will have evaporated
The future of the earth: Earth will not survive the sun’s evolution into a red giant, which will take place in 4-5 billion years. This is because the sun will expand so much that its radius will exceed Earth’s orbit, making Earth’s existence impossible

Salt water: 97% of all water on Earth is salt water
Water and soil: Only 29% of the Earth’s surface is soil – the remaining 71% is water
Ice and water: The South Pole (Antarctica) has as much ice as the Atlantic Ocean has water

Most visible planet: Seen from a distance, Earth will be the brightest of all the planets in the solar system. This is because sunlight is reflected by the water on Earth
Name: Earth is the only planet in our solar system not named after a mythological god
Meteorites: 100 tons of small meteorites enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day. This adds up to around 30,000 particles on an annual basis
The twin planet: Earth had a “twin planet” called ‘Theia’ (Earth is known as ‘Gaia’ in technical terms). It is believed that Theia had the same orbit around the sun as Earth and that Theia and Earth collided around 4.5 billion years ago. This collision likely resulted in the creation of the moon

Earth’s profile
Mass:	5,972,190,190,000,000,000,000 billion kg
Eccentricity:	0.01671123
Diameter at the equator:	12,756.1 km
Circumference at the equator:	40,075.16 km
Circulation speed:	107.218 km/s
Aphelion:	152,098,233 km
Perihelion	147,098,291 km
Average distance from the sun:	149,669,180 km
Surface temperature:	-89.2 to 56.7 °C