Titbit: Some Interesting Ocean Facts
While I was searching around the Web getting numbers and facts for my previous posting about food prices increasing I came across a site that listed a pile of interesting facts about our oceans. I thought I would just share a handful of them.
The longest continuous mountain range chain on the planet resides in the ocean and is more than 40,000 miles long.
- The Antarctic ice sheet that forms and melts over the ocean each year is almost twice the size of the United States.
- The deep ocean Gulf Stream off the east coast of the United States flows at a rate approaching 300 times faster than the average flow of the Amazon River, which is world’s largest land-based river.
- The world’s oceans contain about 20 million tons of gold.
- A single human swallow of seawater contains about one million bacterial cells, hundreds of thousands of phytoplankton, and tens of thousands of zooplankton.
- The blue whale is the largest animal on our planet; its size exceeding that of the greatest dinosaurs. Its heart is the size of a Volkswagen.
- Fish provide the greatest percentage of the world’s protein consumed by humans.
- Eighty percent of all pollution is the seas and oceans comes from land-based activities.
- Eighty percent of all humans live within 60 miles (100 klms) of the coast.
- The average depth of the oceans in 2.5 miles (4 klms).
- Less than 10 percent of the ocean area has been explored.
- Ninety percent of trade between countries is carried out over the oceans via cargo ships.
- If all the world’s ice was to melt the oceans would rise by 500 feet (about 150 metres).
- Ninety percent of all volcanic activity on Earth occurs in the oceans.
- Ocean levels have risen about 15cm over the past 100 years.
- 10,000 years ago the ocean levels were 110 metres lower than they are now.
