Geology Facts

All of the Earth's continents are wider at the north than in the south - and nobody knows why.

Diamonds can be shattered with a hammer.

The North Atlantic gets 2.5 centimetres (1in) wider every year.

Approximately 115 tons of ocean salt spray enters the earth's atmosphere each second.

The largest diamond ever found was an astounding 3,106 carats!

The best diamonds are colored blue-white.

More than 500,000 earthquakes occur throughout the world every year, though most are too small for humans to feel!

The longest cave in the world is the 'Mammoth Cave System' in the USA at 560,000 mtrs deep!

A volcano has enough power to shoot ash as high as 50 km into the atmosphere.

The average ice berg weighs 20,000,000 tons!

The Niagara Falls moves upstream at an average rate of about 295ft a century!

Fine-grained volcanic ash can be found as an ingredient in some toothpastes.

Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks!

All the gold ever mined could be molded into a cube 60 feet high and 60 feet wide.

In 2011, a 60-meter circular anomaly was discovered on the Baltic Sea floor at a depth of 90 meters. While its unusual shape and apparent 'runway' trail sparked UFO theories, geologists believe it's a glacial formation—though the discovery team claims electronics malfunction directly above it.

Scientists told him this river was a myth. In the Peruvian Amazon, it stretches nearly 4 miles and reaches close to 95C - hot enough to cook animals alive. Andres Ruzo went to find it anyway. It was real.

Miners in Mexico found a hidden cave in 2000 with the largest crystals on Earth. The crystals were white gypsum beams up to 37 feet long and 3 feet wide. The heat inside hit 136 degrees with near-total humidity. Without a cooling suit, a person can die within about 10 minutes. In 2015, the mine flooded and sealed the cave shut.

A geologist named Ann Pizzorusso says she solved a 500-year mystery in the Mona Lisa. She matched the rocky landscape behind the subject to Lecco, Italy - the 14th-century Ponte Azzone Visconti bridge, the limestone Alps, and Lake Garlate. Leonardo worked in the Lecco region for years. Not every art historian agrees, but the geological case is hard to argue with.

Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest mirror. Once a year, seasonal rain covers 10,582 square kilometres of salt so flat the horizon vanishes. You appear to walk on the sky. The surface varies less than a metre in elevation across the entire expanse. Space agencies calibrate their altimeters here - five times better than open ocean.

Mount Everest is still growing - and a river 75km away is why. The Arun river has carved a deep gorge, removing so much rock that the crust beneath springs upward. A 2024 UCL study found river erosion is a key driver of Everest's roughly 2mm annual rise. Everest already sits 15-50m taller than it would be without that river.

Yellowstone grew a brand new thermal pool over the winter of 2024-25. Nobody saw it happen. Scientists returned to Norris Geyser Basin that April. They found a 13-foot-wide, ice-blue pool that had not been there before. The water was 109 degrees, about as hot as a bath. Sound sensors later traced its birth to tiny explosions in December, January, and February. It had been buried under snow the whole time.

Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey means Cotton Castle, and it looks like snow that never melts. Hot spring water loaded with calcium carbonate has crept down this hillside for hundreds of thousands of years, hardening into blinding white terraced pools. People have bathed in them since Roman times. The ancient spa city of Hierapolis was built right on top, and the whole site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

They turned Niagara Falls off. In 1969, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dumped 28,000 tons of rock into the Niagara River, stopping the American Falls completely for five months. Tourists walked the dry riverbed and found millions of coins - and engineers discovered the fallen boulders below were holding the falls up.