Category Social Sciences

What are the specialities of the Caspian Sea?

The Caspian Sea is the largest inland body of water and is considered as the world’s largest lake. Historically, it has been considered a sea due its size and the saline it embodies many features of a lake. It covers 372,000 square kilometres (without including the lagoon of Garabogazkol to the east). It has a volume of 78,200 cubic kilometres. It is located at the junction of Europe and Asia and is bordered by the Caucasus Mountains to the west and the steppes of Central Asia to the east. Russia lies to its north-west, Azerbaijan to the west, Iran to the south, Turkmenistan to the southeast and Kazakhstan to the northeast.

The Caspian Sea is endorheic, which means it has no natural outlets. According to Natural History Magazine, close to 130 rivers flow into the Caspian Sea, but none of them are in the east. It’s most important tributary is the Volga River in the north, which provides about 80 per cent of the water that flows into the lake. The Caspian Sea is home to a wide range of species.

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Which is the largest country by area?

Spanni panning across 17,098,246 square kilometres, Russia is the largest country in the world by area. Russia alone occupies one-tenth of all the land on Earth! It is the only country with 11 time zones due to its vast land area. Russia is also part of two continents- Europe and Asia and has territories on three oceans (the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans). The landscapes that one can see across this country vary from sandy and frozen deserts to tall mountains and giant marshes, but the major part of Russia’s landscape is covered by continuous stretches of treeless plains called steppes. Taigas is another type of land area found in Siberia, which are pine forests that occupy about three-quarters of Russia.

Russia had its earliest human settlements when Scandinavians moved south to regions near the upper Volga River in AD 500. These settlers mixed with Slavs from the west, leading to the construction of a fortress, which is now the Ukrainian city of Kiev.

Russian history has many eras. Of them, the evolution of Kiev into an empire that ruled most of European Russia was very important. Kiev was in power for 200 years until it broke up into Ukraine, Belarus and Muscovy. Russia was also ruled by the Tsars for a period in history until the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew them. Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, gave birth to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) from Russia and 11 other countries.

The Soviet Union played a critical role in the victory of the Allied Powers in World War II. It was a superpower and was the major opponent to the United States during the Cold War. This era saw great technological advancements such as the launch of the world’s first human-made satellite and the first human into space. However, the U.S.S.R was dissolved on 26 December 1991.

Recently, Russia is in news for its ongoing war with Ukraine.

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What makes the continent Asia unique?

Asia is the largest continent in the world in terms of land area and is spread across 44.6 million square kilometres. It is also home to 4.6 billion people from the total 7.7 billion population of our planet, making it the most populous continent as well. Apart from these specialities, Asia also has the highest and lowest points on land. Mount Everest, which is 8,848.86 metres above sea level, is the highest point and the Dead Sea depression, which is more than 431 metres below sea level, is the point.

A total of 49 countries form the continent of Asia. India, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and many more big and small countries are part of this continent.

Since the beginning, Asia has been home to the majority of the human population and gave birth to the first civilizations of our world. Even the most popular religions of the world such as Hindu- ism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, as well as many others were founded here.

Asia has a great variety of ethnic groups, cultures, environments, geographies, economies, historical connections and government systems. Similarly, it also has many different climates across its landscapes. From equatorial climates and hot deserts in the Middle East to temperate regions in the east and continental climate in the centre, Asia has almost all types of climatic zones. It even has subarctic and polar regions in Siberia.

Asia is home to about 2,300 languages, which include some of the widely spoken languages like Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, and Japanese.

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WHAT IS IT LIKE AROUND THE NORTH POLE?

In geographical terms, the North Pole is the northernmost point on Earth’s axis of rotation. It is located in the Arctic, on the drifting, two to three metres thick ice that covers the waters of the ocean here. The warmest the North Pole gets is 0°C. Usually, though, the temperature is a bitterly cold sub-zero. In summer, the North Pole is bathed in the constant daylight, but the winter is a long, continuous dark night.

The North Pole is the northernmost point on Earth. It is the precise point of the intersection of the Earth’s axis and the Earth’s surface.

From the North Pole, all directions are south. Its latitude is 90 degrees north, and all lines of longitude meet there (as well as at the South Pole, on the opposite end of the Earth). Polaris, the current North Star, sits almost motionless in the sky above the pole, making it an excellent fixed point to use in celestial navigation in the Northern Hemisphere.

The North Pole sits in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, on water that is almost always covered with ice. The ice is about 2-3 meters (6-10 feet) thick. The depth of the ocean at the North Pole is more than 4,000 meters (13,123 feet).

The Canadian territory of Nunavut lies closest to the North Pole. Greenland, the world’s largest island and an independent country within the Kingdom of Denmark, is also close to the pole.

The North Pole is much warmer than the South Pole. This is because sits at a lower elevation (sea level) and is located in the middle of an ocean, which is warmer than the ice-covered continent of Antarctica. But it’s not exactly beach weather. In the summer, the warmest time of year, the temperature is right at the freezing point: 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Because the Earth rotates on a tilted axis as it revolves around the sun, sunlight is experienced in extremes at the poles. In fact, the North Pole experiences only one sunrise (at the March equinox) and one sunset (at the September equinox) every year. From the North Pole, the sun is always above the horizon in the summer and below the horizon in the winter. This means the region experiences up to 24 hours of sunlight in the summer and 24 hours of darkness in the winter.

Credit: National Geographic

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IN A YEAR HOW MANY CLOUD-FREE NIGHTS DOES THE ATACAMA DESERT GET?

At 16,570 feet (5,050 meters) in elevation, the Atacama Desert plateau may be the best place in the world to spot the solar system’s secrets. To the delight of amateur astronomers, the desert sees as many as 330 cloud-free nights each year. High along the Atacama Desert plateau, an array of observatories track the celestial bodies in our solar system and beyond.

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array/submillimeter (ALMA) — a network of 66 telescopes run by an international collaboration of scientific organizations from Europe, North America, East Asia and the Republic of Chile — spies on faraway stars and the planets birthed around them.

The European Space Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, helped spot the TRAPPIST-1 system of Earth-like planets, located a mere 40 light-years from Earth, and has gathered data on distant exoplanet atmospheres. This telescope, along with others, has uncovered some of the universe’s most intriguing oddities and provided a wealth of data to researchers and astronomers worldwide.

Credit: LIVE SCIENCE

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HOW OLD IS THE KALAHARI DESERT?

The Kalahari Desert is not really a desert, but rather a large arid to semi-arid sandy area in southern Africa, covering much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa. Though it is semi-desert, it has huge tracts of excellent grazing after good rains and is rich in wildlife.

The Kalahari has existed as an inland desert since the Cretaceous period (65-135 million years ago). It has experienced both periods of greater humidity and more aridity, documented in fossil dune fields. It was during a period of greater rainfall that the Makgadikgadi Depression in northern Botswana was formed. The former lake at one point covered 23,000 square miles (60,000 square kilometers), about the same size as Lake Victoria today. The dry riverbeds that now only hold water when it rains are also from such periods.

Credit: New World Encyclopedia

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