Earth
Information, facts and statistics about the planet we all call home.
The planet Earth is the fifth largest in our solar system and is the third planet from the sun, around which it travels a complete orbit every 365.25 days. The extra .25 causes us to insert a leap year every 4 years.
71% of the Earth's surface is covered with water, and we have the only planet in our solar system on which water can natually exist in the 3 states of solid (ice), liquid (rivers and oceans) and vapour (clouds). This is one of the primary reasons why it is also the only planet to support life.
Although it feels pretty solid the majority of the Earth beneath the surface is molten fluid, with the solid crust on which we all live having an average depth of about 40 miles from a radius of around 3960 miles. Relatively speaking this means that the crust is about the same thickness as the skin of an apple.
The fact that the crust "floats about" on a molten core causes the phenomena known as Plate Tectonics, which in turn causes the 13000 earthquakes detected each year.
The hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 136 degrees farenheit (57.8 celsius) in El Azziza in Libya. The coldest temperature ever recorded was -129 degrees farenheit (-89 celsius) at Vostock, Antarctica.
There are somewhere between 5 million and 30 million species of life on Earth. Around 1.75 million of these have been formally identified and named, half of which are insects.
Living organisms range in size from 0.2 micrometers up to, depending on your definition 40+ hectares of the Aspen tree, which forms multiple trees connected by a single root system, or 9 km2 in the case of the giant Armillaria ostoyae fungus.
In the animal kingdom the smallest insect is the male Dicopomorpha echmepterygis at approx. 139 µm. The largest animal ever to have lived is the Blue Whale, which has been measuered at over 33 m.
The largest primate that ever lived was probably the Gigantopithecus which is believed to have averaged 3m tall, although going by sheer weight alone the heaviest primate ever is likely to have been man, or specifically a mobidly obese woman named Carol Yager who, if estimates of her peak weight are accurate, weighed in at 1600lbs.