FactsVibe: The World Of Facts

Old Faithful is a cone geyser located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, United States. It was named in 1870 during the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition and was the first geyser in the park to receive a name. Old Faithful can vary in height from 100-180 feet with an average near 130-140 feet. More than 1,000,000 eruptions have been recorded.  Harry Woodward  first described a mathematical relationship between the  duration  and  intervals  of the eruptions in 1938.Old Faithful is not the tallest or largest geyser in the park; those titles belong to the less predictable  Steamboat Geyser .The reliability of Old Faithful can be attributed to the fact that it is not connected to any other thermal features of the  Upper  Geyser Basin . The average height of an eruption is 145 feet (44 m). Intervals between eruptions can range from 35 to 120 minutes, averaging 66.5 minutes in 1939,  slowly increasing to an average of 90 minutes apart today, which may be the result of  e

The Taj Mahal is an ivory-white marble mausoleum on the south bank of the Yamuna river in the Indian city of Agra. It was commissioned in 1632 by the Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, to house the tomb of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It is listed as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.   The tomb is the centre piece of a 17-hectare (42-acre) complex, which includes a  mosque  and a guest house, and is set in formal gardens bounded on three sides by a  crenellated  wall. Construction of the mausoleum was essentially completed in 1643 but work continued on other phases of the project for another 10 years. The Taj Mahal complex is believed to have been completed in its entirety in 1653 at a cost estimated at the time to be around 32 million  rupees , which in 2015 would be approximately 52.8 billion rupees ( U.S. $ 827 million). The construction project employed some 20,000 artisans under the guidance of a board of architects led by the court architect to the emperor,  Usta

Sailing stones , also known as  sliding rocks ,  walking rocks ,  rolling stones , and  moving rocks , are a  geological phenomenon  where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention. Instead, rocks move when large ice sheets a few millimeters thick floating in an ephemeral winter pond start to break up during sunny days. These thin floating ice panels, frozen during cold winter nights, are driven by wind and  shove  rocks at up to 5 m/min. Trails of sliding rocks have been observed and studied in various locations, including Little Bonnie Claire Playa in Nevada,and most famously at  Racetrack Playa ,  Death Valley National Park , California, where the number and length of tracks are notable. The Racetrack's stones speckle the playa floor, predominantly in the southern portion. Historical accounts identify some stones around 100 m (300 ft) from shore, yet most of the stones are found relatively close to their respec

Blood Falls is an outflow of an iron oxide-tainted plume of saltwater, flowing from the tongue of Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney in the Taylor Valley of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Victoria Land, East Antarctica. The salt content of the subglacial lake under Blood Falls is three times saltier than seawater and too salty to freeze. The reddish deposit was found in 1911 by the Australian geologist  Griffith Taylor , who first explored the valley that bears his name. The Antarctica pioneers first attributed the red color to  red algae , but later it was proven to be due to iron oxides. Chemical and microbial analyses both indicate that a rare subglacial  ecosystem  of  autotrophic   bacteria  developed that metabolizes  sulfate  and  ferric  ions. According to  geomicrobiologist   Jill Mikucki  at the  University of Tennessee , water samples from Blood Falls contained at least 17 different types of microbes, and almost no oxygen.  An explanati

The  giant huntsman spider   is a  species  of  huntsman spider  a family of large, fast  spiders  that actively hunt down  prey . It is considered the world's largest spider by leg span,  which can reach up to 1 foot (30 centimeters). The coloration is yellowish-brown with several irregularly distributed dark spots on the rear half.  The legs have wide dark bands before the first bend. Like all huntsman spiders, the legs of the giant huntsman spider are long compared to the body, and twist forward in a crab-like fashion. The giant huntsman spider is the largest member of the family Sparassidae, boasting a 30 centimeters (12 inches) leg-span, and 4.6 centimeters (1.8 inches) body-length.  The largest known member of the  Sparassidae  known prior to the discovery of  H. maxima  was the Australian  Beregama aurea  (L. Koch, 1875) with a body length of about 4 centimeters (1.6 inches). (Other relatively large members of Sparassidae have been discovered in recent years,

A snowflake begins to form when an extremely cold water droplet freezes onto a pollen or dust particle in the sky.  This creates an ice crystal. As the ice crystal falls to the ground, water vapor freezes onto the primary crystal, building new crystals – the six arms of the snowflake. The ice crystals that make up snowflakes are symmetrical (or patterned) because they reflect the internal order of the crystal’s water molecules as they arrange themselves in predetermined spaces (known as “crystallization”) to form a six-sided snowflake.  Ultimately, it is the temperature at which a crystal forms — and to a lesser extent the humidity of the air — that determines the basic shape of the ice crystal.  Thus, we see long needle-like crystals at 23 degrees F and very flat plate-like crystals at 5 degrees F.   The intricate shape of a single arm of the snowflake is determined by the atmospheric conditions experienced by entire ice crystal as it falls.  A crystal might begin to