Facts Archive - Page 29 of 74 - Interesting Facts

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At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster, the wildly successful movie rental chain, boasted 9,094 locations. Today it has just one. Bend, Oregon, is home to the former giant’s last remaining outpost, a status the store attained when its counterpart in a suburb of Perth, Australia, closed in 2019. Originally opened in 1992 as Pacific Video, the location became a Blockbuster franchise store eight years later — and doesn’t look to be closing any time soon. That’s thanks in part to the 2020 documentary The Last Blockbuster, which contributed to the brick-and-mortar store being cemented as a tourist attraction among nostalgia-minded visitors.

The last Blockbuster inspired a craft beer.

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If you ever find yourself in the mood for a drink that “pairs perfectly with buttery theater popcorn,” try the Last Blockbuster. The black ale with “nuances of red licorice” is a collaboration between the store and local brewery 10 Barrel; the label even resembles Blockbuster’s logo.

Besides the throwback vibe, another major attraction is the store’s expansive library. The Bend Blockbuster has a collection of around 25,000 movies, more than six times as many as Netflix, the monolith most responsible for its parent company’s slow decline. And while no one doubts the convenience of streaming, cinephiles continue to champion independent shops such as Scarecrow Video in Seattle (120,000 titles available) and Cinefile Video in Los Angeles (30,000) that carry rare and/or out-of-print selections unlikely to be found on Netflix, Hulu, or most other streaming services.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Total late fees collected by Blockbuster in 2000

$800 million

Workers employed by Blockbuster in 2004

84,300

Netflix subscribers as of Q4 2024

301.63 million

Cost to rent a new release from Blockbuster for a day in 2011

$2.99

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Only one building outside Washington, D.C., is featured on U.S. banknotes.

Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

The first DVD ever rented on Netflix was ______.

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The first DVD ever rented on Netflix was “Beetlejuice” (in 1998).

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Blockbuster turned down the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million.

Back when the company was in its infancy, Netflix’s founders offered to sell their DVD-by-mail business to Blockbuster for the princely sum of $50 million. Blockbuster declined, and at the time their reasoning was sound — it was early 2000, their own company was valued at $6 billion, and Netflix was on track to lose $57 million that year alone. Within a decade, their fortunes had completely reversed: Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, by which time Netflix had shifted away from its mail-order roots to focus on streaming video. In 2020, the company made close to $25 billion in revenue.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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You may love chocolate, but probably not as much as the Aztecs did. This Mesoamerican culture, which flourished in the 15th and early 16th centuries, believed cacao beans were a gift from the gods and used them as a currency that was more precious than gold. The biggest chocoholic of them all was the ninth Aztec emperor, Montezuma II (1466–1520 CE), who called cacao “the divine drink, which builds up resistance and fights fatigue. A cup of this precious drink permits a man to walk for a whole day without food.” To say he practiced what he preached would be an understatement: Montezuma II was known to drink 50 cups of hot chocolate a day (from a golden goblet, no less). His preferred concoction is said to have been bitter and infused with chilis.

White chocolate is technically chocolate.

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Because it doesn’t contain chocolate solids, white chocolate isn’t technically chocolate. What it does contain is extracted cocoa butter, vanilla, milk products, sugar, and lecithin. While purists may bristle at calling it chocolate, many wouldn’t hesitate to call it delicious.

Needless to say, that was an expensive habit. Aztec commoners could only afford to enjoy chocolate during special occasions, whereas their upper-class counterparts indulged their sweet tooth more often. That’s in contrast to the similarly chocolate-obsessed Maya, many of whom had it with every meal and often threw chili peppers or honey into the mix for good measure.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Cocoa beans required to make 1 pound of chocolate

400

Percentage of the world’s cocoa supply that comes from Africa

70%

Beans on the average cacao tree

2,500

Chocolate sales in 2020

$27 billion

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Your sense of smell fluctuates throughout the day.

A hummingbird hovering over an orange flower

The average hummingbird weighs less than a nickel.

People breathe roughly 20,000 times every day.

Only one building outside Washington, D.C., is featured on U.S. banknotes.

Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

The Aztec word for the cocoa tree is “______.”

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The Aztec word for the cocoa tree is “xocoatl.”

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Candy bars skyrocketed in popularity after World War I.

Morale boosts were hard to come by during World War I, but one thing was sure to get the job done: chocolate. In America, the military chocolate tradition dates all the way back to the Revolutionary War, when the cocoa-loving George Washington included the treat in his soldiers’ rations. For our frenemies across the pond, every soldier received a King George Chocolate Tin in 1915; U.S. WWI rations were solicited from chocolate companies in 20-pound blocks, then cut down and hand-wrapped. Doughboys and Tommies (slang for U.S. and U.K. WWI soldiers, respectively) brought their sweet tooth home with them, and confectioners were happy to oblige. Candy bars became massively popular in the decade following World War I — more than 40,000 different kinds were produced in the U.S. alone by the end of the 1920s. These regional specialties began to die out following the one-two punch of the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II, when Hershey’s was commissioned to create more than 3 billion ration bars for the U.S. Army. They’ve remained an industry titan ever since, and still claim the highest market share of any American confectionery by a sizable margin.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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Walter Arnold probably didn’t think he’d be making history when he took his “horseless carriage” (read: automobile) for a spin through the humble English village of Paddock Wood on January 28, 1896, but make history he did — by traveling at an absolutely blinding pace of 8 miles per hour on the main thoroughfare. And while you may find it difficult to believe that a bicycle-riding constable was able to catch up to him, the ensuing low-speed pursuit led to Arnold paying the first-ever speeding ticket.

Germany’s Autobahn doesn’t have a general speed limit.

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Though some stretches of the famous autobahn require drivers to slow down, there are sections where you can go as fast as you like. Only about 30% of the autobahn has permanent speed restrictions, though the possibility of an official Tempolimit has been debated for decades.

Speeding wasn’t all he was charged with. Arnold was cited on four counts: using a “locomotive without a horse” (the nerve!) on a public road, operating said contraption with fewer than three people, failing to clearly display his name and address on that absolute manifestation of speed, and, last but not least, traveling at a higher velocity than 2 miles per hour. Arnold, one of England’s first car dealers, was driving a Benz that fateful day and paid the equivalent of more than $300 in today’s money for his quartet of criminality. However, a few months later, he began marketing his own Arnold Motor Carriage, a variant on the very Benz he was driving, to the public. Whether the whole thing was a publicity stunt or a mere coincidence has never been settled.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

National maximum speed limit from 1974 to 1995, when the law was repealed

55 mph

Current land speed record, set by Andy Green in 1997

763 mph

Estimated top speed of a cheetah

75 mph

First U.S. speed limit for cars, passed by Connecticut in 1901 (15 mph in rural areas)

12 mph

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Your sense of smell fluctuates throughout the day.

A hummingbird hovering over an orange flower

The average hummingbird weighs less than a nickel.

People breathe roughly 20,000 times every day.

Only one building outside Washington, D.C., is featured on U.S. banknotes.

Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

The state with the highest speed limits is ______.

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The state with the highest speed limits is Texas.

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In Finland, speeding tickets are based on your income.

Not for nothing has Finland been called the “home of the $103,000 speeding ticket.” The Nordic country, as well as a few others in Europe — Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and France — eschew the flat-rate system in favor of “day fines” that work on a sliding scale, leading to a famous case in which a high-earning Nokia executive was ordered to pay the equivalent of $103,600 for driving 47 miles per hour in a 31-mile-per-hour zone. The world record for the largest speeding fine, however, belongs to a repeat offender in Switzerland, who had to pay the princely sum of $290,000 for blazing through a 50-mile-per-hour zone near the village of St. Gallen at 85 miles per hour in a red Ferrari.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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It’s often said that “there’s probably a German word” for unusual situations that are difficult to express in English, but sometimes there’s actually a Japanese word instead. Tsundoku, for example, describes the act of buying books and never reading them. Many bibliophiles can surely relate. Doku can be used in Japanese as a verb that means “reading,” and tsun comes from tsumu, which means “to pile up.” According to University of London Japanese studies professor Andrew Gerstle, the word appears to have been coined in 1879 in a satirical reference to a teacher who didn’t read the many books he owned. Despite that, the term — which can also refer to the piles of books themselves — doesn’t carry a particularly negative connotation in Japan.

English doesn’t have any untranslatable words.

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It has plenty, with “serendipity” being perhaps the nicest. The word comes from Serendip, an ancient name for Sri Lanka, where — at least in one Persian fairy tale — people were said to make discoveries they weren’t looking for. The writer Horace Walpole coined the term in 1754.

For some, tsundoku might be anxiety- or even guilt-inducing — who hasn’t bought an imposing tome such as James Joyce’s Ulysses with every intention of reading it, only to pick up something lighter instead time after time? But it doesn’t have to be that way. There can be a joy to “practicing tsundoku,” since every unread book on your shelf can be thought of as a literary adventure in waiting. There’s no time like the present, but neither is there any harm in leaving Don Quixote for just the right moment.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Estimated number of books in the world as of 2017

136 million

Types of characters in Japanese (hiragana, katakana, and kanji)

3

Number of bookstores in the U.S. as of 2019

6,045

Items in the Library of Congress

162 million

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Your sense of smell fluctuates throughout the day.

A hummingbird hovering over an orange flower

The average hummingbird weighs less than a nickel.

People breathe roughly 20,000 times every day.

Only one building outside Washington, D.C., is featured on U.S. banknotes.

Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

The first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in literature was ______.

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The first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in literature was Yasunari Kawabata.

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There’s a Japanese phrase for when you think you’re going to fall in love.

In addition to hitomebore, a word for love at first sight, the Japanese language also has a more nuanced phrase for “the feeling upon first meeting someone that you will inevitably fall in love with them” — koi no yokan. It’s closer to predicting love than actually feeling it just yet. The term is common in shoujo manga, or comic books aimed at teenage girls, although it also has a particular resonance for older generations, who married at a young age and didn’t fully know their spouse until after tying the knot. Despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that there’s no precise English equivalent, the phrase has inspired both a short film and a rock album of the same name.

Michael Nordine

Staff Writer

Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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The shape of the United States has changed over the centuries — including its farthest reaches east and west. Today, the lower 48 states stretch around 3,000 miles, but the true span of the United States has more than tripled thanks to some of the country’s island acquisitions. In the east, the farthest point in the U.S. in relation to the mainland is Point Udall, located on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. Strangely, the farthest point to the west — on the remote Pacific island of Guam — is also called Point Udall. Although the namesakes honor two different men, they do honor the same family. Point Udall in St. Croix is named after Stewart Udall, who served as secretary of the interior for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Guam’s Point Udall is named for Stewart’s brother Morris, who served as a U.S. congressman from Arizona from 1961 to 1991.

St. Croix is a real person.

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The Catholic Church recognizes more than 10,000 saints, but St. Croix isn’t one of them. The island’s name is French and means “Holy Cross.” St. Croix was a colony of France beginning in 1674 before being sold to Denmark in 1733. The U.S. purchased the island in 1917.

Of course, these two seemingly fortuitous monikers are not a complete coincidence. In 1987, the U.S. Congress approved renaming Guam’s Orote Point to Point Udall in full awareness that the easternmost point had the same name. President Bill Clinton even called out this geographic oddity after Morris’ death in 1998, saying, “It is fitting that the easternmost point of the United States, in the Virgin Islands, and the westernmost point, in Guam, are both named ‘Udall Point.’ The Sun will never set on the legacy of Mo Udall.”

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Year Guam became a recognized territory of the U.S.

1950

Extent (in nautical miles) a country’s sovereignty extends into the ocean

12

Estimated number of Taino living in the Caribbean before arrival of the Spanish

2 million

Hours Guam is ahead of Eastern Standard Time

15

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Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

The Indigenous Taino name for the island of St. Croix is ______, meaning “the river.”

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The Indigenous Taino name for the island of St. Croix is Ay-Ay, meaning “the river.”

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There are laws on the “high seas.”

A common Hollywood trope is that any crime committed in international waters, i.e., the “high seas,” is somehow exempt from trial and prosecution — but that’s not how it works in real life. In 1982, the United Nations created the Law of the Sea as a sort of “constitution for the oceans.” This law (amended in subsequent years) established sovereignty borders and exclusive economic zones, and defined the boundaries of the high seas. Any crime committed in these waters is subject to the laws of the country that owns the vessel or structure on which it was committed. In other situations, the nations of the people involved in a crime may also claim jurisdiction. If the crime is especially heinous, such as human trafficking or other crimes against humanity, any national or international entity can try the accused due to something called universal jurisdiction.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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Egypt may be home to the world’s most famous mummies, but not the world’s oldest. That distinction belongs to Chile, where mummified remains predate their Egyptian counterparts by more than 2,000 years. Known as the Chinchorro mummies, these artificially preserved hunter-gatherers were first discovered just over a century ago in the Atacama Desert, the driest nonpolar desert in the world. Their relatively recent discovery is explained by the fact that they were not buried in ostentatious pyramids but rather — after being skinned and refurbished with natural materials — wrapped in reeds and placed in shallow, modest graves. It’s estimated that the oldest Chinchorro mummies date back a full 7,000 years. Some are now in museums, while others remain underground in land currently threatened by climate change, as rising humidity levels alter the famously dry conditions of the desert.

A mummy once received a passport.

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In 1974 — 3,000 years after his death — the mummy of Ramses II was issued a valid passport in order to be flown from Egypt to Paris for restoration. Said document included a photo of the pharaoh’s face and listed his occupation as “King (deceased).”

Throughout history, many cultures mummified their dead. Among the most notable are the Chinese, Inca, and the Guanche people of the Canary Islands. UNESCO added the Chinchorro mummies and the settlement where they were found to the World Heritage list in July 2021, and there’s a museum devoted to them in the northern port city of Arica.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Potentially active volcanoes in Chile

500+

Mummies found in Egypt, most of which are cats

1 million

Chileans who have won the Nobel Prize in literature

2

Days it took to complete the Egyptian mummification process

70

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Only one building outside Washington, D.C., is featured on U.S. banknotes.

Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

King Tutankhamun died at age ______.

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King Tutankhamun died at age 19.

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People used to hold mummy-unwrapping parties.

The Victorians had a few strange ideas about how to have fun, one of which was holding parties devoted to unwrapping mummies. The practice was particularly popular among the British elite of the early 19th century, which was then steeped in a colonialist ethos and in the grip (like much of the rest of Europe) of an “Egyptomania” initially fueled by Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt. The fad for all things Egypt was so profound that one French aristocrat wrote in an 1833 letter that “it would be hardly respectable, on one’s return from Egypt, to present oneself without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other.” Fortunately, our ideas about such things have evolved, although our fascination with mummies may just be immortal.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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On February 6, 1971, Alan Shepard took one small shot for golf and one giant swing for golfkind. An astronaut on the Apollo 14 landing, Shepard was also a golf enthusiast who decided to bring his hobby all the way to the moon — along with a makeshift club fashioned partly from a sample-collection device. He took two shots, claiming that the second went “miles and miles.” The United States Golf Association (USGA) later put the actual distance of his two strokes at about 24 yards and 40 yards, respectively.

Earth’s moon is the largest moon in the solar system.

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Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons, is the largest moon in the solar system. With a diameter of 3,270 miles, it’s even bigger than Mercury. Our moon, the fifth-largest, also ranks behind Titan (Saturn), Callisto, and Io (both Jupiter).

While not enough to land him a spot on the PGA Tour, those numbers are fairly impressive when you remember that the stiff spacesuit Shepard was wearing (in low gravity, no less) forced him to swing with one arm. And while those two golf balls remain on the moon, Shepard brought his club back, later donating it to the USGA Museum in Liberty Corner, New Jersey. Other objects now residing on the moon include photographs, a small gold olive branch, and a plaque that reads: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

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Numbers Don't Lie

Number of moons orbiting Saturn — the most of any planet in the solar system

82

Total cost of the Apollo program ($152 billion when adjusted for inflation)

$25.4 billion

Dimples in most golf balls

336-500

NASA astronauts who have walked on the moon

12

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Your sense of smell fluctuates throughout the day.

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Only one building outside Washington, D.C., is featured on U.S. banknotes.

Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

The last man to walk on the moon was ______.

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The last man to walk on the moon was Eugene Cernan.

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The moon is slowly drifting away from us.

Every year, the moon gets just a little bit farther away from Earth — 3.78 centimeters, to be precise. This is caused by the interaction between its gravity and our oceans, which influence each other in such a way that a small amount of energy is transferred to the moon’s orbital rotation. Over time, those centimeters really add up: The moon is thought to have been thousands of miles closer to us when it was first formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago.

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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While we humans can quite happily sit out in the sun for hours (with adequate sun protection, of course), jellyfish can disappear completely if washed ashore on a sunny day. This is because a jellyfish’s delicate body is composed of at least 95% water, unlike the human adult body, which is about 60% water.

Jellyfish are older than dinosaurs.

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Jellyfish have been around for more than 500 million years, possibly even as long as 700 million years, meaning they appeared more than 250 million years before the first known dinosaurs. This gives jellyfish the distinction of being the oldest multi-organ animals in the world.

As you may suppose, jellyfish are jellylike in consistency — at least when well hydrated — but they aren’t actually fish. They are in fact plankton, ranging in size from less than an inch to nearly 8 feet long, with tentacles that can measure an impressive 100 feet or more. (The largest jellyfish is longer than a blue whale.) Jellyfish have no bones, no brain, and no heart, and they use only rudimentary sensory nerves at the base of their tentacles to detect light and odors.

Due to their structure and exceptionally high water content, jellyfish can evaporate within hours in a process known as deliquescing if they’re stranded on a beach in the sun. The jellyfish shrinks as its water evaporates away, leaving behind nothing but a faint imprint on the sand.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Percentage of the Earth’s surface covered by ocean

71%

Average amount (in tons) of plankton consumed by an individual blue whale each day

16

Depth (in feet) of the deepest human free-dive, achieved by Herbert Nitsch in 2012

830

Depth (in feet) of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean

35,876

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Your sense of smell fluctuates throughout the day.

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The average hummingbird weighs less than a nickel.

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Only one building outside Washington, D.C., is featured on U.S. banknotes.

Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

On average, it takes light from the sun ______ to reach Earth.

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On average, it takes light from the sun 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth.

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Box jellyfish rank among the ocean’s deadliest creatures.

When we think of dangerous sea creatures, our minds tend to jump straight to sharks. In reality, there’s a far greater threat floating in the open water: the box jellyfish. These nearly transparent creatures possess up to 15 tentacles, each growing to roughly 10 feet in length.

Each tentacle has about 5,000 stinging cells, whose venom is considered to be among the most potent and deadly in the world. While typically used to instantly stun or kill prey such as fish and shrimp, a box jellyfish’s venom can also be fatal to any humans who come too close. The sting is so unbearably painful that human victims have been known to go into shock and drown — or die from heart failure — before even reaching the shore.

While there are an average of six fatalities from shark attacks per year, box jellyfish stings result in between 40 and 100 human fatalities annually, although experts believe the true figure is likely far higher. As such, box jellyfish can claim to be the deadliest creatures in the ocean.

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Tony is an English writer of nonfiction and fiction living on the edge of the Amazon jungle.

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Overcooking ingredients is one of the most common mishaps in the kitchen and can result in mushy vegetables, tough meats, and other gastronomic woes. Mushrooms, however, are incredibly forgiving, being almost impossible to overcook. Their ability to maintain an agreeable texture over a wide range of cooking times is all due to the unique cellular structure of fungi. The secret lies in chitin, the material that forms the cell walls in mushrooms.

Chitin, which is also found in insect exoskeletons and crustacean shells, is very durable and heat stable — unlike the cellulose found in plant cells or the proteins in animal tissue. In most foods, cooking often produces dramatic structural changes. The proteins in meat go through a process of denaturation and coagulation, causing the meat to firm up and, when overcooked, become tough. Vegetables, meanwhile, are held together by pectin, which starts to break down during cooking, releasing the bond between cells and making the vegetables turn soft — potentially too soft if overcooked.

Some mushrooms are capable of changing color to match their surroundings, like chameleons.

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Mushrooms cannot change their color in the same way as chameleons. But around 100 mushroom species do possess bioluminescent properties, allowing them to glow in the dark. By emitting light, those mushrooms attract the attention of insects, which can help spread fungal spores.

But thanks to the magic of chitin, mushrooms maintain their structural integrity, and therefore their firmness, when cooked for even long durations. Any textural change that occurs in mushrooms while cooking is more likely due to water loss than cellular breakdown. Mushrooms have a high water content, and this liquid is released while cooking, which concentrates the flavor and changes the texture slightly without compromising structure. So while it is possible to burn mushrooms through overly high heat and negligence, it’s difficult to overcook them, whether you’re sautéing a chanterelle or roasting a portobello.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Known species of edible mushrooms

2,189

Record for the most mushrooms chopped in one minute

58

Price of the most expensive giant white truffle ever sold

$330,000

Height (in feet) of the largest mushroom statue in the world

20

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Your sense of smell fluctuates throughout the day.

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The average hummingbird weighs less than a nickel.

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Only one building outside Washington, D.C., is featured on U.S. banknotes.

Russian Czar Peter the Great established a tax on beards.

Mushrooms are more closely related to ______ than to plants.

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Mushrooms are more closely related to animals than to plants.

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The Armillaria ostoyae honey mushroom is the heaviest living organism on Earth.

Deep within the Malheur National Forest of Oregon lives the heaviest living thing on Earth: a giant mushroom playfully dubbed the “humongous fungus.” This gigantic specimen of Armillaria ostoyae honey mushroom is estimated to weigh somewhere between 7,500 and 35,000 tons and occupies a total area of 2,385 acres — equivalent to 1,350 soccer fields.

DNA testing has revealed this to be a single organism, consisting of a massive mycelial network located mostly underground. While the humongous fungus can claim to be the heaviest living organism in the world, it’s not necessarily the largest in terms of area. A specimen of Posidonia australis seagrass, located in Shark Bay in Western Australia, covers an area of approximately 77 square miles — equivalent to around 28,000 soccer fields.

Both the Oregonian Armillaria ostoyae and the Shark Bay seagrass rank among the oldest living organisms on Earth. Based on current growth rates, the seagrass is estimated to be around 4,500 years old, while the honey mushroom is estimated to be at least 2,400 years old and possibly even as ancient as 8,650 years.

Tony Dunnell

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Tony is an English writer of nonfiction and fiction living on the edge of the Amazon jungle.

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On September 9, 1972, spelunkers exploring Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system made an incredible discovery. While plumbing the darkest recesses of the nearby Flint Ridge Cave system, then the longest known cave in the world, the group suddenly spotted a well-groomed tourist trail that belonged to Mammoth Cave. The spelunkers quickly realized that the two cave systems were actually one, making Mammoth Cave the longest cave in the world. (The world’s second-longest cave, Sistema Ox Bel Ha in Quintana Roo, Mexico, is around 150 miles shorter.) With the discovery, what was once simply one of America’s oldest tourist attractions became one of the world’s grandest caves.

Kentucky was originally part of Ohio.

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Virginia’s General Assembly created the county of Kentucky in 1776, and the county (which eventually split into smaller counties) remained a part of the state until 1792, when Virginia ceded it to the newly formed United States. Kentucky became the 15th state that same year.

This historic revelation was the culmination of thousands of years of human exploration of the cave system. The first peoples to enter the cave were Native Americans, who explored roughly 19 miles of its interior some 5,000 years ago. Tribes used the cave for shelter, and the discovery of mummified remains suggests they also found the caves sacred in some way. In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, an enslaved cave guide named Stephen Bishop extended the cave’s known length while also creating its first map. Entire families of explorers traversed the caves leading up to the 1930s, until Mammoth Cave became a national park in 1941. With around half a million visitors every year, Mammoth Cave continues to inspire awe just as it did many thousands of years ago.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Estimated number of caves in the contiguous U.S.

45,000

Depth of the Verëvkina cave in the country of Georgia, the deepest cave explored by humans

7,257

Year the United Nations established Mammoth Cave as a World Heritage Site

1981

Distance (in miles) of the Kentucky Derby

1.25

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The most-visited national park in the U.S. is ______.

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The most-visited national park in the U.S. is the Great Smoky Mountains.

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The world’s largest cave has its own weather system.

In Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park lies Hang Son Doong — the largest cave in the world. While the cave was discovered by a local in 1990, it took almost two decades for an official expedition to rediscover it and explore its vast interior, which encompasses a dumbfounding 1.35 billion cubic feet. Because of the cave’s immense size and consistent year-round temperature (a very comfortable 73 degrees Fahrenheit), when warm air enters the cave it forms clouds, which then cool and produce rain inside the cave, creating a unique rainforest ecosystem. This occurs at the cave’s mouth and at two dolines, spots where the cave ceiling collapsed around a millennia ago. These cave clouds only form in Vietnam’s warm and muggy spring, summer, and fall months. During the winter, when outside temperatures are cooler than the cave’s ever-consistent 73 degrees, the weather inside Hang Son Doong is crystal clear, much like in many other much smaller caves on the planet.

Darren Orf

Writer

Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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