Want to try being in four places at once? Then get thee to the aptly named Four Corners Monument, which marks the intersection of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. It’s the only place in America where so many states converge, which is especially impressive given that there are at least 60 spots where three states meet. The exact location of the quadripoint (the technical term for a place where four territories touch) was a matter of more debate than you might expect, with some surveyors arguing that it should have been about 2,000 feet to the west, thanks to changes in the technical reference systems used for various surveys. It wasn’t until a 1925 Supreme Court case that the matter was officially settled. 

Kentucky borders the most other U.S. states.

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Kentucky borders seven states, but Missouri and Colorado take the cake with eight states each.

Ending the dispute was an especially lengthy process when you consider that the borders were first surveyed in the aftermath of the Civil War. What’s more, it isn’t just state boundaries that are marked by the Four Corners Monument: The lands of the Navajo Nation, which maintains the site, meet those of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe there. The monument itself is fairly modest, with each state’s seal embedded in a cement pad around a circular granite disk that reads, “Here meet in freedom under God four states.” Sprawl just so on that disk, and you can have a different limb in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico each. 

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Traversing thousands of miles across eastern Asia, the Great Wall of China has stood as a symbol of the country's military and technological know-how for more than 2,000 years. And thanks to a team of scientists at Zhejiang University, we now know that the secret to its legendary endurance is … sticky rice soup?

As explained in Accounts of Chemical Research in 2010, the scientists stumbled upon this discovery while examining mortar samples from the Great Wall and other long-standing Chinese buildings. They realized the mortar was an unusual composite created from slaked lime and congee, the former a heated type of limestone exposed to water, and the latter a pudding-like rice porridge commonly eaten throughout Asia. When combined with the lime’s calcium carbonate, a complex carbohydrate in the congee known as amylopectin helped stymie the development of calcium carbonate crystals in the mortar, resulting in a compressed structure that gave the ancient barrier the strength to withstand earthquakes and bulldozers.

The Great Wall of China is visible from the moon.

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The Great Wall's similar coloring compared to the surrounding landscape renders its identification from the lunar surface a futile task. Experts say that the wall can only be discerned by the human eye in low orbit under favorable lighting conditions.

While not invented until around the fifth century CE, well after the initial parts of the Great Wall were raised, the sticky rice-lime mortar was used for the well-preserved sections that remain from the Ming dynasty (the 14th through 17th centuries). Which all goes to show that along with fueling the diet of a country of 1.4 billion people, this simple porridge packs enough power to keep historic structures upright through all sorts of human- and nature-instigated onslaughts.

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Earth is far from the perfect “blue marble” we like to picture. In reality, our planet is filled with deep trenches, towering mountains, and centrifugal bulges that make its mass uneven across the globe — and that unequal distribution can really mess with gravity. One famous example is the Hudson Bay region in northeastern Canada, where gravity reaches some of its weakest levels in the entire world. These levels aren’t extraordinarily low — residents weigh only one-tenth of an ounce less than they would elsewhere — but it’s enough for scientists to take notice and wonder why this particular area experiences gravity differently. 

Hudson Bay is the farthest south penguins live year-round.

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Hudson Bay is a vital habitat for one arctic species — but it’s not penguins. Polar bears live year-round near James Bay, a body of water connected to the southern Hudson Bay. The Hudson Bay’s yearly freeze-up allows polar bears to hunt seals on the bay itself.

The force of gravity is calculated using mass and distance. To put it simply, the mass of the Earth, combined with our proximity to its surface, is why we feel gravity the way we do. This is also why astronauts experience lower gravity as they move farther away from the Earth’s surface. Because we experience the Hudson Bay anomaly while still on Earth, that must mean the area somehow has less mass. It turns out there’s not only one, but two reasons for this. The first is a process in the Earth’s mantle (found 60 to 124 miles beneath the planet’s surface) called convection, in which super-hot magma moves continuously in a circular motion, sinking and rising back up again — and pulling tectonic plates with it. One of these sinking currents occurs in the Hudson Bay region, and could account for an estimated 55% to 75% of its “missing” gravity. 

The second reason takes us back 20,000 years to the last ice age, when much of North America was covered by a nearly 2-mile-thick glacier called the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Its massive bulk, especially around Hudson Bay where the glacier formed huge domes, compressed rock into the Earth’s mantle and created a giant indent with less mass. Scientists have confirmed that gravity is slowly increasing in the area as the Earth rebounds (at about half-an-inch per year) from this glacial trauma, but residents of the Hudson Bay region will still experience some gravity-induced weight loss for the next 5,000 years or so.

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The Earth’s oceans are just as dynamic a landscape as the bits of rock that peek above its surface. Our seas are home to the world’s longest mountain chain, its deepest trenches, and other impressive natural structures that boggle the mind. The ocean is even home to its own underwater lakes and rivers. When seawater seeps up from the seafloor, it mixes with the salt layers above and creates a depression in the seabed, where this heavy, dense, and briny mixture rests. Some of these depressions can be more like puddles than proper lakes, stretching only a few feet across, but others can be many miles wide or long, and even feature their own underwater waves. And like lakes and rivers on land, these underwater features also have coastlines and animals that rely on these salty seas within seas to survive. 

The oceans contain the vast majority of the world’s wildlife.

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Some 94% of the world’s wildlife can be found in the oceans. However, the oceans contain just 1% of life overall as measured by biomass (tons of carbon); plants, which mostly live on land, account for more than 82% of biomass. Humans, meanwhile, comprise just 0.01% of biomass.

These aren’t the only types of “rivers” found in the world’s oceans. Where some of the world’s major rivers (including the Amazon and Congo) meet the sea, an underwater current of silt and sand can create massive channels that move more sediment in a few weeks than all the world’s regular rivers combined can move in a year. Although these are massive undersea structures, scientists discovered them only 40 years ago with the advent of sonar mapping, and many mysteries still surround them. In fact, some oceanographers have said that we know more about the surface of Mars than the depths of the Earth’s oceans, and less than 19% of the ocean floor has been mapped in detail. Which raises the question: What other amazing aquatic wonders have yet to be discovered?

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