Valles Marineris

Canyon Week continues today with a surprise that I bet you weren't looking for. We have left terrestrial Earth on a journey to a canyon that is so large it is very difficult to imagine. Valles Marineris on Mars is a phenomenally large canyon. It is over 4000km long, 200km wide and 7km deep. For those of you who are not friendly with the metric system that means "it is huge!" No really, that means that it is 2500 miles long, 125 miles wide and more than 4 miles deep. There is no comparison to be made with anything on Earth and as I mentioned the Grand Canyon will be a posting later this week so you can make comparisons to that later.

The canyon cuts across the picture above. Below you can see some of the depths of the canyon in false color.

Needless to say, I haven't been to this canyon. As needless as it was, I said it anyway!

Fish River Canyon

To kick off Canyon Week here, I am posting about a canyon I visited a few years ago. The Fish River Canyon in southern Namibia is a very dramatic canyon. Below is a view looking down into the canyon from the main rim viewpoint. From this vantage point it appears similar to the Grand Canyon in the US as they both have dry desert conditions and surroundings.

Fish River Canyon was created by - surprise - the Fish River as it winds from the Namibian plateau until it empties into the Orange River, which provides the southern border between Namibia and South Africa.

In the picture above you can see some of the dramatic cut from the plateau on the upper left to the river below. Parts of the canyon are up to about 1600 feet deep and the canyon is about 100 miles long. Both of the pictures here today are ones I took on my visit.

Canyon Week

It is time for another theme week on No-Profundity as it has been a few months since we have had one.

This week postings will be about canyons. The picture above is of the Grand Canyon but there will definitely be a post about this canyon later in the week.

World's Best Countries

I came across a great infographic from Newsweek today about the 100 best countries in the world. As they state, they took into consideration health, education, economy and politics. Here is the link to the infographic. In case anyone was wondering the US is #11, Finland is #1 and Burkina Faso was #100. There are more than 100 countries in the world so that means there are numerous more below this ranking. There are 192 UN Nations so this is only about half of the countries in the world. The US had its highest ranking in Economic Dynamism and that was #2, while Singapore was #1 for that category. This was a fun one to explore.

Giant Clock

I read a couple of days ago about how the world's largest clock has been installed as part of a new super tall building being built in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The building itslef reminds me of the Soviet era Seven Sisters buildings in Moscow. Getting back to the clock, it has 46 meter faces, that is like 150 feet across (WOW, that is big). Here are a couple of links about the clock and the tower:
This bottom image is how the building is to look when complete. The building will be nearly 2000 feet tall when complete.
The first link in the post has the best photos but each of them has different pictures and are fun to check out.

http://gizmodo.com/5611008/worlds-largest-clock-installed-at-mecca-has-46m+diameter-faces

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100811/lf_nm_life/us_saudi_mecca_clock_1

http://tvnz.co.nz/world-news/largest-clock-begins-ticking-in-mecca-3697311?ref=rss

Shcool Zone

No, that is not a typo, at least not an unintended typographical error I made in the title.

This morning I read about this AWESOME error. The new place I will be living beginning later this month is about 2 blocks from a high school so I will now go around and see if there are any silly mistakes like this near me. I am guessing there won't be but how much fun would I have if I found something like this!!!

Seriously those are big letters, they took time to paint, how unconscious was the road crew?

Gold

So yesterday morning I heard someone say that all the gold that has been mined in the history of the world would only fill 2 Olympic swimming pools! You think of how much gold mining has gone on and all of the gold rushes and now industrial mining and all of the jewelry, etc, then imagine it all in once place, now it doesn't seem like there is that much of it anymore. More gold fun facts -

Gold was used as medecine in the middle ages (of course, something rare and beautiful can only be good for health!)

Gold has been used since the Copper Age between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

There are about 4600 tons of gold in the Fort Knox Depository.

It takes a lot of ore to get a little gold as you can see in the picture below - 860 kg ore and 30 g gold.