My Science School

The route stretching from Cape Town, South Africa, to Magadan, Russia, 22,387 kms in length, is the world's longest walkable distance. It requires no flights or boats, just open roads and bridges. You pass through 17 countries, six time zones and all seasons of the year. The journey on this recently-discovered route has been compared to 13 trips up and down Mt Everest!

A real person walking this route at a sustainable pace would need about three years to complete the trip. They’d need to pack a variety of things or, like in the award-winning game 80 Days, sell their stuff and buy new stuff along the way: desert gear, rain gear, and even body armor for the sections through anarchic or war-torn regions like South Sudan. There’s a little bit of everything along the way, from extremely dangerous rainforest animals to near the coldest inhabited place on Earth in Russia. (Remote Bilibino, home to the smallest nuclear plant on Earth, is just a three hour flight even farther northeast after Magadan.)

People around the world do walking pilgrimages for purposes that are often spiritual. The most popular route on the Camino de Santiago, which leads to the shrine to St. James the Apostle in the Santiago de Compostela cathedral, is 500 miles long. That the hypothetical longest walk on Earth makes this daunting trip sound short is, well, blasphemous. The Appalachian Trail that runs vertically along the eastern edge of the U.S. is about 2,000 miles long, and while it’s not an explicitly religious or spiritual journey, the caretaking organization calls it a “sacred space” for its reach to people and for its preserved natural beauty.

Credit : Popular Mechanics

Picture Credit : Google 

Ice eggs are a rare phenomenon in which small pieces of ice are rolled over by wind and water. Chunks of ice break off from larger ice sheets in the sea and wash up on shore on the incoming tide or are pushed in by gusts of wind at the water's surface. Waves strike the ice chunks as they travel, slowly eroding their jagged edges into smooth curves. Seawater sticks and freezes to the forming eggs, causing them to grow. Once the ice chunks reach the shore, the pounding waves smooth out any lingering sharp edges on their surfaces, leaving behind shiny "eggs".

Given enough time, the frozen balls can grow to become boulder size. In 2016, giant snowballs washed up on a beach in Siberia, some measuring a metre (about 3 feet) across. An ice specialist from the Finnish Meteorological Institute has been quoted as saying ice balls are rare but not unprecedented, and occur about once a year on the Finnish coastline as conditions allow. They also appear on the American Great Lakes where they are called Ice balls.

Credit : Wikipedia 

Picture Credit : Google