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Geography For The Curious Mind

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Spain attracts 96 million tourists every year.
Yet hidden in its heart is a region where fewer than 2 people per km² live.
How did one of Western Europe's emptiest places end up surrounded by major cities?
Watch the full documentary 👇
https://t.co/XRl6Ygdji6
#Spain #Geography

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In 1821, a sealing captain reported a high, mountainous island near Antarctica and named it Emerald Island. For decades, ships detoured to find it, but modern satellite imaging proved the captain had just been fooled by dense, low-lying polar fog banks

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To put global scale into perspective: the continent of Australia is physically wider than the entire diameter of the moon. Australia stretches about 4,000 kilometers from coast to coast, while the moon's diameter is only around 3,400 kilometers

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When Cyprus gained independence from the UK in 1960, Britain kept two sovereign military bases on the island. Due to a mapping error during the negotiations, a Cypriot village called Ormidhia was accidentally encircled by a British base, making it a permanent enclave #Geography

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The Dutch completely changed their geography by building a massive 20-mile dike across a violent saltwater sea inlet called the Zuiderzee. They successfully cut it off from the ocean, pumped out the salt, and turned it into a massive, calm freshwater lake

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Multiple nations are fighting over the Spratly Islands by physically building brand new land. They are dredging up sand from the ocean floor, pouring it onto underwater coral reefs, and building concrete military runways out of nowhere to claim maritime territory

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For 50 years, mapmakers kept shifting the location of "Dougherty Island" in the South Pacific. Different captains kept reporting it in slightly different spots, leading explorers to realize they were all just looking at massive, floating icebergs covered in dirt #Geography #Maps

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If you look at a globe, the entire continent of South America sits surprisingly far east. In fact, if you fly straight south from Miami, Florida, you don't hit South America at all, you miss the continent completely and end up out in the open Pacific Ocean #Geography

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There is a tiny Bosnian village called Sastavci that is completely trapped inside Serbia. The local infrastructure is such a mess that residents have to pay electricity bills to Serbia, land taxes to Bosnia, and cross international checkpoints just to go to work #Geography

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The Karakoram Highway is the highest paved international road on the planet, cutting straight through the mountain peaks connecting Pakistan and China. It reaches an altitude of over 15,000 feet, meaning construction crews had to build a highway in thin air

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There is an island between Maine and Canada called Machias Seal Island that both countries claim to own. Instead of fighting over it, lobster fishermen from both nations operate there under completely different legal systems at the same time, creating a bizarre legal grey zone

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In 1670, a Dutch captain reported finding a strange, flat island in the South Atlantic with a massive mountain in the center. Over the next 150 years, dozens of other ships logged seeing it too. But when modern search fleets looked for it, it was completely gone

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If you fly from London to Tokyo, planes don't fly in a straight horizontal line across Asia. The pilot flies straight north toward the Arctic Circle instead. Because the Earth is a 3D sphere, curving over the top of the globe is actually the shortest path.

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India has one of the last uncontacted tribes on Earth and the wettest region on the planet.
I covered 25 incredible facts that completely changed the way you’ll see this country.
Full video: https://t.co/dy8bnztUS5 
Which fact surprised you most?
#India #Geography #Maps

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The country of Lesotho is completely landlocked by just one single nation, South Africa. It’s known as the "Kingdom of the Sky" because it’s the only independent country on Earth where every single square inch of land sits more than 1,000 meters above sea level #Geography

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Switzerland built a railway tunnel so deep and long that trains travel right through the roots of the Swiss Alps. The Gotthard Base Tunnel runs for 35 miles straight through solid rock, sitting over a mile beneath the mountain peaks above it

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Four separate nations, the UK, Ireland, Iceland and Denmark, have spent decades arguing over who owns a single, tiny volcanic rock in the Atlantic called Rockall. Whoever owns the rock gets exclusive fishing and oil rights to the surrounding ocean for miles #Geography

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In 1906, famous explorer Robert Peary reported a massive, undiscovered mountain range in the Arctic called Crocker Land. An expedition went out to find it years later, only to realize Peary had been fooled by a complex polar mirage that bent light over the horizon

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Because of the squiggly shape of Central America, the Panama Canal does not run straight east to west. If you travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through the canal, you are actually moving from west to east. It breaks your brain looking at the map #Geography

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San Marino is a fully sovereign country with its own laws, passports, and military, but it sits entirely inside the borders of Italy. It is the world's oldest surviving republic, having managed to protect its mountain borders from being absorbed by Italy since the year 301