This is the January 2024 edition of my fascinating facts newsletter, which includes a range of interesting topics. This includes topics including avalanches, Natural Phenomena and forgotten technology.
Fascinating Facts January 2024 Contents
You can download the full newsletter to read HERE, however some snippets are listed below.
Avalanches
Such innocuous tiny flakes of harmless snow, when in mass, can become deadly as a fully developed avalanche weighing up to millions of tons and can accelerate from standing to speeds approaching 200 miles per hour in minutes. But an avalanche is not just snow; the force of the mass of snow gathers up rock, ice, soil, vehicles, buildings in its path and other material as it slides swiftly down a mountainside all faster than the world’s fastest skier. Read More…
The Wonders of Natural Phenomena
Blood Falls is an outflow of an iron oxide–tainted plume of saltwater, flowing from the tongue of Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney in the Taylor Valley of the Mc Murdo Dry Valleys in Victoria Land, East Antarctica. The iron-rich hypersaline water sporadically emerges from small fissures in the ice cascades. The saltwater source is a subglacial pool of unknown size overlain by about 400 metres (1,300 ft) of ice several kilometres from its tiny outlet at Blood Falls. Read More…
Forgotten Technology
The Romans were builders and their aqueducts, bridges are still standing. The dome of the Pantheon is the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, 2,000 years later. The exact recipe for Roman concrete, in particular its use underwater, has baffled scientists for millennia. Read More…
The Seven Generations
As a person of the Silent Generation, I have lived through 6 generations and often reflect on the fact that the Silent and Baby Boomers were the best generations. There was something about the pace of life, the lack of big brother, the nanny state of Health and Safety and the fear of expressing an opinion in case it causes offence and ends up in legal proceedings! Children learned by experience. They were never stressed. If people were stressed, they just got on with what they had to do. It was never an excuse. Read More…
Female Pirates
The first and only American woman pirate she ran away from home as a teen and married George Wall, a fisherman. Settling in Boston with constant money problems led them to turn to a life of crime. In 1781, they procured a small boat, and with a few low-life mariners preyed on ships off the coast of New England. Their ingenious and brutal strategy was when there was a storm make their boat look like it had been ravaged by rough seas. The comely Rachel would stand on deck pleading for aid from passing ships. When the rescuers came near, they were boarded, robbed and murdered. Read More…
Have we learnt the lesson of self sufficiency?
Hitler was determined to starve this country into submission and directed the Kriegsmarine, using U-boats, mines and surface raiders, assisted by the Luftwaffe and Italian submarines, to strangle the transatlantic lifeline. For me, this was history. Being born in, 1936 I grew up just accepting the situation. But of course for my parents this was a lot of change. As less than one third of the food available in the UK at the start of the war was home produced. This meant that the country had to import some 20 million tons each year, such as meat, cheese, sugar, fruit, cereals and fats, as well as large qualities of fuel. Hoping to be better prepared than during the First World War, by 1938, the government had printed ration books. Read More…
