The 7 Most Interesting World Facts You'll Ever Hear

 1. About 69 percent of the world's fresh water is stored in glaciers and ice sheets.

According to Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources, published by the United States Geological Survey, the seas hold little over 96 percent of the total amount of water on the planet (USGS). That is, however, largely seawater. Because 68.7% of the world's fresh water is locked in ice caps, perpetual snow, and glaciers, you'll have to go to the poles to find it. Sign up for our daily newsletter to have more facts delivered straight to your inbox.

2. The world's fastest wind gust ever recorded was 253 miles per hour.

Keep your caps on because this isn't your typical windstorm. Olivia, a tropical cyclone off the coast of Barrow Island, Australia, struck with such ferocity in 1996 that it set a new record. "Olivia's eyewall generated five intense three-second wind gusts, the greatest of which was a 253 mph gust," according to The Weather Channel, shattering the previous wind record of 231 mph recorded on Mount Washington, New Hampshire in 1934.

3. Droughts in Europe have been the worst in over 2,100 years.

Since 2015, Europe has been suffering severe dry periods and excessive temperatures, resulting in massive droughts. To try to narrow down the cause, researchers headed by the University of Cambridge (and published on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website) looked at isotopes in the rings of old European Oak trees in Central Europe that evolved over thousands of years. According to EurekAlert!, they determined that the dry periods are a "result of human-caused climate change and accompanying alterations in the jet stream."

4. Hawaii is the finest site on the planet to witness rainbows.

If you're a big fan of rainbows and want to see them all, the state of Hawaii is the place to go. The area's "mountains provide significant gradients in clouds and rainfall, which are important to abundant rainbow sightings," according to a report published by the American Meteorological Society in 2021. Air pollution, pollen, and a huge number of cresting waves all contribute to Hawaii's rainbow quantity and quality being at the top of the list.

5. Greenland has fossilized plants under 1.4 km of ice.

The Greenland Ice Sheet covers around 80% of Greenland, making it the "biggest and perhaps the sole relic of the Pleistocene glaciations in the Northern Hemisphere," according to Britannica. Is it, however, always been this cold? Researchers discovered "well-preserved fossil plants and biomolecules" at the bottom of a 1.4 km core sample taken in 1966 at Camp Century during the Cold War, indicating that the massive sheet melted and reformed at least once in the last million years. Brrrrr!

6. The ocean floor may be mapped using whale songs.

Fin whales are the ocean's version of Barry White. According to Scientific American, the deep, roaring sounds that males employ to attract mates are the loudest of all aquatic species and can be heard "up to 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) distant." They can also be used to musically map the ocean floor, because to the fact that sound can travel to depths of 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles), bounce back, and give researchers precise readings. Furthermore, a study published in Science in 2021 found that employing a fin whale's song is considerably more beneficial and has a lower impact on sea life than using a huge air gun, which is the standard equipment used by researchers.

Deep-sea volcanoes have revealed new organisms.

Finding previously unknown organisms in the depths of the ocean may sound like something out of a science fiction horror film, but a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in 2020 found "over 90 putative bacterial and archaeal genomic families and nearly 300 previously unknown genera" in a deep-sea volcano near New Zealand. Hydrothermal vents, like deep-sea volcanoes, have been connected to the "beginning of life" in certain studies. So, are we witnessing the emergence of future land-dwellers? We'll have to wait and see what happens.