› added 6 days ago

TIL that in 1980 a Texaco oil rig on Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur drilled into a salt mine, which created a giant whirlpool and a 164-ft waterfall that drained the lake, reversed the flow of a canal that lead to the ocean, but everyone in the mine was able to escape.

Read more babel.hathitrust.org

via reddit.com

W75p4 TIL In Milan the Madonnina (golden statue of the Virgin Mary that sits on top of the cathedral) must be the tallest point of the city. So now whenever they build a taller building they put a copy of the statue on top.
e0Xn TIL in 1978 Charlie Chaplin’s dead body was stolen from the cemetery where he was buried. The body was recovered after 3 months and then re-buried in a vault surrounded by cement.
XE1rk TIL the coastal hillsides of Japan have “tsunami stones” placed by previous generations. The stones indicate the high-water mark of previous tsunamis, with a warning to not build structures below. Heeding such warnings kept some places safe from damage during the 2011 tsunami.
oey7 TIL that 29% of San Francisco’s air pollution comes from China
00ev TIL about the Flyby Anomaly: when spacecraft do Earth-flybys at certain angles, they experience a small but sudden velocity increase, which is still unexplained. One of the proposed explanations is the existence of a ring of dark matter around Earth.