Post * eK9b — Curious Curator

› added 11 years ago

63

TIL that in 1875 a swarm of locusts 1800 miles long and 110 miles wide swarmed through the western U.S., causing $200M in crop damage. At 12.5 trillion insects, it was the largest concentration of animals ever seen. Less than 30 years later the species had vanished, and was declared extinct in 1902.

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WNQB TIL former US President Calvin Coolidge (1924-28) enjoyed “buzzing for his bodyguards and then hiding under his desk as they frantically searched for him”

Zpvp4 TIL that a Butt load is (was) an actual unit of measurement. A butt approximately equated to 108 imperial gallons (130 US gallons)

wLAko TIL Clair Cameron Petterson, the American geochemist who proposed the still-accepted age of the Earth of 4.5 billion years old, helped accelerated the phaseout of lead from all standard, consumer, automotive gas, decreasing lead level in blood of Americans by 80% by the late 1990s.

e0G8k TIL that the lowest point in Louisiana is found in its largest city, New Orleans, an area that lies at an elevation of 8 feet below sea level. The average elevation of the city lies at 1 to 2 feet below sea level mainly owing to subsidence as much of the city had been constructed on swamp lands.

wLXKE TIL there is a "forest" covering over 100 acres consisting of over 40,000 trunks of a single tree. The trunks are all connected to the same root system and collectively weigh 6000 metric tons. The root system is an estimated 80,000 years old, though each trunk only lives about 130 years.