Ask anyone what the highest point on the planet is, and they’ll likely respond with the Himalayas’ famous Mount Everest. And indeed, it is: Mount Everest stands 29,029 ft (8,848 meters) above sea level. But this well-known bit of knowledge is based on the old assumption that the Earth is a sphere, when, in fact, it actually isn’t quite that round. When one takes this factor into account, Everest’s reign at the top of the world appears to to come up short.
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The geologically active region surrounding the edge of the Pacific Ocean, known as the Ring of Fire, has dramatically increased it’s activity over the past week, with numerous earthquakes above magnitude 6.0 occurring in various regions along the Pacific Basin’s periphery. While mainstream geologists and seismologists maintain that the increase in activity in the Ring of Fire over the past four decades can statistically be accounted for as random chance, it’s still far from unusual for large earthquakes in seemingly unconnected regions to occur within days of one another. This raises the obvious question: are these earthquakes somehow related?
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A recent study has unveiled a new perspective on the ancient eruptions that formed the region now known as the Snake River Valley in Idaho and the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. The study, conducted out of the University of Leicester, found that there were far fewer individual eruptions over the 8-to-12 million-year span that formed the region’s geography, but those individual eruptions were much more violent than originally estimated.
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Some of our smallest astronomical neighbors just keep getting odder and odder: recent observations of the bright spots found on dwarf planet Ceres have shown them to be brightening and dimming over the course of it’s 9-hour day.

The spots, made of a briny mixture containing magnesium sulfate hexahydrite, appears to be upwelling in certain spots from below the former asteroid’s surface. The spots have been found to emit a haze, indicating that the water in the material is evaporating into space, leaving the pale minerals deposited on Ceres’ dark surface.
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