Facts about geography that you may not learn in school

Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined.

Antarctica is the largest desert in the world, because the amount of rain it receives during the year is extremely low.

France's longest border with another country is with. Brazil. French Guiana is a province of France, located in the northeastern corner of South America.

Depending on where you live, airborne dust can come from. Africa. Particularly dust from the Sahara desert regularly spills into the Amazon. In fact, without that layer of dust, the Amazon jungle might not even exist. The soil there is quite poor in nutrients and the dust acts as a form of fertilizer. Two huge but opposing geological features - one full of life, the other very sparse - but very closely related to each other.

Australia is wider than the Moon.

The earth is extremely smooth, although Mount Everest is 8.85 km above sea level and the Mariana Trench is 11 km deep. But, the distance of 19.85 km on a sphere 12,742 km in diameter is extremely small. 0.156% of the planet's circumference contains all the topographic elevations. The surface of the cue ball on the billiard table has a tolerance for finish (permissible smoothness) of about 0.222% of the surface circumference. That is, the earth is smoother than that familiar white cue ball, even if you put Mount Everest next to the Mariana Trench.

On the globe, the US state of Alaska is quite small. But it's really huge. It is larger than Montana, Texas and California combined.

There are 14 mountains, belonging to 2 mountain ranges, with an altitude of over 8,000 meters. All of them are in Asia.

The distance between New Zealand and Australia is roughly the same as the distance between the Netherlands and Libya. Simply because Europe is so small.

FedEx, a world-renowned shipping company, chooses Anchorage - a city in the southern part of the state of Alaska - as its global shipping hub. Because it is one of the only places in the world within 10 hours of flying from the three biggest global markets: North America, Europe and Asia. Who would have thought that a place that was supposed to be so remote could actually be the center of the world.

Relatively speaking, we are living on the skin of an apple. It is about the thickness of the Earth's crust relative to its volume.

The Australian tectonic plate is drifting northward at a faster rate than other plates. The entire continent is moving north and slightly clockwise at a rate of about 6.8 centimeters a year. And this is fast enough that GPS systems have to continuously compensate for it to stay accurate. In a few hundred million years, Australia will likely collide with Asia, creating a mountain range even taller than the Himalayas when this event occurs.

The country with the most different time zones is. France! Because there are so many islands and areas in the world that are considered French land. Britain also has a wide range of overseas properties, but unlike France, they do not consider them part of the same country.

This is not a collage and the phenomenon is called Lahaina Noon, which happens every two years in Hawaii, USA. That's when the sun is right at the top and the light shines straight down making everything seem shadowless. Because the Earth is always rotating, the Lahaina Noon phenomenon is sometimes located in the middle of the sea, sometimes in the desert or somewhere difficult to observe, or simply no one notices.

The northernmost point of North America is in Greenland, in Denmark. I.e. a European country whose northernmost point is somewhere outside of Europe.