#afactaday

also - you can find the sources i used for my facts (woah!) over [here]. this was quite an academic one so pretty easy to compile my sources, almost all of them books or articles. no idea if i'll keep this up lol i wouldn't get your hopes up

The World's tiniest McDonald's is in Sweden but it's only for bees - it’s called the McHive. #FACT

lots of these points are related, and recurring features come and go (eg you'll have a period of time where there's usually a notch in the side of the points produced during that period). a lot of speculation based on this fills in the gaps based on the time: eg the Magellan points found in South America are thought to be related to the Clovis points found in North America. for comparison, see how different points can be - most of these in this image are from different cultures found in and around Florida.

to give a super-duper speedy summary: glaciers carved the shapes of the hills (#1839) and left behind soil (#1840) which gets subducted into sinkholes (#1841) called "subsidence dolines" or "shakeholes". the water features are also cool (and cold) (#1846) and the flora is distinct inside these sinkholes (#1847). i also got distracted by the railway, which was constructed by 6,000 navvies living in makeshift towns over about 6 years (#1843, #1844, #1845). can't be bothered to link those individually so just check out the blog or website :)

since the last glacial maximum, the global sea level has risen drastically. i've seen quite different numbers for exactly how much, but roughly 110-130m in that 22 thousand years. even in the last 5ky there's been a reasonably large rise of about 5m. this has wildly changed the coastline - i was aware of Doggerland, the big bit of land between what's now England, France and Germany that disappeared about 10-8kyBP, but now i'm reading about it in the context of the Floridan peninsula, which has more than halved in area since the last glacial maximum.

#1676: after the eruption of Ksudach volcano, Kamchatka, in 1907, much of the surroundings were caked in "air-fall" pumice. some areas up to several metres deep had all life and water completely wiped, whereas some were just a few cm deep. this made it a perfect case study in succession (ecology, not the tv show). with a metre of pumice, lichen came back first, forming a "desert", followed by "pioneer herbs". in 10-30cm deep pumice, secondary succession was most prominent, whereas primary succession was moreso in 70-100cm. which makes sense. in the sweet inbetween spot is a "complex mosaic" of all sorts of plants coming back and coming for the first time. a 1994 study on this eruption recreated detailed maps of the area before and shortly after the 1907 eruption. they're ugly and old so i won't bother embedding, but they're fascinating to compare. there are a lot more different types of land many years after the eruption compared to before, even if each individual type is much less diverse. of course the lakes and rivers were filled in but then they found their way back very quickly to exactly the same size and shape, just in slightly different places. it's absolutely fascinating. the same study estimates that it'll take 2000 years for the area to "recover" completely to a climax community.

#1650: the ant Temnothorax albipennis sometimes needs to move its nest, and they use a magnificent process to choose a new site. they send out scouts who find possible sites, usually crevices. then they use tandem running to bring more ants to the new nest site, except they wait a little bit each time. the wait time is inversely proportional to how good the new nest site is - so if the new site is perfect they'll recruit ants immediately and if it's only just passable then they'll wait a while. ofc it also takes time to travel so further-away nests are also less favourable, which makes sense. eventually one of the nests will reach a critical threshold (measured by how often ants interact with one another) and when this happens, that means a high enough proportion of the colony has favoured a certain site, and the new nest has been chosen. it's insanely clever and efficient and gets the best result, yet no single ant orchestrates it. honey bees use similar processes i think, except with more waggling

#1583: the Fujita scale for assessing the intensity of a tornado was invented in 1971, but it wasn't really properly grounded in physics - all the numbers were more or less wild guesses, and you based on consensus. they upgraded the system to the Enhanced Fujita scale, which runs very similarly, but more standardised: there are a list of 26-odd "Damage Indicators" (Canada uses 31) which are basically types of structures (bungalow, shed, fence, stuff like that) and the windspeeds at which they fall over. the main difference between the two scales is that now all these structures are standardised: a wooden fence is made of panels with posts sunk into concrete post holes in the ground, for example. measuring the amount of roof lost on a heritage churche, for example, will point towards particular wind speeds to help categorise a tornado. the first tornado to get an EF5 on the new system was the Greensburg tornado in 2007.