David Worboys – As a Matter of Fact

At 6,992 km, the River Amazon is marginally longer than the Nile (6,853 km), making it the longest river on Earth. It is also far and away the greatest. Its discharge (volume of water carried) is 224,000 cubic metres per second (80 times that of the Nile), equalling the next six biggest rivers combined. These are headed by the Ganges (43,900 m3), while the narrower and shallower Nile carries a mere 2,810 m3.

The residential population of Antarctica is just 1,100 but, like Nerja, it quadruples in the summer season. Its land (or ice) area of 14,200,000 km2 is second only to Russia (16,378,410 km2) and way ahead of India (2,973,190 km2) with the world highest population of 1,428,628,000). Each single inhabitant of Antarctica enjoys available space of 13,000 km2 (about the size of Montenegro). This is 65,000 times the space for each resident of India.

The Caspian is the largest lake by far (371,000 square km). The combined volume of the next seven biggest (headed by Lake Superior) is 355,490 m2. The Caspian is bordered by two continents. Its major port is Baku, capital of Azerbaijan and the world’s lowest-lying capital at 28 metres below sea level.

Mahon, Menorca has the third largest natural port in the world, after Pearl Harbour and Sydney Harbour, which both cover a larger area but are much shallower.

Globally, the hottest 28 days ever recorded were all in July 2023. In the UK it was one of the wettest  months ever, but June there was the sunniest since 1957 and the hottest on record (overtaking 1976, 1940 and 1884). In Phoenix, Arizona the temperature reached 43+ for twenty-eight consecutive days.

The Arctic is warming at four times the rate of the rest of the world. Meanwhile in Antarctica, 12 trillion tons of ice has been lost from its glaciers since 1997.

Not a lot of people know that a pineapple grown in Australia weighed 28kg. On a slightly different subject, Germany’s smallest municipality is Groede with a population of seven. The biggest (Berlin) has 3.5 million.

The highest number of murders last year were committed in Nigeria (64,209). In Singapore there were eight. Spain recorded 292 murders; the UK had 784; USA 16,200; South Africa 21,000; Brazil 57,400.

The Nerja cave is almost five kilometres in length and 32 metres maximum height. The world’s biggest cave is in Vietnam, Hang Soon Doong, at nine km long and 200 metres high.

Spain is the only major country whose National Anthem has no words. It shares this distinction with San Marino and two partly liberated territories in former Yugoslavia.

Cordoba as a seat of learning predates the universities of Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca by over 200 years. Academics from many advanced countries came to teach and to learn subjects ranging from philosophy and maths to medicine, astronomy and botany.