A wildfire can survive winter after it seems dead. If emb... | funfact.wiki | funfact.wiki
A wildfire can survive winter after it seems dead. If embers burn into deep peat, they can smolder under snow for months, then return to the surface when spring dries the ground. Researchers call these zombiefires.
The world's firstsunglasses were invented about 2,000 years ago by Arcticindigenous people. They carved animal bones or ivory to fit the face with thin slits, preventing snow blindness from UV rays reflected off the snow.
The Greenland shark is the longest-living vertebrate. In 2016, radiocarbon dating aged one female at ~400 years; the species may reach 272–512. The secret is a metabolism crawling in the cold, deep Arctic. It takes ~150 years to mature — so one maturing today was born in the 1600s.
The plant cistus has sap with a flash point of just 35°C, spontaneously igniting in dry Mediterranean summers. It burns surrounding plants to death, but its fire-resistant seeds germinate in the ash—an evolutionary self-immolation strategy to beat competitors.
A camel's hump stores fat, not water — and evolved for the Arctic, not the desert. 3.5 million years ago, ancestors in Arctic Canada grew fat-storing humps to survive winters. When they migrated south, the hump proved equally useful in the desert.