Bananas and Brazil nuts are radioactive! Bananas contain trace amounts of potassium-40, a radionuclide with a half-life of approximately 1.3 BILLION years! Brazil nuts can contain 1,000 times more radium than other foods! A pocket full of Brazil nuts would likely set off the radiation sensors at a nuclear power plant! As alarming as these finding can be made to sound, in real life both of these foods have been consumed by large numbers of people over entire lifetimes without any known adverse effects from their nominal radioactivity.
The exposed bedrock formations that support the skyscrapers of New York City were formed under extreme pressure requiring a depth of at least 25 miles. At one time the area was under a towering mountain range as tall as the present day Alps, but erosion has worn the mountains down almost flat, leaving a surface barely above current sea level.
The Alps were created by at least three major over-thrust processes resulting from the collisions of tectonic plates. The result is a "layer cake" with twists and folds that often resulted in older rocks on top of younger ones.
The Matterhorn, the highest peak in the Alps, is constructed of three major layers. The bottom layer came from Europe. The middle layer is sedimentary rock from the Atlantic sea floor. The top layer came from Africa and is 200 million years older than the sedimentary layer below it.
Up until around 60 million years ago, the red sandstone rock that lines one side of Loch Ness in Scotland was part of the Catskill Mountains in North America.
Coconuts kill 10 times more people per year than sharks.