The Longest Waterfall On Earth
from an article by Ken Jennings, Jeopardy champion
Until you
see one, it’s hard to imagine the size and power of the world’s most impressive
waterfalls. Six million cubic feet of water—enough to fill more than sixty
Olympic-sized swimming pools—goes over Niagara Falls, between New York and
Canada, every minute. That’s enough to produce four million kilowatts of
electricity, enough to power half of Las Vegas on a hot summer night.
But what
if the world’s biggest waterfall wasn’t big and noisy and a fancy-pants
honeymoon resort? What if no one ever saw it, because it’s miles beneath the
North Atlantic Ocean?
Scientists have discovered a series of enormous
cataracts beneath the world’s oceans, most the result of temperature
differentials. Cold water is denser than hot water (its molecules are bouncing
around less, so they need less space), so it tends to sink. When cold-water
basins pour into slightly warmer ones, their water plunges straight down, just
like at Niagara—only slightly slower, much more quietly and almost invisibly,
since it all happens underwater.
The world’s biggest underwater waterfall is located in the Denmark
Strait between Greenland and Iceland. Arctic water from the Greenland Sea drops
precipitously into the depths of the (slightly less chilly) Irminger Sea.
The amazing thing about the Denmark Strait cataract is that it
dwarfs anything you’d see abovethe waves. Its water drops almost 11,500
feet, more than three times the height of Angel Falls in Venezuela, normally
considered Earth’s tallest waterfall. And the amount of water it carries is estimated
at 175 million cubic feet of water per second. That’s equivalent to almost two
thousand Niagaras at their peak flow.
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