Archives for June 2019

Facts About Biafo Glacier

June 18, 2019 By admin 121 Comments

Biafo Glacier is the third largest glacier outside the world’s polar regions. This large river of ice is located in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan. The glacier lies inside the Karakoram mountain range. Biafo glacier meets the Hispar glacier at a height of 5128m.

Biafo Glacier
Author: BlackZero_007 / (CC BY 2.0)

Biafo was explored for the first time in 1892 by Sir Martin Conway, a British mountaineer.

The glacier has a total length of about 67km.

The area of the glacier is about 853km². More than 70% of the glacier’s total area is made up of snow and ice.

Together with the Hispar glacier which is 49km long, the two glaciers form a long highway of ice more than 100km long.

Author: Yousaf Feroz Gill / (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Unlike, other glaciers of the Karakoram the Biafo’s main source of ice is from snowfall rather than avalanches.

The glacier collects a lot of snow each year. However, due to global warming and climate change, more snow and ice is melted and lost than is collected by the glacier.

The Biafo-Hispar highway has significant historical importance too. In ancient times the route served as an important path for traders as well as invading armies who used the path to attack adversaries located at the other end of the highway. In ancient times warriors from Nagar in the west used to cross this route to attack the Baltitstan Kingdom in the east.

The area also has some wild animals. These include the Himalayan Bear, Siberian Ibex, Mountain Goat(Markhor) and Snow Leopards.

Snow Lake, located at Biafo-Hispar junction
Author: Dave Hancock, Fieldtouring.com / (CC BY-SA 2.5)

At the Hispar Pass, the place where Biafo ends and Hispar glacier starts, there’s a large body of ice called the snow lake.

Snow Lake is about 16m wide and has a total area of about 77km². The ice in the lake has a depth of more than 1.6km, and is considered one of the largest ice caps in the non-polar regions of the world.

Some people claim to have seen footprints of the cryptid Yeti, on the sufrace of the Snow Lake.

Biafo glacier is covered in moraines, boulders and has a lot of crevasses which makes trekking very difficult.

Facts About Arafura Sea

June 11, 2019 By admin Leave a Comment

The Arafura Sea is in a continental shelf area located between western New Guinea and the northern part of Australia. Arafura Shelf appears to have been a low-relief land surface that had an used to have a desert like climate.To the north, it is bordered by the Tertiary collision zone between the Australian craton and the northern island arc. To the south the sea adjoins the stable Australian craton. The sea is also a host for numerous Indonesian islands in the region. Towards the east of the Arafura Sea forms a stable continental shelf which has suffered a little from some intense compressional events. Episodes of rifting and basin formation for the Arafura sea are recorded to be in Paleozoic and Mesozoic sequences.

The following are a few facts about the Arafura sea:

Sea levels were so low during the last glacial maximum that the Arafura Shelf, the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the Torres Strait formed a large land bridge that connected Australia and New Guinea.
During the time of that land bridge themigration of humans from Asia into Australia had a noticeable increase.
The Arafura Sea is a generally shallow sea in the western Pacific Ocean that occupies about 250,000 square miles between the north coast of Australia, also known as the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the south coast of New Guinea.
According to the IHO, or theInternational Hydrographic Organization, the Arafura Sea is defined as being one of the waters of the East Indian Archipelago.
The Arafura sea has various depths with the more shallow of those depths being between 165 to 260 feet, deepening as is goes towards the western edge, this is the point where coral reefs have grown at depths close to 2,000 feet.
The oceans depth of the Arafura Shelf exhibits depths of between 160 and 260 ft, but the deeper parts which can go down as far as 1,970 ft can occur at the edges.
The saltiness of the Arafura Sea annually ranges from 34.2-34.8 in the deeper parts to the north to 34.2 to 35.0 on the Arafura Shelf.
The Arafura Sea yields a little under 4 million metric tons of seafood annually.
With marine ecosystems and fish stocks in a steady decline, the Arafura Sea stands out as one of the most abundant places to fish in the world.

An island in the Arafura Sea
Author: SuWiRe / (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Arafura Sea holds many mysteries and there are still issues with illegal fishing going on. If this illegal trend continues, the numerous local communities who surround and depend on the Arafura Sea will face a number of obstacles in order to sustain their livelihoods and quality of life. Increasing their economic growth while maintaining an optimum environment quality are the primary challenges that need to be overcome for this region to grow economically. Along with the illegal fishing in the area there are threats of pollution being dumped into the sea from nearby areas. Luckily there is already a controversy from the local people trying to save their economy and to prevent the pollution of the Arafura sea.

History of Tea Bags

June 2, 2019 By admin 1 Comment

If you’re a tea person you would know how important tea bags are and how they’ve made our lives so much easier. Whether we are at work or hanging out or at home, us tea lovers just can’t live without tea. Tea bags make the task of brewing tea a lot easier. Instead of boiling the tea in a pot all we do is just dip the tea bag in a cup of hot water(add a little milk too if we like it that way) and we’re good to go. But of course it wasn’t always like this. Tea bags were just invented over a 100 years ago and that too by accident.

Different types of tea in teabags.
Author: André Karwath / (CC BY-SA 2.5)

The story of how tea bags were invented goes like this:

In 1904, Thomas Sullivan a tea merchant from New York sent some samples to his clients. The samples Thomas sent were wrapped in pouches of silk. His clients instead of opening them up just dipped the pouches directly into hot water and brewed the tea. And this is how tea bags were born.

Seeing the popularity of his tea bags and customer feedback, Sullivan developed sachets made out of gauze, the first purpose-made tea bags. Commercial production of tea bags started in the 1920s, and soon the bags became popular all over the United States.

Up until the early 1940s tea bags resembled small round sacks. The modern day rectangular tea bags that we use today were not invented until 1944.

Evolution of Lipton’s Tea Bags
Image: Unilever

Some Facts About Tea Bags:

Each Tea Bag contains about 3g of tea.

In each teabag of Litpon’s Black Tea, the tea contains about 25mg of Potassium.

Teabags were adopted by the British much later than the Americans. Tetley was the first company to introduce tea bags in UK.

Tetley started commercial production of teabags in Britain in 1953, about 30 years later than the Americans did.

Tea bags are made up of either filter-paper,nylon or food grade PVC(plastic).

Some artists use on teabag papers to create different shapes of art. This practice has become known as teabag folding or teabag origami.

Because Teabags are not airtight, the tea loses flavor over time. So it’s best to use them as quickly as possible once the packing containing the teabags is opened.