Blue Hill Publishing

03/06/2017

03/06/2017

On May 6, 1937, the German airship Hindenburg burst into flames while attempting to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The disaster killed 35 people on the airship, and one member of the ground crew, but miraculously 62 of the 97 passengers and crew survived. The disaster was caused by an electrostatic discharge ( i. e. a spark ) that ignited leaking hydrogen. The incident shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying rigid airship and marked the abrupt end of the airship era.

03/06/2017

Thanks to the modern measuring techniques, and after an archaeological survey taking more than five years, the total length of the world’s largest man-made structure had been finally revealed in 2012, as 13,170.69 miles. The surprising length is more than twice as long as the previous estimates. The Great Wall of China took more than 2,000 years to build. It was built in different areas by different dynasties to protect different territorial borders. The Great Wall, one of the greatest wonders of the world, was listed as a World Heritage by UNESCO in 1987.

03/06/2017

Mount Vesuvius is best known for its eruption in AD 79 that led to the burying and destruction of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. That eruption ejected a cloud of stones, ash and fumes to a height of 20.5 miles, spewing molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 tons per second, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima bombing. An estimated 16,000 people were killed in this eruption due to hydrothermal pyroclastic flows.