30 Most Extreme Geographic Wonders on Earth

[00:00:03]Earth is not a gentle [music] planet.

[00:00:04]Beneath its habitable surface and temperate seasons lie places of almost incomprehensible violence, heat, cold, pressure, and isolation. Deserts where rain has not fallen in recorded history.

[00:00:16]Lakes so acidic they dissolve flesh and volcanoes that have been erupting continuously for millennia. Here are 30 of the most extraordinary, punishing, and extreme places on the surface of the Earth. Number one, the Danakil Depression in northeastern Ethiopia is widely considered one of the most hostile places [music] on the surface of the Earth. It sits roughly 125 m below sea level, making it one of the lowest points on land, and average temperatures exceed 34°C year-round, with [music] highs regularly surpassing 50°.

[00:00:48]Three tectonic plates are pulling apart simultaneously here, producing active lava lakes, hydrothermal fields, and salt flats stained lurid yellows, greens, and reds by sulfuric acid. The landscape looks more like the surface of another [music] planet than anything else on Earth. Next up, Antarctica. It is the coldest, driest, windiest, and highest continent on Earth, and it holds records in all four categories simultaneously. The lowest temperature ever recorded [music] on Earth was measured here, -89.2°C at the Soviet Vostok Station in 1983.

[00:01:22]Though satellite data suggests temperatures in certain [music] areas may have dipped even lower. Antarctica receives less precipitation than the Sahara Desert, making it a polar desert.

[00:01:32]Winds in some coastal regions exceed 320 km/h. Beneath the ice sheet lies a continent [music] of mountains, valleys, and lakes hidden for millions of years.

[00:01:43]At number three, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean is the deepest known place on the surface of the Earth.

[00:01:49]The Challenger Deep, its lowest point, reaches approximately 10,935 [music] m below sea level.

[00:01:56]The pressure down there is about 1,086 times what you feel at the surface, enough to crush almost any [music] vessel ever built.

[00:02:05]The temperature is just above freezing.

[00:02:07]No sunlight has ever reached [music] the bottom. Despite all of this, life exists there. Microorganisms, shrimp-like amphipods, sea cucumbers, and various species of fish have all been found at extreme depths. It has been visited by humans fewer times than the surface of the moon. Then there is Lake Natron.

[00:02:24]Located in northern Tanzania, it is one of the most corrosive bodies of water on Earth. Its pH can reach [music] as high as 10.5, nearly as alkaline as ammonia, because of the natron and trona minerals that seep into it from the surrounding volcanic rock. The water temperature can [music] reach 60°C in shallower areas.

[00:02:44]Animals that fall into it or are unfortunate enough to land on its surface are calcified, their bodies hardened into eerie mineral statues.

[00:02:52]And yet [music] Lake Natron is the primary breeding ground for roughly 3 million lesser flamingos, the only species that can tolerate its chemistry well enough to nest there, using the caustic lake as protection from predators.

[00:03:04]Number five. Death [music] Valley in California holds the record for the highest reliably recorded air temperature anywhere on Earth.

[00:03:12]On July 10th, 1913, [music] a temperature of 56.7°C was recorded at Furnace Creek, [music] a record that still stands. The valley sits at up to 86 m below sea level, [music] and its surrounding mountain ranges trap heat in the basin like an oven. In summer, the ground surface temperature can exceed 90°C.

[00:03:32]Despite all of this, Death Valley is a national park and attracts over a million visitors annually. [music] If Death Valley is brutally hot, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile takes dryness to a completely different level.

[00:03:43]It is the driest non-polar desert on Earth. Some weather stations in its core have never recorded measurable rainfall at all. Certain riverbeds in the Atacama have been dry for an estimated 120,000 years.

[00:03:56]It sits trapped in a rain [music] shadow between the Chilean coastal range and the Andes. It is so dry that some patches of soil contain almost no life at all, making them the closest thing on Earth to the dead [music] soil of Mars.

[00:04:08]Interestingly, when it does rain on rare occasions, the desert erupts in a spectacular [music] bloom of wildflowers that covers the landscape in pink and purple.

[00:04:17]Then there is Mount Everest.

[00:04:19]At 8,849 m above sea level, it is the highest point on Earth above mean sea level. The summit sits in what climbers call [music] the death zone, above 8,000 m, where the air pressure is so low that there is only about a third of the oxygen you would get at sea level.

[00:04:36]People who are not used to that altitude lose consciousness within minutes. Winds at the summit regularly exceed 200 km/h.

[00:04:43]The temperature can drop to minus 60° C.

[00:04:46]>> [music] >> More than 6,000 people have reached the summit since Hillary and Norgay first did so in 1953.

[00:04:53]More than 300 have died trying, and many of their bodies remain on the mountain.

[00:04:58]And if Everest alone is not enough, consider [music] the entire plateau beneath it. The Tibetan Plateau is the largest and highest plateau on Earth, covering approximately 2.5 million square kilometers at an [music] average elevation of over 4,500 m above sea level. So vast and so elevated that it directly affects the Asian monsoon and weather patterns across the entire planet.

[00:05:20]>> [music] >> It is sometimes called the roof of the world. Winters are brutal, with temperatures well below minus 30° C in places. [music] The air is thin enough that altitude sickness hits almost every newcomer. And yet [music] the Tibetan Plateau has been continuously inhabited by humans for at least 15,000 years. Number nine, another extremely cold place is [music] Oymyakon, a small village in the Sakha Republic of northeastern Russia, home to roughly [music] 500 people, and the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth. The lowest temperature ever recorded there was -71.2° C in 1924, [music] the coldest temperature ever reliably recorded in any permanently lived-in settlement on Earth. At that temperature, exposed skin freezes in seconds, engines must be left running or they will freeze in place, and pens stop [music] working because the ink freezes solid. Despite all of this, Oymyakon has been lived in for centuries, originally as a winter campsite for reindeer herders. Number 10, Lake Assal in Djibouti is the third saltiest lake in the world, roughly 10 times saltier than the ocean. It sits 155 m below sea level, making it the lowest point in Africa and one of the lowest in the world. The lake has no outflow. Water evaporates continuously in the extreme heat, depositing thick [music] white crusts of salt around its edges. The landscape surrounding it is a surreal expanse of white [music] crystalline salt flats, ringed by black volcanic rock, one of the most striking and inhospitable landscapes on the continent. Speaking of extreme water, [music] the Amazon Basin is the largest tropical rainforest on Earth, covering approximately 5.5 million square kilometers across nine countries. It contains about 10% of all species on the planet. The Amazon River alone discharges roughly 20% of all the fresh water that enters the world's oceans.

[00:07:11]In some parts of the forest, rainfall exceeds 3,000 mm per year. The forest releases so much water into the air through its leaves that it creates its own weather systems. It is the closest thing Earth has to a biological engine, producing oxygen, regulating rainfall, and [music] cycling carbon on a continental scale.

[00:07:30]And while the Amazon drowns in rainfall, the Sahara does the opposite.

[00:07:35]It is the largest hot desert on Earth, covering approximately 9.2 million square kilometers across 11 countries, an area roughly the size of the United States.

[00:07:45]It is not, as commonly imagined, a sea of golden dunes. Only about 25% of the Sahara consists of sand. The majority is rocky plateau, gravel plains, and bare mountain ranges. Sand temperatures in the Sahara can reach 80° C.

[00:08:00]Rainfall in the driest parts averages less [music] than 25 mm per year. As recently as 5,000 years ago, it was substantially greener, with lakes, rivers, and wildlife, before a shift in Earth's orbital cycles dried it out.

[00:08:14]Number 13. Located in the United States, Mount Washington in New Hampshire stands only 1,917 m above sea level, modest by global standards, but [music] it holds the record for the highest surface wind speed ever directly measured by humans outside of a tropical cyclone.

[00:08:32]On April 12th, 1934, a wind gust of 372 km/h was recorded at the summit weather observatory. A record that stood as the world's highest measured [music] surface wind speed for 76 years.

[00:08:47]The summit is above the tree line, frequently shrouded in cloud and ice, and subject to rapidly changing, violent weather in every season.

[00:08:55]Number 14. Tristan da Cunha is the most remote permanently inhabited island on Earth. It sits [music] in the South Atlantic Ocean, roughly 2,400 km from the nearest land, which is the island of Saint Helena, itself one of the most isolated places in the world.

[00:09:13]The nearest continent, [music] Africa, is about 2,800 km away.

[00:09:18]There are no flights, meaning the only way to reach Tristan da Cunha is by boat, and supply ships arrive only a handful of times per year, a journey that takes about 6 days from South Africa.

[00:09:29]The island sits on an active volcano that last erupted in 1961, forcing the entire population to evacuate to Britain. At number 15. Mawsynram in the Meghalaya state of northeastern India is the wettest place on Earth. It receives an average of approximately 11,871 mm of rainfall every year, almost 12 times the annual rainfall of London.

[00:09:52]During the monsoon season, the rain is so relentless and so heavy that locals traditionally stuff grass into their windows to muffle the sound, which would otherwise make normal [music] conversation impossible.

[00:10:04]The village sits on a plateau at the edge of the Khasi Hills, perfectly positioned [music] to catch moisture-laden winds rolling in from the Bay of Bengal.

[00:10:13]The landscape is extraordinarily lush as a result in a dense [music] jungle dripping with water year-round. Number 16, this is Kawah Ijen, a volcanic crater lake in East Java, Indonesia, and it is one of the most surreal and dangerous landscapes on Earth.

[00:10:29]The lake itself is the largest highly acidic crater lake in the world, holding around 200 million cubic meters of turquoise water with [music] a pH close to zero, acidic enough to dissolve clothing and burn skin on contact.

[00:10:42]But what makes Kawah Ijen truly extraordinary is what happens at night.

[00:10:46]Sulfuric gases emerging from cracks in the crater floor ignite on contact with the air, producing electric blue flames that pour down the mountainside like rivers of fire.

[00:10:56]The flames reach up to 5 m high and are visible from kilometers away.

[00:11:01]Sulfur miners work inside the crater in near darkness, breathing toxic gases through damp cloths, carrying loads of up to 90 [music] kg of solidified sulfur up the crater walls several times a day.

[00:11:12]It is one of the most brutal working environments on the planet. At number 17, over in Siberia, the town of Verkhoyansk holds one of the most extreme temperature ranges of any permanently inhabited place on Earth.

[00:11:26]It has recorded temperatures as low as minus 69.8°C in winter and as high as 38° C in summer, giving it a temperature range of approximately 108° between its coldest and hottest recorded readings. In June 2020, Verkhoyansk recorded a temperature of 38° C, the highest temperature ever recorded [music] north of the Arctic Circle.

[00:11:49]Number 18, the Congo Basin contains the second largest tropical rainforest on Earth after the Amazon, covering approximately 3.3 million square kilometers across six countries.

[00:12:01]The Congo River, which flows through it, is the deepest river in the world with measured depths exceeding 220 m.

[00:12:09]The forest contains an extraordinary concentration of species found nowhere else on Earth, including the bonobo, the okapi, and the forest elephant.

[00:12:17]>> [music] >> Parts of the Congo Basin remain so remote and inaccessible that no one has ever fully mapped or explored them. It generates enormous rainfall, shapes regional climate, and stores vast quantities of carbon in its soils and vegetation.

[00:12:31]>> [music] >> Number 19, beneath the limestone of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula lies one of the most extensive underwater cave systems in the world. The Sac Actun system, confirmed in 2018 when two previously separate systems were found to be connected, stretches for over 370 km and is the largest known flooded cave system on the planet.

[00:12:53]These cenotes, natural sinkholes where the limestone ceiling has collapsed to reveal the water below, were sacred to the ancient Maya, who used them for religious rituals and as water sources.

[00:13:03]The cave systems contain perfectly preserved fossils, [music] ancient human remains, and evidence of habitation stretching back thousands of years. Number 20, [music] few people think of Iran when they think of extreme landscapes, but the Great [music] Salt Desert in its center is one of the most inhospitable places in Asia.

[00:13:21]Its surface is a treacherous crust of salt [music] and mud that can appear solid but conceals soft, wet ground beneath, capable of swallowing an animal or a person who steps on it without warning. Summer temperatures regularly exceed 50° C. The salt marshes produce a blinding white glare in daylight and can be completely disorienting. [music] Rainfall is almost nonexistent. The desert is ringed by mountain ranges that block virtually [music] all moisture from every direction. Despite all of this, it harbors plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth. At number 21, [music] La Rinconada in Peru is the highest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth. It sits at an altitude of approximately 5,100 m in the Andes, perched on a glacier near the Bolivian border. The air at that altitude contains roughly half the oxygen available at sea level. Newcomers can barely walk without gasping. Chronic altitude sickness is a constant presence, and temperatures drop well below -20° C at night.

[00:14:23]And yet, roughly 50,000 people live here. Most settlers drawn by gold, as the mountain beneath the town contains significant gold deposits.

[00:14:31]It is one of the most extreme examples of a human community existing somewhere humans arguably should not be able to exist at all.

[00:14:40]Number 22, Angel Falls in Venezuela is the world's highest uninterrupted waterfall, dropping 979 m from the edge of the Auyantepui plateau in the Canaima National Park.

[00:14:52]The waterfall's so far that much of it vaporizes or is blown away as mist before reaching the pool at the bottom.

[00:14:59]The tepui plateaus from which it falls are among the oldest geological formations on Earth, flat-topped sandstone mountains that have been isolated from the surrounding landscape [music] for tens of millions of years, creating ecosystems found nowhere else on the planet.

[00:15:14]Angel Falls was unknown to the outside world until American aviator Jimmy Angel flew over it in 1933. Number 23, Manila in the Philippines is the most densely populated city [music] on Earth. The district of Binondo alone squeezes over 68,000 people into a single square kilometer.

[00:15:33]The wider city contains millions of people living in conditions so compressed that entire families share single rooms. Informal settlements stack vertically over drainage canals, and the noise, heat, and human [music] density create an environment as physically overwhelming as any desert or trench.

[00:15:50]Metro Manila as a whole is home to over 13 million people, and during rush hour its roads become some of the most gridlocked on the planet.

[00:15:58]It is a city permanently operating at the edge of what infrastructure, housing, and human endurance can sustain. At number 24, if the Atacama is the driest desert, the Namib Desert along the Atlantic coast of Namibia is the oldest on Earth, estimated to have been arid for at least 55 million years and possibly as long as 80 million years. It is home to some of the most extreme sand dunes on Earth, with some dunes reaching over 380 m in height.

[00:16:26]Despite its extreme aridity, the Namib is host to a remarkable diversity of life, much of it uniquely adapted to harvest moisture [music] from the coastal fog that rolls in from the cold Benguela current offshore. Number 25, the Salar de Uyuni in southwest Bolivia is the world's largest salt flat, covering approximately 10,582 sq km at an altitude of 3,656 m above sea level.

[00:16:53]It contains roughly 10 billion tons of salt and holds about half of the world's known lithium reserves locked in the brine beneath the salt crust. During the rainy season, a thin layer of water covers the flat and creates an almost perfect [music] mirror effect that reflects the sky so accurately that it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish [music] the ground from the sky.

[00:17:13]The Salar was formed by the evaporation of a prehistoric [music] lake and is so geometrically flat that NASA uses it to calibrate the altimeters of Earth observing satellites. It is in the most literal sense the flattest place on [music] the surface of the planet.

[00:17:27]Number 26, Lake Baikal in Siberia is so extreme it barely makes [music] sense as a lake. It is 25 to 30 million years old making it the oldest lake on Earth by a margin that dwarfs most geological records.

[00:17:40]>> [music] >> It plunges to a depth of 1,642 m deep enough to stack four Eiffel Towers on top of each other and still not reach the surface. It holds approximately 20% of all the fresh liquid surface water on the entire planet, more than all five of the North American Great Lakes combined. Number 27, the Sundarbans is the world's largest mangrove forest covering approximately 10,000 sq km across the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers in Bangladesh [music] and India. It is also one of the most dangerous places on Earth for the people who live there.

[00:18:16]The forest is home to the largest [music] population of Bengal tigers in the world and these tigers are unique among the species in regularly hunting and killing humans. An estimated 50 to 60 people are killed by tigers in the Sundarbans every year. The forest is also frequently struck by powerful cyclones from the Bay of Bengal [music] and is highly vulnerable to sea level rise. Number 28, Araouane is a village [music] in northern Mali deep in the Sahara and it is one of the most isolated and inhospitable human settlements on Earth. It sits in a sea of sand with almost no [music] vegetation, no permanent water source, and summer temperatures that regularly exceed 50° C.

[00:18:54]At its peak, it was a prosperous trans-Saharan trading post on the salt caravan route. Today, its population [music] has dwindled to a few dozen people and the village is being slowly swallowed by sand dunes that creep closer every year. The nearest town of any size is Timbuktu, itself one of the most remote cities in the world, and reaching it requires a multi-day journey across open desert.

[00:19:17]Number 29, some extreme places do not look dangerous at all.

[00:19:22]Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon is a calm, deep crater lake in a region of quiet hills and small farming villages.

[00:19:29]On the night of August 21st, 1986, it released a massive cloud of carbon dioxide [music] that had been building up from volcanic activity deep beneath the lake bed. The gas, heavier than air, rolled silently down the surrounding valleys at low altitude, suffocating everything in its path.

[00:19:45]By morning, approximately 1,800 people and 3,500 livestock were dead.

[00:19:52]The event is known as a limnic eruption, one of the rarest and most terrifying natural disasters on Earth, and Lake Nyos remains one of only three lakes in the world known to be capable of producing one.

[00:20:04]Number 30, and we [music] end in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan, near the town of Derweze, where there is a crater approximately 70 m wide and 30 m deep that has been [music] on fire continuously since 1971.

[00:20:17]Soviet engineers drilling [music] for natural gas accidentally broke through [singing] to a large underground cavern filled with gas, causing the drilling platform to collapse into [music] the hole. Fearing the spread of methane gas, they set it alight, expecting it to burn out within a few days. More than 50 years later, it is still burning. The local population calls it the doorway to hell or the gates of hell, and the Turkmenistan government has made multiple attempts to extinguish it, but none succeeded. And there you have it, 30 of the most extreme [music] places on the surface of the Earth. If you made it this far, drop a comment below [music] telling me which place shocked you the most. And if you want more content like this, the subscribe button is right there. [music] It is completely free, and it helps the channel more than you know. Thanks for watching, and see you in the next one.