I wrote this a couple weeks ago and, for some reason, didn’t post it…
If you scroll down a bit and look to your right, you’ll find a link to “The best newspaper columnist in America.” He’s Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Examiner, and I’m not sure he quite deserves that billing any longer (he seems to have gotten more and more esoteric and… cutesy seems to harsh a word, but something like that) although if he doesn’t, I’m not sure who does.
Anyway, Carroll remains entertaining and unpredictable. Today he wrote about Mars, and, well, did you know….
- Mars has a mountain that is the highest geographic thing ever discovered in the Solar System, nearly three times as high as Everest, so high its peak is outside Mars’ atmosphere in a total vacuum.
- Mars has a crater that’s 27,000 feet deep - nearly as deep as Everest is high - and as big as New England that was formed by a meteor hit so powerful that is deformed the planet.
- Mars has an canyon three times as deep as the Grand Canyon and as big in diameter as the continental U.S. Going from one end of it to the other would entail a five-hour flight in a commercial jet.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/14/DDG719LB93.DTL#ixzz0RBYXxnKv
