- The Canary bird is named after the Canary Islands, which came from Latin Insula Canaria, meaning "island of dogs". So canary means dog.
- The highest unclimbed mountain in the world is Gangkhar Puensum in Bhutan, because it is illegal to climb anything over 6000m over there.
- Hanoi was called 東京 (Tonkin) during the Lê dynasty. Because every Asian country has a place called that.
- Cities that are built on lakes, e.g. Mexico City, sit on clay and silt that amplify seismic shaking, and suffers from worse earthquakes due to soil liquefaction.
- "The ocean is so salty" because rivers have been leeching salt from rocks for billions of years, and it's not like the salt has any substantial way to go back on land, other than slow-acting tectonic activity, or things like lagoons drying up.
- Pacific and Atlantic ocean waters don't mix. Their difference in salinity, temperature, and direction of flow make them hard to mix together.
- A bog is nutrient-poor. A fen has slow-flowing water that might have nutrients.
- The South Pole is the dryest place on Earth, at ~0% relative humidity. For practicality, the South Pole follows New Zealand's time.
- There is no particular why north is up.
- Mariana Trench is east of the Philippines.
- City planning includes flooding only the parts of a city that can afford to be flooded, i.e. putting important buildings higher up, and parks lower down.
- Aragon is a place in today's Spain. Aragorn is a dude in the Lord of the Rings.
- Cancun is in Mexico.
- There is a town called Samsung Town. The company's headquarters are too big to fit in a single building.
- The average age of a country is 158 years, according to one source, Vice.
- The Appalachian mountains are in eastern US, not South America.
- Every part of Chile's lat/lng is negative for both components.
- Levant (le-VANT) is a place, where Israel and Syria are today, roughly.
- Antarctica can be a desert because there can be places where rain falls every two million years, like the McMurdo Dry Valleys.
- A billabong is an Australian oxbow lake.
- The closest Taiwanese territory to China is actually Kinmen County, something like 2km away from Xiamen. The two sides "artilleried" each other (in a friendly manner) from 1958 to 1978, and stil make knives with the shells today.
- The fall line is where the hills meet the flood plain.
- Africa was the Roman name for the tiny province where Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya now are. The province came from destroying Carthage in the third Punic war.
- The French usage of ha-ha (hâ-hâ) actually means an unexpected obstacle on a path. The Ha! Ha! River means the river was an obstacle.
- Taipei is surrounded by a city called New Taipei.
- Because Greenwich is (lat, 0), longitude goes from -180 to 180, not 0 to 360.
- The blue Danube (Danu being "river" in ancient languages) flows from Germany all the way east into the black sea.
- If you look closely, you can see a tiny bump out of France's waist, called Savoy. It really is pronounced Savoy.
- A woman who lives in Hamburg, Germany is a Hamburgerin.
- There are seven transcontinental cities, with the most well-known being Istanbul.
- There is no standard (by size) that distinguishes islands from continents.
- An archipelago is just a group of islands.
- Pittsburgh is quite close to (40,-80).
- Spain almost touches Morocco.
- Oymyakon is the coldest place on Earth... children are allowed to go to school if it's -55 degrees C or higher.
- Portishead was named after Portishead the town, which sounds like por-tis-HED.
- There is a town called Charfield.
- There currently exists two the Congos: Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a "the" in the name, and Republic of the Congo, also with a "the" in the name.
- The Lichtenstein Castle is located in Germany, not Lichtenstein.
- Cities tend to have a poorer east end because air pollution tends to flow east.1. New Zealand is on its own geographical (not political) continent called Zealandia.
- The summit Chimborazo of Ecuador is the farthest point from the centre of Earth, while Mt. Everest is the highest point from sea level.
- 西貢 is in the east, because Hong Kong.
- Quite a bit of rural Australia is still farmland.
- Baltimore is on the east coast, roughly where Washington DC is.
- The US, UK, and Puerto Rico all have virgin islands.
- Tasmania is a country next to Australia, not a jungle.
- Switzerland does not have a capital city. Bern is not a capital, but sure feels like one.1. Sparta is now the capital of the region of Laconia, an unremarkable part of Greece.
- Guatemala is the country below Mexico.
- Reno NV is farther west than Los Angeles CA.
- Jakarta is sinking.
- Singapore has a latitude of ~1.28.
- China's version of "Salt city" is nowhere close to Salt lake city.
- Australia has over 10000 beaches.
- Nastapoka arc, the near-perfect-circular crater-like thing in Hudson Bay, does not have properties commonly found in craters, such as shatter cones in the bedrock.
- The Republic of Kiribati has a number of settlements, among them are: London, Paris, Poland, and Banana.
- Understandably, Easy Anglia is Eastern England. Before that, it wasn't immediately obvious that England had such a circular, cancerous bulge on the side.
- Interestingly, Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, is on the smaller island.
- The Pakistani city of Karachi is a top-10 city by population, either 4th or 6th depending on where you check.
- New Zealand literally means new sea land. It is named after Zeeland, a place in the Netherlands.
- Yonaguni is lower down in latitude than Taipei is.
- Tobago rhymes with Potato.
- The Japanese walked to Japan. The sea that separated Korea and Japan did not exist.
- Bangalore is officially known as Bengaluru.
- Russia has an exclave called Kaliningrad Oblast. It is named after a Soviet somebody called Kalinin.
- The largest country in Europe is actually Ukraine, if you don't think Russia is a thing, because a country like that doesn't deserve to participate in any event.
- Brittany is a place in France.
- Earthquake lights are visible near places before an earthquake happens. There is no concrete explanation so far.
- All states in the US are divided into counties, with two exceptions: Louisiana, which consists of parishes, and Alaska, which uses boroughs.
- New Hampshire is known as the granite state. Its capital city is Concord, a place you have never heard of.
- The Bengal delta / Ganges delta is the largest delta on Earth.
- The Black Sea is 5000 times (rounded up) bigger than the Dead Sea. More or less a lake, the Dead Sea is not really visible on a map unless you go looking for it. The average temperature at Dead Sea year round is 47 degrees Celsius.
- Holland is two of the provinces in the Netherlands (called North and South Holland, unsurprisingly).
- Mount K2 is the second tallest mountain in the world, and also the one with the second highest death rate. Everest is the tallest, but Annapurna I has the highest death rate.
- Lake Kivu blows up from underwater CO2 pressure every thousand-or-so years, suffocating and killing everything around it. "Around the lake, geologists found evidence of massive biological extinctions about every thousand years, presumably caused by outgassing events."
- Easter Island belongs to Chile ("annexed in 1888"). It is at the middle of
nowherethe Pacific ocean. - Bethlehem is in West Bank now. The Gaza Strip is the tiny thing that is neither Israel nor the West Bank. Together, West Bank and Gaza Strip make up Palestine.
- 九龍仔, 九龍塘, 九龍灣, and 九龍城 are all in Kowloon, but 九龍坑 is not.
- Pulau Satumu is an island in Singapore. Its name means "one tree", but the island has more than one tree.
- With a population density of 406 people per km² -- 497 if water is excluded -- the Netherlands is a very densely populated country for its size. Only Bangladesh, South Korea and Taiwan have both a larger population and a higher population density. Nevertheless, the Netherlands is the world's second largest exporter of food and agriculture products, after the United States.
- Naval Maps are centered at America, cutting Asia in half.
- Both the six-continent and seven-continent models of the Earth list Tel Aviv as being in Asia.
- Trinidad isn't in Asia, dumbass.
- Chinese government apparently obfuscates corodinates of their maps and street view stuff using something called GCJ-02 in the name of national security, but their algorithm is leaked so much that the reverse code it is just on wikipedia.
- Doubly-landlocked countries are landlocked by landlocked countries. There are currently only two countries in this category: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan.
- Saudi Arabia and UAE are not the same countries. Saudi Arabia is the big one. UAE is a bit more to the east. Both are a huge expanse of almost nothing.
- Maryland has no natural lakes.
- St Pierre and Miquelon, tiny pair of islands with a population of 6,008, have four primary schools, one middle school, and two high schools.
- Scandinavia does not include Finland.
- There is a line in China at which the population suddenly drops. Reproduce this in Google Maps by drawing a line from 怒江 to 北京.