Collection
Debunking has a second error, and almost nobody guards against it.
Every file here corrects a popular claim and then stops itself from correcting too far. "A file that overcorrected into you can never see it would be making the opposite error." "Blue does not mean barren, and the file’s own framing had to be corrected on this point." "Just white sand is not wrong about the grains." "Lead did not stop being the reason for the federal presence." "Nothing here suggests geologists are baffled." The first error is believing the myth. The second is believing that disproving part of it disproves all of it, and the second is the one a confident corrector makes. Two of these files record the overshoot happening inside their own drafts and being caught. That is the argument: the correction is not automatically the truth, and a publication that only ever corrects downward will be wrong in a new direction.
Leroy Chiao shot it with a 180 mm telephoto in 2004. He said afterwards that he never saw the Great Wall, and wasn’t sure his picture showed it.
Cyanobacteria top out near 73°C. The middle of the spring sits near boiling. No photosynthetic mat can live there — but the Park Service records abundant Archaea in it, and the blue is what deep water does to light.
Gypsum dissolves. The Tularosa Basin has no outlet for surface drainage, so runoff arrives carrying it, evaporates, and leaves crystals behind — and wind builds those into dunes up to 18 metres tall.
Oklahoma's 2004 relocation covered only families with children under seven. Then the Army Corps found a third or more of homes had collapse potential. Then, in 2008, an EF4 tornado hit the town.
The rock is phonolite porphyry and the columns are cooling cracks — that much is agreed. How the magma got there is not. The NPS lists four origin hypotheses and says discrepancies remain for all of them.
Highest above sea level is Everest. Tallest base to summit is Mauna Kea, by more than a kilometre. Farthest from the centre of the Earth is Chimborazo. NOAA prints all three.
Isle Royale's wolves and moose have been counted every year since 1958. The Michigan Tech project that counts them writes that what guides nature is "rich, dynamic variation, not 'balance of nature'."
The USGS computes the average interval between Yellowstone's eruptions — 725,000 years — calls it meaningless because it rests on two intervals, and notes that even if you trust it, there are about 100,000 years to go.
