Which continent is the driest on earth? Detailed answer

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Which continent is the driest on earth? Detailed answer

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Which continent is the driest on earth?

Small, surrounded on all sides by the waters of the seas and oceans, Australia is the driest continent on Earth. It is not so far from the equator, and the surface of the mainland is very hot. The mountains along its shores, although not high, do not allow moist sea winds to penetrate into the center of the mainland.

Australia is hot, rain is rare, and therefore there are few rivers. Almost all of them don't go anywhere. Their water evaporates under the hot sun in vast dry spaces. Such drying rivers in Australia are called screams. Creeks are filled with water only during the rains, and then turn into dry hollows. On the maps they are indicated by dotted lines.

Droughts on the continent can continue for several years in a row. Then all the grass burns out, shrubs lose their foliage. During such severe droughts, pastures turn into a scorched desert, millions of sheep die, which, exhausted, cannot reach water sources.

Surprisingly, a huge underground water basin stretches almost under the entire Central Lowland of Australia. It is called the Great Artesian Basin. Water is at different depths - from 20 to 2000 meters. Many artesian wells have been drilled here, from which water sometimes spouts, and sometimes it has to be pumped.

Author: Cellarius E.Yu.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

Who and how first showed that air has weight?

The first to do this was the great Italian physicist, mechanic and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and in two ways.

In the first, qualitative experiment, Galileo, having achieved by thermal rarefaction of air in a flask with a long neck, carefully closed with a cork, made sure that if this vessel was allowed to float in water, then it would sink less than if the air was not rarefied.

In other quantitative experiments, Galileo used a pump to pump excess air into a flask, in addition to that normally contained in it, and measure the increase in the weight of the flask. Using ingenious tricks, Galileo measured the volume of air pumped into the flask, and based on this result determined the ratio of the specific gravity of air to the specific gravity of water. He got a value of 1:400. If we compare this value with the true one (1:773) and take into account what means Galileo then had at his disposal, then the accuracy of his measurements seems remarkable.

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An efficient way to extract hydrogen from sea water 11.02.2023

The electrolysis process to extract green hydrogen typically requires large amounts of clean water - up to 9 liters for every kilogram of hydrogen. However, an international group of researchers from Australia, China and the USA proposed in their article a more economical method using sea water - without any pre-treatment, but with an acid coating on the catalyst (water was split with almost 100% efficiency).

"In this work, we demonstrate the direct electrolysis of seawater that has not been pre-treated, but only filtered to remove particulate matter and micro-organisms," the scientists said.

The team says a typical electrolyser catalyst can be made with cobalt oxide and chromium oxide on the surface. Normally, sea water destroys catalysts due to severe erosion caused by chloride ions; also accumulated insoluble deposits of magnesium and calcium block the electrodes - however, scientists solved this problem by simply adding a layer of the so-called Lewis acid to the catalyst.

The acidic coating allowed enough negatively charged hydroxyl anions to be captured from the seawater to create a strong pH 14 alkaline environment around the catalyst, stopping both chlorine attacks on the catalyst and sludge formation on the electrodes.

"The efficiency of a commercial cell with our seawater catalysts is close to that of platinum/iridium catalysts," says Associate Professor Yau Zheng.

It is clear that the demand for pure hydrogen will increase in the future. Acid coating and no pre-treatment: researchers have invented an efficient way to extract hydrogen from sea water, and in view of the scarcity of fresh water (which is predicted to affect two-thirds of the world's population by 2025), the use of sea for clean energy production looks promising. The researchers hope to eventually apply the results of their experiments to the commercial production of hydrogen fuel and ammonia synthesis.

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