50 Fun Facts About Natural Resources

Petroleum formed mostly from the buried remains of which organisms, rather than dinosaurs?

Plankton and algae sank to ancient seabeds and were buried under sediment. Heat and pressure then cooked them into oil over millions of years.

Which ingredient of concrete and glass is the most consumed natural resource after fresh water?

Sand suitable for concrete is in high demand, because plentiful desert sand does not work in the mix. Its grains are blown too round and smooth by the wind to bind into solid concrete.

Which continent holds more than half of all the fresh water on Earth?

Antarctica's ice sheet covers 98% of the continent and averages more than 2 kilometres thick. That ice holds about 61% of all the fresh water on the planet.

Which sea animals did fleets from Nantucket and New Bedford hunt for lamp oil before kerosene from petroleum took over?

Whales, especially sperm whales, supplied the brightest and cleanest-burning lamp oil. Once kerosene arrived the American whaling fleet shrank, and only 39 ships set out in 1876.

Which gas that cools MRI scanner magnets is a finite resource recovered from natural gas wells?

Helium is so light that once released into the air it escapes into space for good. Underground it builds up from radioactive decay and gets trapped alongside natural gas.

Which metal from bauxite ore can be recycled endlessly for about 5% of the energy of making it new?

Aluminum fresh from ore is energy-hungry because bauxite must be refined into alumina and then split by electrolysis. Remelting old metal skips both steps.

Which volcanic island nation heats at least nine in ten of its homes with geothermal energy?

Iceland swapped oil for geothermal district heating after fuel prices jumped in the 1970s. The same hot water warms greenhouses and swimming pools and keeps some sidewalks free of ice.

Which body's gravity is the main driver of the ocean tides that tidal power stations harness?

The Moon supplies about two-thirds of the pull behind a spring tide, and the Sun adds the rest. Its steady orbit makes tidal power highly predictable.

Which human activity accounts for about 70% of the fresh water that people withdraw worldwide?

Agriculture takes the lion's share because irrigated crops are so thirsty. Roughly seven-tenths of the world's irrigated land lies in Asia.

Which Nordic country set up a state fund in 1990 to invest its surplus North Sea oil revenues?

Norway calls it the Oil Fund, and it has grown large enough to own about 1.5% of the shares of the world's listed companies.

Which fossil fuel formed from swamp forests that covered the tropics during the Carboniferous period?

Coal was laid down so widely then that the name Carboniferous means coal-bearing. About 90% of all beds date from that period and the Permian that followed.

Which heavy metal is mined as the fuel for nuclear reactors because one of its isotopes splits easily?

Uranium is the only naturally occurring element with a fissile isotope in more than trace amounts. It is also about 70% denser than lead.

Which odorless gas makes up most of natural gas, so suppliers add a rotten-egg smell to reveal leaks?

Methane has no smell of its own, so an odorizer is added to piped gas to make leaks noticeable. Among the gases people emit, only carbon dioxide has done more to warm the climate.

Which unit, defined as exactly 42 US gallons, is used worldwide to measure and price crude oil?

Barrel measures date from the 42-gallon wooden tierce, a standard shipping cask in the English colonies by 1700. One holds about 159 litres.

Which gemstone is carried up from deep in the Earth by volcanic eruptions in rocks called kimberlites?

Diamond is pure carbon, the same element as graphite, with its atoms locked in a rigid crystal. It packs more atoms into a given volume than any other known substance.

Which material is made from the milky latex tapped from Hevea trees native to the Amazon?

Rubber left its home continent in 1876, when Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 seeds out of the Amazon to Kew Gardens in England. Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia became leading producers.

Which metal is the main product of Chile's giant Chuquicamata mine?

Copper is one of the few metals that occur naturally in a directly usable, unalloyed form. Chuquicamata is the largest open-pit mine of its kind by excavated volume.

Which dam, the world's largest power station by capacity, forced more than a million people to relocate?

Three Gorges spans the Yangtze, and its reservoir stretches about 660 kilometres upstream. Estimates of the people moved to make way for it run from 1.13 million to 1.4 million.

Which US president put about 230 million acres under public protection and established the US Forest Service?

Theodore Roosevelt created 150 national forests, 51 bird reserves and five national parks. He often acted by executive order, over the objections of Western members of Congress.

Which catalytic-converter metal has about three-quarters of its known resources in South Africa's Bushveld Complex?

Platinum is one of the rarer elements in Earth's crust. The Bushveld Complex, the largest layered igneous intrusion known, also holds about half of the world's palladium.

What term describes an underground layer of water-bearing rock, such as the Ogallala beneath eight US states?

Aquifer water beneath the Great Plains supplies about 30% of the groundwater used for irrigation in the United States. Once drained, it would take over 6,000 years to refill from rainfall.

Which battery metal, light enough to float on water, is extracted from brine beneath Andean desert flats?

Lithium is one of only three metals that can float on water. Batteries alone consume more than three-quarters of all that is produced.

Which metal, extracted from ores such as hematite and magnetite, is the main ingredient of steel?

Iron is, by mass, the most abundant element on Earth, forming much of the planet's core. Some 98% of the ore mined for it goes into making steel.

Which material is stripped from the bark of a Mediterranean oak every nine years without felling the tree?

Cork oaks live for about 300 years and are first stripped at around 25. Portugal produces roughly half of the world's harvest.

Which country is home to Ghawar, by far the largest conventional oil field in the world?

Saudi Arabia has drawn roughly a third of all the oil it has ever produced from Ghawar, a single field about 280 kilometres long.

In which US state did Edwin Drake drill his famous oil well near Titusville in 1859?

Pennsylvania's Drake Well was just 69.5 feet deep, yet its success set off the first oil boom in the United States.

Which desert's saltpeter deposits were at the heart of the War of the Pacific, which Chile won over Peru and Bolivia?

Atacama saltpeter sparked the fighting through a dispute over a ten-centavo tax, giving the conflict its nickname the Ten Cents War. Chile's victory left Bolivia landlocked.

Which layer, which can take 500 years to build one inch, blew off Great Plains farms in the Dust Bowl?

Topsoil lost its anchor when farmers deep-plowed the native grasses whose roots had held it through droughts. When drought came in the 1930s, the wind simply carried it off.

Which Central Asian lake shrank to a tenth of its size after Soviet irrigation projects diverted the rivers feeding it?

The Aral Sea, once the third-largest lake in the world, had largely dried into desert by 2007. A UN secretary general called its loss one of the planet's worst environmental disasters.

Which Caribbean island holds Pitch Lake, a vast natural deposit of asphalt?

Trinidad's lake holds an estimated 10 million tons and is still mined for asphalt. Sir Walter Raleigh came across it on his expedition of 1595.

Which process, used by thousands of plants in the Middle East, turns seawater into drinking water?

Desalination uses so much energy that it generally costs more than drawing fresh water from rivers or wells. Even so, over 16,800 plants were operating worldwide by 2020.

Which lake, the deepest in the world, holds more fresh water than all five North American Great Lakes combined?

Baikal in Siberia reaches a depth of 1,642 metres, so although only seventh in surface area it holds 22–23% of the world's fresh surface water.

Which fish was caught so heavily off Newfoundland that Canada shut down the fishery in 1992?

Atlantic cod off Newfoundland had fallen to about 1% of historic levels after decades of overfishing. The ban ended a trade that had shaped Canada's east coast for 500 years.

Which phrase, the title of a 1968 essay by Garrett Hardin, describes users ruining a shared resource through overuse?

Tragedy of the commons borrows its image from an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd, who pictured herders each adding cattle to a shared pasture.

Which gas, about 78% of the air, does the Haber process turn into ammonia for fertilizer?

Nitrogen in the air is exceptionally stable and barely reacts with anything. The Haber process forces it to combine with hydrogen, usually obtained from natural gas, to make ammonia.

Which element, second only to oxygen in Earth's crust, is the base material of most solar cells and computer chips?

Silicon is so central to the semiconductor industry that California's Santa Clara Valley was nicknamed after it. It makes up about 28% of the crust by mass.

Which extraction technique frees oil and gas by cracking deep shale with fluid pumped in at high pressure?

Fracking pumps fluid, mostly water, down a well at high pressure to open cracks in deep rock. Tiny grains carried in the fluid then prop those cracks open so oil and gas can flow.

Which fuel of partly decayed plants was traditionally cut from bogs and dried for home fires in Ireland and Scotland?

Peat covers just 3% of the land yet stores more carbon than all other vegetation types combined, the world's forests included.

Which biome of pines, spruces and larches stretches across much of Russia and Canada?

Taiga, also called boreal forest or snow forest, covers about 11.5% of Earth's land. In its present form it is young, having existed only for the 12,000 years since the last ice age ended.

Which metal, mined in Cornwall since the Bronze Age, makes up about one-eighth of classic bronze?

Tin is obtained chiefly from the mineral cassiterite. It is also the main ingredient of pewter, used for tableware since the Bronze Age.

Which fertilizer led the US Congress in 1856 to let citizens take possession of unclaimed islands holding it?

Guano, the built-up droppings of seabirds, is so rich in plant nutrients that Peru's deposits fed a booming 19th-century trade. Mining it has destroyed habitat and cost the lives of millions of seabirds.

Which tiny Pacific island nation had most of its interior strip-mined for phosphate over about a century?

Nauru's reserves ran out in the 1990s, and mismanagement of the mining wealth then left it in serious financial trouble. It is cited as a classic example of the resource curse.

Which metal did Bolivia's Cerro Rico mountain at Potosí supply in vast quantities to the Spanish Empire?

Silver from Cerro Rico made up an estimated 85 percent of all that the central Andes produced in the colonial era. Most of it was shipped to Spain.

Which African country mines most of the world's cobalt, a metal essential to rechargeable batteries?

DR Congo accounted for more than half of world output by 2016 and about three-quarters by 2024. Very large deposits were found in its Katanga region in 1914.

Which country's huge Groningen gas find in 1959 gave economists a term for resource booms that hollow out industry?

The Netherlands lent its name to Dutch disease, a term The Economist coined in 1977 for the decline of manufacturing that followed the gas boom.

Which Shell geologist told a 1956 industry meeting that US oil production would peak by 1970 at the latest?

M. King Hubbert argued that output from any oil region follows a bell curve. His forecast drew heavy criticism at first, because so many earlier predictions had proven false.

Which forester, first head of the US Forest Service, began his career managing the woods of the Biltmore Estate?

Gifford Pinchot coined the term conservation ethic as applied to natural resources. He had studied forestry in Europe on the advice of leading foresters he met there.

Which metal used in stainless steel is mined from Ontario's Sudbury Basin, the scar of an ancient asteroid impact?

Nickel ore turned up there in 1883, when blasting for a railway exposed it. The basin is the eroded remnant of a crater formed about 1.85 billion years ago.

Which city, where the Nobel brothers built an oil business, supplied half the oil sold on world markets around 1900?

Baku drew the Nobel brothers in 1873 and the Rothschilds in 1882. By the start of the 20th century its oil fields were the largest in the world.

Which country produced the first geothermal electricity in 1904, using steam from vents in the ground at Larderello?

Italy followed the 1904 test with the world's first geothermal power plant in 1911, built in a valley known as Devil's Valley for its boiling springs.