Geographic trivia

Some interesting trivia in a list entitled "Interesting Geography" a friend forwarded to me this week. Here are a few items from the list:

• Detroit: Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, carries the designation M-1, named so because it was the first paved road anywhere.
• Alaska: More than half of the coastline of the entire United States is in Alaska.
• Amazon: The Amazon River pushes so much water into the Atlantic Ocean that, more than one hundred miles at sea off the mouth of the river, one can dip fresh water out of the ocean. The volume of water in the Amazon river is greater than the next eight largest rivers in the world combined and three times the flow of all rivers in the United States.
• Brazil: Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.
• Canada: Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined.
• Ohio: There are no natural lakes in the state of Ohio, every one is manmade.
• Sahara Desert: In the Sahara Desert, there is a town named Tidikelt, which did not receive a drop of rain for ten years. Technically though, the driest place on Earth is in the valleys of the Antarctic near Ross Island. There has been no rainfall there for two million years.
• Antarctica: Antarctica is the only land on our planet that is not owned by any country. Ninety percent of the world's ice covers Antarctica. This ice also represents seventy percent of all the fresh water in the world. However, Antarctica is essentially a desert. The average yearly total precipitation is about two inches. Although covered with ice, Antarctica is the driest place on the planet, with an absolute humidity lower than the Gobi desert.
• Damascus, Syria: Damascus was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.
• Rome, Italy: The first city to reach a population of 1 million people was Rome, in 133 B.C. There is a city called Rome on every continent.
• Los Angeles: Los Angeles's full name is El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angelesde Porciuncula -- and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size: L.A.
• Siberia: Siberia contains more than 25% of the world's forests.
• Spain: Spain literally means 'the land of rabbits.'
• United States: The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one-mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.

[Hat tip to J.S.]