Geography Awareness week

S1 Geography in the news Special
November 11 to 17 is Geography Awareness Week with this year's theme being Asia.Asia plays a massive role in the world due to its size and population. Here are just some facts about Asia:
Even though Asia expands less than nine percent of surface, that is slightly under thirty percent of Earth's dry land.
The world's largest country, Russia with 6,592,812 square miles (17,075,400 km sq), is mostly in Asia.
The world's two most populous countries are China and India.
The Tokyo metropolitan area is the world's largest urban agglomeration with 30,724,000 people.
Mount Everest is the highest sea level elevation in the world at 29,035 feet (8,850 m).
The Dead Sea is the lowest surface elevation in the world at 1,316 feet (401 m) below sea level.
The Caspian Sea is the largest lake, surface area of 142,000 square miles (367,000 km sq) in the world and currently at geopolitical hot spot due to its oil and natural gas wealth.
Lake Baykal is the deepest lake in the world at 5,135 feet (1,620 m).
And on the human side:
There are four billion people in Asia which is approximately sixty percent of the world's population.
About 7.5 million Asians have AIDS with more than 4.5 million infected living in India.
The Gross Domestic Product of Asia is $18.077 trillion and per capita is $4,518 (the United States is $13.675 trillion/$43,444 and the European Union $13.08 trillion/$29,900)
Asia will play an increasingly daily role in people's lives with markets being globalized, jobs being outsourced and insourced, the rise of China, wars against extremism, and the spreading of new diseases.

The Sundarbans mangrove forest, one of the largest such forests in the world (140,000 ha), lies on the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers on the Bay of Bengal. It is adjacent to the border of India’s Sundarbans World Heritage site designated in 1987. The site is crisscrossed by a complex network of tidal waterways, mudflats and small islands of salt-tolerant mangrove forests, and presents an excellent example of ongoing ecological processes. The area is known for its wide range of fauna, including 260 bird species, the Bengal tiger and other threatened species such as the crocodile and the python. Climate change threatens UNESCO World Heritage sites. Rising sea levels and flooding due to climate change could have a devastating effect on both the buildings and social fabric of historic cities and settlements.
Satellite imagery shows that the sea level in the Sundarbans has risen at an average rate of 3.14 centimetres a year over the past two decades - much higher than the global average of two millimetres a year.
Scientists believe that in the next 50 years, a rise of even one metre in sea level would inundate 1,000 sq.km of the Sundarbans.
Read the rest of the article here.

Look at the journey a journalist takes down the river here. Good use of Google maps.