SortStack #1497 — 2030-07-15
By size · Order from shortest to longest.
- A house dust mite 0.3 mm
Millions live in the average mattress, feasting on flakes of dead skin, yet they are too small for the naked eye to see.
- A classic incandescent light bulb 11 cm
Its glowing filament reaches around 2,500 degrees Celsius, yet wastes most of its energy as heat, not light.
- A standard house brick 22.5 cm
Fired clay bricks have been made the same basic way for over 5,000 years, outlasting the empires that baked them.
- The island of Crete (length) 260 km
Home to Europe's oldest known city, Crete's Minoan palaces had running water and flushing toilets 3,500 years ago.
- The Grand Canyon (length) 446 km
The Colorado River carved it over millions of years, exposing rock layers nearly two billion years old at the bottom.
- Chile (length) 4.4K km
So long and thin it spans 38 degrees of latitude, from the driest desert on Earth to icy glaciers in the south.