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  • Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And I'm Regent's Park

  • in London joined by Tom from "/Tom."

  • Awesome channel, check it out. This camera belongs to Tom and Hazel

  • is operating it right now. Yeah, that's her giving a thumbs up, which

  • I'm sure just look like a blur, but the point is we're gonna do information today.

  • Right now, Tom, I'm in London. Which is in England. And it's also in

  • the United Kingdom. Which is in Europe. Okay, and we've also

  • got another term - Great Britain. Well, let's unpack all these terms

  • and today learn about

  • geography. I may have failed geography.

  • Can I find someone else?

  • Now, if we're going to talk about geography, I think we should go all the

  • way back to a time

  • when there was no geography. That's right. Way before YouTube existed,

  • our solar system was nothing but a mist of dust and gases,

  • what is known as a solar nebula. But then,

  • about 4.6 billion years ago something

  • majestic happened. We don't know exactly what caused it,

  • but some scientists believe that the shockwave of a nearby supernova

  • hit our nebula, causing it to start spinning

  • and contracting. Now, as things collected together, their overall gravity got

  • stronger and they pulled more stuff in it. And boom,

  • we've got a Sun. A half billion years later,

  • and the disk of junk circling around the Sun starts coming together in its

  • own way,

  • into what we now call the planets. One of these planets I've actually

  • visited and it's called Earth. But before we get ahead of ourselves,

  • what the heck is the Moon doing there? I mean, here's the problem. When you look at

  • all the terrestrial planets, all the planets near us, near the Sun,

  • they all have very similar structure and they'll have the same big metal core

  • and they all have very similar densities. But the Moon

  • is very not dense. And it doesn't have

  • a similar structure, it doesn't have a huge dense metal core.

  • In fact when we visited them and brought back dust and rocks to analyze what the

  • Moon was made out of,

  • we found that the Moon was made out of the same stuff that you find in

  • Earth's crust and mantle but not Earth's

  • core. This discovery gave rise to a pretty awesome idea

  • that the moon is actually made out of what used to be

  • on Earth. About 4.52

  • billion years ago there used to be another planet

  • called Theia. It was a little bit smaller than Mars but it had an unfortunate

  • orbit. It was fine for millions of years but eventually and

  • what did happen to it was that it collided with Earth.

  • Now, it's believed that the collision happened quite slowly

  • and the centers, the cores of both Theia and Earth

  • fused into one. And material from the mantle and crust of Earth

  • wasn't just scattered but it was forcefully ejected,

  • literally launched into outer space. It circled around

  • Earth and scientists believe that it took only about a week

  • for all that Earth material out in space to coalesce

  • into what we now call the Moon. Oh, and by the way, if

  • that's how the Moon formed, it was such a strong collision

  • the actual axis that the Earth spun on was tilted

  • 23.5 degrees, which to this day

  • is why we have seasons.well

  • Wow.

  • Alright, so four billion years ago the continents as we know them

  • began to emerge. You know, these pieces of the Earth's crust that have cooled down

  • and are floating around on Earth's molten liquid insides.

  • Now, they move and they've been in constant motion since they began but

  • they move

  • very, very slowly. Every 300 to 500 million years,

  • the continents all converge into what's called one

  • big supercontinent. All the land in the entire Earth

  • altogether and the rest of it covered in ocean. The most recent supercontinent is

  • kind of a famous, it's called

  • Pangaea. But scientists believe that there may have been four, five, six or even more

  • supercontinents that existed

  • before Pangaea. What's really mind-blowing

  • is the fact that eventually there's going to be another Pangaea, another supercontinent.

  • And based on calculations, the Earth at that time

  • will look like this. But like I said, these land masses are moving very very

  • slowly

  • and so for that reason it is worth learning their names

  • as they are now. Which brings us back to the question of

  • England, United Kingdom, Great Britain,

  • British Isles and what all these terms mean. Let's begin

  • zoomed out. The British Isles and Ireland are a collection of

  • 6 thousand islands off the coast of Europe. The term

  • Great Britain refers to the largest of these islands.

  • Now, Great Britain contains three separate countries: England,

  • Wales and Scotland. If we add Northern Ireland into the mix,

  • we're now looking at what is known as the United Kingdom or the

  • UK. The Republic of Ireland is a separate country that is not part

  • of the United Kingdom. And, by the way, England is where London is

  • which is where Summer in the City was. Which brings us back to Regent's Park.

  • And

  • as

  • always,

  • thanks for

  • watching.

  • Could you guys stand still for a second?

  • To learn more about Great Britain,

  • Ireland, overseas territories and even Canada,

  • you really must check out CGPGrey's

  • explanation video, if you haven't seen it already. This guy's incredible.

  • You can also check out the channels belonging to the people who helped me with the intro

  • and outro for this video. We've got Tom and

  • "Dude! Where's My Challenge?"

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And I'm Regent's Park

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