At over 2000 kilometers long The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.

The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, Australia.

The Great Barrier Reef can be seen from outer space and is the world’s biggest single structure made by living organisms. This reef structure is composed of and built by billions of tiny organisms, known as coral polyps. It supports a wide diversity of life and was selected as a World Heritage Site in 1981. CNN labeled it one of the seven natural wonders of the world. The Queensland National Trust named it a state icon of Queensland.

A large part of the reef is protected by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which helps to limit the impact of human use, such as fishing and tourism. Other environmental pressures on the reef and its ecosystem include runoff, climate change accompanied by mass coral bleaching, and cyclic population outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish. According to a study published in October 2012 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the reef has lost more than half its coral cover since 1985.

The Great Barrier Reef has long been known to and used by the Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and is an important part of local groups’ cultures and spirituality. The reef is a very popular destination for tourists, especially in the Whitsunday Islands and Cairns regions. Tourism is an important economic activity for the region, generating over $3 billion per year.

In November 2014, Google launched Google Underwater Street View in 3D of the Great Barrier Reef.

If you could drive your car straight up at 95km/h (60mph), you would arrive in space in just a little over one hour.

To get to the Moon would take a little longer though, since it’s 400,000km (250,000 miles) away – driving around the Earth ten times – just under six months. Your only real problem (apart from having no oxygen for your lungs and for burning the petrol) would be finding a petrol station – and a place that has a bathroom!

There are around 96,560.64 kilometers of blood vessels in the human body. If you took them all out and laid them end to end, they’d stretch around the world more than twice. Please don’t do it, though.

It was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, when taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout. The crash signaled the beginning of the 10-year Great Depression that affected all Western industrialized countries.

[button color=”blue” size=”small” link=”http://www.history.com/topics/1929-stock-market-crash” target=”blank” ]Stock Market Crash of 1929[/button][button color=”blue” size=”small” link=”http://www.history.com/topics/great-depression” target=”blank” ]The Great Depression[/button]