Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

WEIRD OR WHAT

There’s no doubt that planet Earth is awe-inspiring. That’s even more true for the handful of humans who’ve seen it from space with their own eyes.

“We tend to think of ourselves as a weird, tiny little human being on a very large, powerful planet, and therefore clearly irrelevant to anything that might affect the planet at a planetary scale,” says former NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, who in 1984 became the first U.S. woman to walk in space. “In some ways that’s true. But if you step back and look at the planet in total, you see how richly interconnected and intertwined all the actual systems are.”

Even with all its magnificence and majesty, Earth is also just kind of strange. Aside from the fact that it’s the only planet known (so far) to support life, it has a bunch of inherent quirks, from geophysical weirdness to the landscapes adorning its surface to the organisms it supports. And the more we learn about Earth’s peculiarities, the more we grow to appreciate and treasure its many wonders—starting with the air we breathe.

“You look back at the Earth and that huge majestic ocean, [the atmosphere is] a lot more like the fuzz on a tennis ball than some big massive thing,” Sullivan says. “It’s like the wall of a soap bubble, this little membrane that envelops this grain of rock and is the reason that critters like us can live.”

Here are some of the oddest things about this gas-shrouded ball of water and rock we call home.

The Planet’s Poles Flip

We all know that North is, well, north—somewhere above Alaska—and south is down near the middle of Antarctica. That will always be true for the planet’s geographic poles, but it’s only intermittently true for the planet’s magnetic poles. Over the past 20 million years, the magnetic poles have flip-flopped every several hundred thousand years or so, which means that if you had a compass in hand about 800,000 years ago, it would tell you that north was in Antarctica.

Though scientists are pretty sure Earth’s churning, molten iron core powers these polar acrobatics, it’s not entirely clear what triggers the actual reversals. The process is gradual and occurs over millennia. For now, Earth’s north magnetic pole is creeping northward by about 40 miles a year. And given that the last major pole reversal happened 780,000 years ago, we are overdue for a flip.

It Has a Supersized Moon

Sunday evening marked the most recent rising of the supermoon, but regardless of how large Earth’s moon appears in the sky on any given night, it’s always among the solar system’s most overgrown satellites. Relative to Earth, it’s positively enormous, coming in at a quarter as wide as our home planet.

The only celestial twosome that bests the Earth-moon team in this regard is Pluto and its biggest moon Charon, which really form more of a binary system—a pair of objects twirling around each other—rather than a typical planet-moon pair. And thank goodness the moon is so big and so close. If it were smaller or farther away, we would never see total solar eclipses.

The Biggest Mammal Migration Is Airborne

Yep, you may have thought the 1.3 million wildebeest that hoof their way between Kenya and Tanzania were tops, but you’d be wrong.

Millions and millions of bats—giant fruit bats, to be exact—fly between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia’s Kasanka National Park each year. With more than 10 million of these cat-size, mango-munching, echolocating chiropterans involved, it’s the largest known mammal migration on Earth.

And as always have a chilled day from the Viking