On This Day:
Tuesday May 27, 2014 This is the 147th day of the year, with 218 days remaining in 2014. Fact of the Day: glaciers Glaciation is the shaping of the landscape by ice; all over the world there are features that were formed during past ice ages by these huge moving rivers of ice and by bigger mounds of ice called ice sheets. Most of the world's glaciers are found near the Poles. They are created when layers of snow are compacted in icy mountain regions to form rivers of ice, which slowly creep downhill until they melt. Both the surface and underside of a glacier are covered with debris plucked from the valley sides by the sheer weight of the ice as it moves. The longest glacier in North America is the Bering Glacier in Alaska, measuring 126 miles long. Currently, 10% of the earth's land area is covered by glaciers, which also store about 75% of the world's fresh water. If all of the earth's land ice melted, sea level would rise approximately 230 feet worldwide.
Holidays Feast day of St. Julius the Veteran, St. Eutropius of Orange, St. Restituta of Sora, and St. Melangel.
Events 1647 - Achsah Young became the first woman known to be executed as a witch in Massachusetts.
1703 - After winning access to the Baltic Sea through his victories in the Great Northern War, Czar Peter I founded the city of St. Petersburg as the new Russian capital.
1929 - Colonel Charles Lindbergh married Anne Spencer Murrow.
1930 - Richard Gurley Drew received a patent for adhesive tape, later made by 3M as Scotch tape.
1931 - In a balloon launched from Germany, Paul Kipfer and Auguste Piccard became the first to reach the stratosphere, rising almost 10 miles during their flight.
1937 - The Golden Gate Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Marin County, California, was opened.
1941 - The British navy sank the German battleship Bismarck off France, with the German death toll over 2,000.
1994 - Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after two decades of exile.
Births 1794 - Cornelius Vanderbilt, American shipping and railroad magnate, established ferry service between Manhattan, Staten Islands.
1818 - Amelia Jenks Bloomer, American reformer.
1819 - Julia Ward Howe, American author, reformer; wrote "Battle Hymn of the Republic".
1837 - Wild Bill Hickok (James Butler Hickok), American marshall, frontiersman.
1878 - Isadora Duncan, American dancer and choreographer.
1894 - Dashiell Hammett, American author.
1907 - Rachel Carson, American biologist, writer.
1911 - Hubert Humphrey, American politician.
1911 - Vincent Price, American film actor.
1915 - Herman Wouk, American writer.
1922 - Christopher Lee (born Christopher Frank Carandini Lee), English actor.
1923 - Henry Kissinger, American statesman and political scientist.
1945 - Bruce Cockburn, Canadian musician.
1957 - Siouxsie Sioux, English musician.
Deaths 1564 - John Calvin, French religious reformer.
1931 - Arnold Bennett, British novelist.
1949 - Robert Ripley (born LeRoy Ripley), American cartoonist who created the Ripley's Believe It or Not! series.
1964 - Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian statesman and prime minister.
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