The Rocky Mountain StateColorado has the highest elevation of all the U.S. states, and it has some of the tallest mountain ranges in the U.S. as well. The state's mountain scenery is arguably the most majestic and dramatic in the country. The State of Colorado was named after its great river the Colorado River, which Spanish explorers called Rio Colorado, meaning 'colored river' for the reddish sandstone soil carried down river from the mountains. It was also believed at the time that the Colorado River originated in the territory. Colorado's topography is made up of breathtaking mountains, forests, high plains,...

It was in the year 1793 that Captain James Colnett of the Royal Navy set sail in the merchant ship Rattler to do a survey of the Galapagos Islands to investigate the possibilities of sperm-whale fisheries in the region. Colnett’s Chart of the Galapagos is the first fairly accurate map of the archipelago. It was published on January 1, 1798 by notable London map-maker Aaron Arrowsmith, who surveyed the Great Post Roads between London and Falmouth, and in the 1790s, established his own map-making business, publishing roughly 200 maps. Colnett is known for serving under Captain James Cook during Cook's second voyage of exploration,...

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Located in the Central America between Nicaragua and Panama, Costa Rica packs an amazingly diverse ecosystem into a tiny 51, 120km(19, 739 sq miles) of land. The small democratic country covers only 0.03 % of the surface of the globe, and shelters 5% of the existing biodiversity in the entire world. Around 2 million of Costa Rica’s 4.8 million people live in the capital of San Jose. At one point in time, 75% of Costa Rica was forest, until economic expansion and the demand for tropical hardwoods in the 1960s and 70s resulted in massive deforestation of the region. Today,...

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