Your New Years eve factoids

This is the only day in history when every adult was born in the 1900s, and every minor was born in the 2000s.

Historian and author Paul Gromosiak once said that winter at Niagara Falls can be so breathtaking that it “diminishes even those skyscrapers” on the other side of the border in Canada.

Trees once thick with fall leaves as they framed the cascading falls are mere frozen branches covered in pristine white snow. In Gromosiak’s words 13 years ago, the trees are “bowing to the river, with the weight of the ice on their branches.” Icicles hanging like stalactites have formed on rocks, walls and railings surrounding the falls. The water is icy but still descending swiftly onto the river below it in a thick cloud of mist.

Such is the winter-wonderland sight that tourists, cameras in hand, are braving the frigid winter to see. Though known for its hundreds of acres of lush terrain and trails conducive to hiking, Niagara Falls State Park, just outside Buffalo, boasts equally stunning views even as temperatures drop and crowds thin.

In 2014, pictures purporting to show frozen-solid falls circulated online. But as The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey, who is from Niagara Falls, noted, these are “either totally misleading or outright false.” Many of the photos, as BuzzFeed News reported, were old ones.

More than 3,000 tons of water flows over Niagara Falls every second. Hundreds of thousands of gallons fall over each of the three falls that make up Niagara Falls.

“It would take a lot more than a few days of cold weather to completely shut that off,” Dewey wrote.