The Coriolis Force
In the night between
11 and 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus luckily ended up in the Bahamas.
To his credit, he is the first navigator who followed the Trade Winds across
the Atlantic Ocean.
Honestly, sailing
across the Atlantic in that direction is relatively easy. I bet coming back
would have been a lot harder because he had to go a lot further North to find
some decent Westerlies (and storms…) and come back home via
the Acores.
Why are the winds like that? The Equator is hot so the air rises there, which creates a depression. The hot air goes North (and South) all the way to about 30 degrees of latitude, then comes down and goes back to the Equator. If the Earth was not spinning, the prevailing winds in the intertropical zone would be Northerlies in the North and Southerlies in the South. Simple. But the Earth spins, so the winds are deflected to the right in the Northern hemisphere, and to the left down South. This is called the Coriolis Force. It explains the Trade Winds, and why winds spin clockwise around a depression here in Australia, and anticlockwise in the North.
It also applies to
water so the currents in the oceans follow the same pattern. Does it apply to
the water in your sink? In short, no. Such a system is way too small, and
calculations show that the Coriolis force is about 100,000 times smaller than
the gravitational forces.
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