Charles Kovacs - Geology and Astronomy

In the winter it can get very cold, but no matter how cold it can get here in our part of the world, there are places where it can get much, much colder. In which direction would we travel to find lands where it gets much colder than here? Would it be east, where the sun rises? South, where the sun stands highest at noon? West, where the sun sets? Or north, the direction in which we never see the sun moving across the sky? To find the colder lands we would travel north.

Travelling north we would come to lands which are much colder than ours; and the further we go north the colder it would get, until we come to parts of the world which are so cold that the ice and snow never melt completely and the ground is always frozen summer and winter. Think of Greenland, Northern Canada, Alaska or Northern Russia. These are the lands around the North Pole, the polar region, the region of everlasting ice and snow.

On such a journey to the frozen north we would discover something else. We would notice something about the plants. In our part of the world there are two kinds of trees. First the leafy trees which, every winter, shed their leaves and stand bare. Then there are the trees that have only green needles for leaves; in botany we call them conifers or evergreens. Here, in our part of the world, we have these two kinds of trees, but going further north the leafy trees get fewer and fewer. There you would hardly see anything but the dark green of pines, firs and larches; the trees which have green needles as leaves.

Can you guess why this is so, why the trees with broad leaves get fewer and fewer the further we go north? Because a broad leaf tree needs more sun and cannot stand being frozen. Where there is less sunlight and it is less warm the trees with narrow leaves, or needles, can live better than the others. One could say that the leaves shrink and become needles as we go further north. Not only the leaves shrink as you go north; the trees themselves get smaller. The pines, firs and larches that grow far to the north of us are like dwarfs compared with our trees; they would barely reach to your shoulders. In the regions where these dwarf trees grow there is still a kind of summer. The snow does melt and then plants and flowers grow and have lovely blossoms; but they all have only tiny, tiny stalks, much shorter stalks than our flowers here. If we go still further north we come to the regions where nothing grows at all not even dwarf trees or tiny flowers. These are the regions near the North Pole, the regions of everlasting ice.

But how would things change if we travelled further and further south in the direction where the sun stands at its highest at noon? We know of course that it would get warmer and warmer. We would come to lands where people never have winter. How do the plants change as we go further south? Going south the needle trees become fewer and fewer, as they dont like too much sunlight, and the leafy trees increase; we come to trees with very large leaves indeed, like the palm trees. Think how long and broad and thick the palm leaves are. The trees also get taller and the other plants, the flowers, shoot up too. They have long stalks, long leaves and large blossoms in the hot lands of the tropics.

So you see how the whole earth changes from north to south. In the south, in the tropics, it is always summer it is sunny and hot and we find tall trees, long stalks, big leaves and large flowers. The further north we go the trees are smaller, the leaves shrink, the stalks get shorter and, in the end, we come to lands where it is always winter and there is always ice and snow. Of course if you go beyond the equator, as far south as you can go, you finally end up at the South Pole and it is again extremely cold.

What I have just described is about the whole earth. The whole earth changes like this from south to north, or from equator to pole. But think of a very high mountain. Let us take the highest mountains there are in the world; the Himalayas. At the foot of the Himalayas you have a hot climate, the hot weather of India. You would see tall, broad-leaved flowers and trees. But as you go up into the mountains the air gets cooler and cooler, and the trees and plants become smaller. At a certain height you might think you are in Scotland there are pines, larches, there is even heather, but there are also oak trees and beech trees. You go still higher and soon there are only needle trees and they become smaller. There are mountain flowers, like gentian, with short stalks. If you go still higher up there is, again, everlasting snow and ice. The summits of such high mountains are just like the polar regions and nothing can grow in the frozen, snow-covered heights.

Every high mountain is like the whole earth. Just as children often look like their father or their mother, so the high mountains of the earth are children of the earth, and they have a likeness to their mother, the earth.