OK, I don’t usually play the geek game and look for nits to pick in television science programs. But…
Today’s gem comes courtesy of the Canadian History Channel and their Aftermath series, the first episode of which I just watched over the Internet. The show had many eyebrow-raising moments (and I don’t mean the implausible concept itself, about the Earth’s rotation slowing down to zero in a mere five years; I could get over that if the science had been right otherwise). This particular gem of a sentence, complete with fancy animation, especially caught my attention:
“The rotation of the Earth creates constant patterns of east-moving winds in the Northern hemisphere, and west-moving winds in the Southern. This is called the Coriolis effect.”
Oh really. I wonder if pilots flying in the Southern hemisphere know this.
That explains all the polar tornadoes. Whereas if the earth stopped spinning, winds would go straight from the equator to the poles.