Does Clockwise Counter Clock wise have anything to do with the Equator and passing over it. Was in Dirty jobs

Question

Does Clockwise Counter Clock wise have anything to do with the Equator and passing over it. Was in Dirty jobs

Answer 1

It is *not* true that water spins the opposite direction south of the equator -- most drains are too small and irregular for such a regular result, and the earth only spins at one revolution per day -- meaning that you usually only notice the effects of the Coriolis force only on phenomena which take days to occur.

But hurricanes *do* spin the opposite direction on each side of the equator.

Here's the deal: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, which means that if you look "down" on the Earth from the North Pole, you think that it's rotating counterclockwise, one revolution per day. But if you looked "down" on the Earth from the South Pole, your sense of "down" would be the exact opposite, and you'd think that the earth is rotating clockwise, one revolution per day.

Now, think about what the world would look like if you were on a merry-go-round, spinning about. If you tried to throw a ball to someone else on the merry-go-round, you'll see it behave with a curved path -- but that's really you, curving around in the circle of the merry-go-round.

Similar things happen with hurricanes, as well as precision naval artillery. If you want to read up on the effect, it's called the "Coriolis effect," and you can read up on it on Wikipedia.

Answer 2

Drostrie is correct, water in a drain is as likely to go CW as CCW, on both sides of the equator. Any other notion is an urban myth.  And it's so easy to check!

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Answer 3

water circles the drain clockwise north of the equator and counter-clock wise south of it.

Answer 4

drosty wrote some of what i was going to write, and i would disagree with him about the water in the drain, as my friends in australia tell me otherwise.

plants also grow one way in the northern /southern hemisphere.

compass work with error if damped for the north and so forth.

keep in mind, that we are in space, and there is no up, or down. we use relative terms to describe what we see, but really there is no set spin in the universe

many plants spin counter clockwise when seen from the Andromeda galaxy, others do not.

it is relative