The Geographic Reason for the Season(s)
Life on Earth is filled with a rejuvenating cycle of colors, sounds, sensations, and the traditions that follow seasons.
At this time of year, when people talk about the "reason for the season," I love to reflect on the magic of the way the Earth cycles through rebirth, growth, reproduction, and senescence through its own seasons.
Years ago, I taught Physical Geography 201 to a giant lecture hall of college freshmen and sophomores trying to fulfill their lab science requirements. Seeing how the Earth System works set off light bulbs of understanding and appreciation. My hope, then and now, is that understanding and appreciation lead people to set out on their own environmental journeys.
So, a wintertime refresher on basic geography!
To make it all work, we need the Earth to ROTATE, REVOLVE around the Sun, and TILT at a degree that supplies the Goldilocks conditions that allow for moderate temperatures (on a good swath of the planet most of the time). Rotation around our axis gives us our diurnal patterns. Revolution around the Sun on that same axis gives us our annual, seasonal patterns.
Outside of the tropics. we witness pronounced annual cycles of rebirth, growth, reproduction, and senescence as our temperatures change and animal and plant life respond, putting on remarkable displays. Spring brings new bird songs, summer brings magical fireflies, and fall brings firey leaf color palates.
In the tropics and subtropics where I grew up, the variation is not enough to create temperature variations like we see outside of the tropics, but it creates the wet and dry seasons that make the richness of tropical rainforests some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.
Everywhere on the globe, the seasons bring sounds, smells, and sensations that evoke memories and transport us to the past for an instant or two. They remind us to mark these seasons in our own lives: renewal, growth, creativity, and the relinquishing of old ideas and practices in favor of new ones.
