Capturing meteorites in Antarctic:
![Image](http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/final_words/real_story3.jpg)
http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/meteorites/index.html
Okay, East Antarctica (the right side of this map) does occupy roughly the portion of Antarctica that is in the Eastern Hemisphere.APOD wrote:in East Antarctica, huge sheets of blue ice remain pure and barren
Do you have another suggestion? Seems to me that reasonable cardinal directions for Antarctica are east, west, central/south, and coastal/north.apodman wrote:But East Antarctica still seems like a strange term to me.
How is that different from any other point on the Earth? By definition, east means spinward. That works no matter where you are, except exactly on the poles.Even though its coast is deeply dented, Antarctica surrounds the South Pole. If I pick a spot and head East, I find no spot that is furthest East except as measured from an arbitrary Prime Meridian - I just keep going and going.
Hey, I only said strange ... not offended, nor outraged, nor feeling the need to replace any terminology. Just playing with the difference between the usages. Personally, I live on the East coast of a continent that actually has an East coast, and therefore I think of the Eastern U.S. as the part adjoining the East coast. My little mind (not my real mind, just pretending for fun) has trouble conceptualizing an Eastern region of a continent that does not have an East coast to adjoin. Funny, huh?Chris Peterson wrote:Do you have another suggestion? ... There are two different usages here. East Antarctica is the region of the continent that lies in the Eastern Hemisphere, and walking east means walking spinward.apodman wrote:But East Antarctica still seems like a strange term to me.
I didn't take it wrong, but was serious if you had an alternate terminology in mind. The 2D coordinate system we find generally convenient to describe our position on the surface of a sphere does go to hell at the poles. Reminds me of that old puzzle about walking a mile south, a mile east, and a mile north, bringing you back to your starting point... what color is the bear you see?apodman wrote:Hey, I only said strange ... not offended, nor outraged, nor feeling the need to replace any terminology.
Wow. Posing for gag pictures in Antarctica...nerds.neufer wrote:http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080907.html
Capturing meteorites in Antarctic:
http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/meteorites/index.html
<<What do you do if you try and try, and the meteorites just don't seem to ever be in your path?iamlucky13 wrote:Wow. Posing for gag pictures in Antarctica...nerds.neufer wrote:http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080907.html
Capturing meteorites in Antarctic:
http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/meteorites/index.html
And so they are. But there's an awful lot of the continent of Antarctica that is nowhere near the South Pole. In terms of distance to the Pole, most of Antarctica is similar to Siberia, northern Canada, or Greenland. People in those places don't seem to have a problem with directions.BMAONE23 wrote:Yeah,
It seems to me like from the South Pole all directions are North.
Australia claims most of Eastern Antarctica.So if the South American section is Western Antarctica and the African/Indian section is Eastern Antarctica, what is the Austrailian section?
Exactly. And that's how the continent is divided. As noted previously, there are two ways of using directions. There is the simple navigation use, which is just N, S, E, and W like anywhere else ("Hey Joe, I think that's a meteorite over to the north of you.") There's also the cartographic convention of Western Antarctica and Eastern Antarctica, as determined by which hemisphere they lie in. Makes sense- not unlike talking about the West Coast and East Coast of the United States.BMAONE23 wrote:But in terms of reference there isn't a proper east or west portion of a continent that covers the south pole only the half (+/-) that lies in the eastern hemisphere and the half that lies in the western hemisphere.
I went to school in a snowy town where they never plowed. Legend had it that after a warm season the mayor declared the Earth's axis had shifted, we were now in the tropics, and he sold the plows. Are you related?emc wrote:To make things more simple, I think we should swap north with east and south with west.
I never heard of the man.apodman wrote:I went to school in a snowy town where they never plowed. Legend had it that after a warm season the mayor declared the Earth's axis had shifted, we were now in the tropics, and he sold the plows. Are you related?emc wrote:To make things more simple, I think we should swap north with east and south with west.