Funkinwagnill: Fact # 000148
Posted: April 18th, 2011 | Author: Michael Courtenay | Filed under: mcsixtyfive | Tags: Coriolis Effect, Drain, Funkinwagnill, Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis, Spin, Water | Comments Off
Water draining from a sink or toilet will always spin the same direction, counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clock wise in the southern hemisphere.
Have you ever noticed how spinning is a common behaviour in nature and science, especially in the small world of the atom. As the earth spins on its axis its movement imparts some spin onto anything on its surface. This causes things like drains to spin in the same direction. Cyclones, and large storms all spin in the same directions. Tornado’s are mostly the same but about 1% of them will actually spin in the opposite direction, this only applies to smaller Tornado’s as the Coriolis Effect has little impact on them.
First described by the 19th-century French engineer-mathematician Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis in 1835. The theory proposed by Coriolis was a breakthrough as it described Newtons laws but within a rotating frame of reference.funkin
