Observations From a New Point of View

Since she’s got­ten back, Pam has said that she’s been see­ing the world (includ­ing our home) a lit­tle dif­fer­ently lately:

1. While the coastal moun­tains may look big to us (and they cer­tainly loom large enough that I use them to ori­ent myself when­ever walk­ing down­town), the Andes Moun­tains in the south of Chile and Argentina make them look small.
2. The ice­bergs she saw were ‘roughly the same size as the con­tainer ships’ we saw yes­ter­day in Eng­lish bay. Bear in mind that this is just the vis­i­ble tip of the object. 7/8 of it is underwater.
3. While it’s been pretty much dis­missed as a myth, Pam did notice that the water going down the drain where she was always went down clock­wise. We did a lit­tle test here and although the bath­tub goes coun­ter­clock­wise, the guest bath­room sink went clock­wise as well. I stand by the opin­ion that the Cori­o­lis effect, while clearly hav­ing an effect on large-scale weather pat­terns (like hur­ri­canes), does not pro­duce enough force on small local­ized phe­nom­e­non in order to lead to a con­sis­tent direc­tion either way when things go down the drain. Instead, in these cases, it’s more a func­tion of the size, shape, and angle of the bowl or tub.
4. When they left South Amer­ica, the cap­tain of the Pam’s ship said: “Say good-bye to trees for 10 days”. Indeed, there wasn’t a sin­gle tree on any of the pho­tos Pam took on any of the islands or the coast of Antarc­tica. A land­scape with­out a tree is some­thing I’d have a hard time get­ting used to.
5. Moss (which was found on these islands) always grew on the South side of rocks (as opposed to the North side here).
6. Birds in Antarc­tica (includ­ing the Pen­guins, Terns, Alba­tross and Petrels) were all much larger than the birds we see here. They call the Cor­morant (which we some­times do see here) a Blue-Eyed Shag.
7. Even on a cloudy or rainy day, you need sun­glasses in Antarc­tica because the reflect­ing snow is so bright.

I’m sure she’ll think of oth­ers as they strike her.