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EXTREME CLIMATES

Coldest Place....

Yes, the Antarctic has the coldest temperatures on the earth, but that shouldn't surprise you. (Coldest reported temperature ever was -89.4°C/-129°F.) What most people don't know is that the South Pole has the clearest, calmest weather anywhere on earth. Most of the wickedly high winds that everyone associates with the cold and the ice of the Antarctic are around the edges of the continent at the shores. These winds are so fast and so fierce they are world-famous and they have a special name, too - katabatic winds - and they can blow with hurricane force up to 304kmh/190 mph!

Believe it or not with all the ice in the Antarctic, there is very little actual snowfall or precipitation. It does snow on the ice during the austral winter, but measured on an annual basis the Antarctic is as dry as the Sahara Desert.

You want to talk about world records, Antarctica is the land of extremes. It is the coldest, windiest, and highest continent anywhere on earth. With an average elevation about 7,544ft/2,300 meters above sea level it is the highest continent. Even though it is covered in ice it receives some of the least amount of rainfall, getting just slightly more rainfall than the Sahara Desert, making it the largest desert on earth. Most people have the misconception that a desert is a hot, dry, sandy, lifeless place, but the true definition of a desert is any geographical location that receives very, very little rainfall. Even though there's ice on the ground in Antarctica, that ice has been there for a very long time.

Antarctica is the only continent that has never had an indigenous population of humans because it has always been such an extreme environment. Just the boat ride getting to the continent is over the most treacherous seas anywhere in the world. The inaccessibility of the place and the lack of reliable food and means for constructing shelter has kept humans away for thousands of years. But the new technologies developed over the last 200 years made it possible for people to reach these icy shores to explore and study the Antarctic for the first time in human history.

Hottest Temperature....
EL AZIZIA, LIBYA

There are many places on earth that are plenty hot - record-breaking hot. In fact, there's a good chance on the day this record-breaking temperature was recorded by a meteorological station in El Azizia in 1922 there were other places hundreds of miles away that were even hotter. In all likelihood, this record temperature has been exceeded since then in many places on earth, but we have no official records of the temperatures. It is important to note that when atmospheric temperatures are recorded it is not the surface temperature, where it can sometimes reach 150° F/ 66° C, but rather the air temperature at about 5 feet (1.6 m) above the surface in an enclosed shelter. Of course, it's important that the temperature sensor is not exposed to direct sunlight - the shelter is louvered to permit air flow across the sensor. Most humans don't 'hang out' where some of the hottest tempertatures on earth are regularly experienced so there aren't a lot of meterological stations in these places to reliably record extreme temperatures.
THE WETTEST PLACE.....
Mount Wai-‘ale-‘ale, Kauai, one of the Hawaiian islands - the weather station here is 1569 metres high and records on average 13,000mm to 11,684mm rain per year, depending on which source you believe. Either way this is really wet!!!!! Rain falls on between 335 and 360 days per year, again depending on which source you believe. Nearby sea level sites, meanwhile, record around 500mm rain per year.

As you can see, sources vary considerably as to how much rain falls here. Bodin (1978) quotes 11,684mm per year figure as being the 1912-45 average, an average that quite possibly will have changed since then, whilst The National Climatic Data Center quotes this figure as a 30 year average there, but fails to mention which 30 period was covered. The Weather Network and The Guiness Book of Weather Records (Holford 1977) quotes 11,455mm rain per year, whilst Ahrens (2000) quotes 11,680mm as the average annual rainfall at Mount Wai-'ale-'ale and Kroll (1995) claims 13,000mm falls there.

Similarly, The Weather Network and the Guiness Book of Weather Records quote 335 days with rain here whilst Simons (1996) suggests that rain falls on an incredible 360 days per year here. Nice.

DOOMS DAY

There is a common belief that the calendar holds a prophecy that the world will end in 2012. I knew very little about the whole topic when I began doing the research. I like to think I had an open mind. My investigation began with mainstream archaeology and expert interpretations of the calendar. But it soon took a turn that made my hair literally stand on end. I am now convinced that these prophecies are true.

To understand what is likely to happen to Earth and its people, you will need to remain calm and try to follow the facts. It's not as simple as some people describe. It requires an understanding of some fairly complicated science, but I think I can explain this in a way that you will easily understand.

The Calendar -- A Descrption

First, the Mayan calendar is also sometimes called the Aztec Calendar. This calendar is recorded as a carving on the Aztec "sun stone," currently on exhibit in the National Museum of Anthropology and History located within Chapultepec Park, Mexico City. There's a lot we could say about this carved stone but most of those details are irrelevant to the "end times."

Our modern calendar, called the Gregorian Calendar, has days, weeks, months and years. In the Mayan Calendar it's more complex. In fact, it's really three calendars at the same time.

First there's a religious calendar that takes 260 days to complete a full religious cycle. There are 20 "weeks" made up of 13 days. Each week has a special name, a graphic logo and unique meaning associated with it. This reminds me of the Chinese years which cycle through "the year of the rat" and "the year of the monkey," etc., each with it's special image and meaning.

Graphic logos for each of the 20 religious weeks.

Next there is the solar calendar. This has 365 days, like our modern calendar. It's divided in 18 months of 20 days each. At the end of the cycle there's five special days considered to be unlucky because they don't belong to any month. Each of the months has a special name, graphic logo and some special significance, similar to the icons for the weeks in the religious calendar.

So it is possible, for any specific date, the calculate the religious week and the solar month and to predict the influences that might be guiding fate. But that's not really what's involved with the prophecy of 2012. To understand that we must look at the third calendar, called the long count.

While the first two cycles could be thought of as cogs or gears (see below) revolving through time, the long count is a linear number of days, starting from the first day, "1," and counting through each day to the present. Any day in history can be recorded using the long count and, with some simple mathematics, the corresponding religious week and solar month can also be found.

In writing this article, I thought about creating a javascript program that would do this calculation. My friend, Gene Matlock, then told me that when he was in Mexico, he found a place that sold wooden, mechanical calculators with gears that did just that. He said that Mexicans sometimes used these mechanical calendars to foretell the future or to find auspicious times for special events like marriage or births. Anyway, although it might be nice to know the religious and solar significance, it's the long count that foretells Doomsday.

Cog or "gears" can be used to compute the religious and solar cycles for any date.

The days of the long count are numbered with an unusual system. Instead of writing numbers as we do, from right to left with each place being a multiple of 10 (i.e. 10000, 1000, 100, 10, 1), the Mayans had only 5 places.

The first place recorded a number from 0 to 20. To the left, the second place could have a range from 0 to 17; the third from 0 to 19; the fourth from 0 to 19 and the last from 0 to 12. The numbers were written from right to left, like our system, separated by a dot. Instead of multiples of 10, the first place had a multiple of 1 (like our system); the second place a multiple of 20; the third a multiple of 360; the fourth a multiple of 7200 and the fifth a multiple of 144000.

So a long count number, for example, could be written as 4.12.5.9.0 and would be calculated as follows:

(4 x 144000) + (12 x 7200) + (5 x 360) + (9 x 20) + (0 x 1) or a long count of 145980.

It's not too difficult to realize that the maximum number which can be recorded this way would be 12.19.19.17.20, although some researchers like to write it as 13.0.0.0.0. This amounts to a long count number of 1,872,000 days or 5125.36 years of our modern calculations. Obviously, the calendar is very old!

Over the years, archaeologists have found carved monuments that recorded the long count for known dates in Mayan history. Once a date was fixed in time, it was easy to determine "day 1" as August 11th, 3114 BC. And it was also easy to calculate the date at which the calendar would end -- December 21st, 2012.

Trust me, just because the calendar ends doesn't prove that time, or the world, or life will end. We need to look carefully at December 21, 2012 and try to understand why the Mayans never calculated a date beyond this point in time. To do this we must move from Archaeology to the science of Astronomy and Astrophysics.