The Great Gulf

Blog posting round 2! Here goes nothing!

So this week’s topic is supposed to be discussing the link between location and climate. In other words, explaining why the climate in a particular place is the way it is. I thought I would look into England, which is affected by the Gulf Stream. This is the swath of warm air that cradles England and makes the water and weather much warmer than it would be naturally for that longitude. My parents used to live in England, and I can attest to how relatively mild the winters were; they were very similar to the winter I experienced growing up in Maryland, which is several hundred miles south of England. The other strange part of visiting my parents abroad was that in the summer and winter the number of hours that the sun was visible was very great and very few, respectively. In the winter, the sun would only be out for about four hours or so, and the world before and after would be plunged into darkness. Inversely, the summer produced long days with only about four hours without sunlight; and the shades had to be pulled tight in order to produce enough darkness to sleep. There wasn’t really an accurate way to look at the sun outside and determine what time it was.

Pushing this idea that warm air circulates over the United Kingdom; there is also a large amount of precipitation because the warm air comes from over the Atlantic Ocean, bringing moisture and heat with it. As the air cools over the land, water is lost from the air, landing all over Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. Although cooling, the air is not cold enough in the winter to consistently produce lots of snow during the winter in England, which is surprising considering that England and the northern United States and Canada are on the same latitude. However, they have very different climates.

 An image of the Gulf Stream and temperatures of the surface.

First Post

The simple question posed at the end of class the other day was: why am I in this class?

In short, it's an obvious answer; it's a class that fits into the requirements for the concentration within my major. Through the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at University of Vermont, I'm working towards a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science with a concentration in Conservation Biology and Biodiversity.

With all that jargon out of the way, the long answer is that I thought the class would be interesting. I thought it would further explain how to understand and realize the different parts within the whole of an ecosystem. In all honesty, I could have taken any number of classes to just fulfill the requirement, I picked this class because I think studying a problem on the ecosystem level is the most effective way to figuring out the world around us. Understanding how the pieces, or in this case species, within a puzzle interlock is the key to problem solving. That being said, I hope this class helps me to do that.