Somewhat disappointing this month, as Dr. Carroll had a mix-up with subject matter and book selection and does not recommend three of the five titles he read.

I am pretty ignorant of both oceanography and meteorology, but still didn't get much out of the summary.

• While the oceans cover a huge amount of area on the Earth, there’s not as much water there as you might think. Take all the water and make a sphere of it, and it’s much, much smaller than the Earth.

This idea is dramatically conveyed by the image that got shared around a few years ago.

• The Appalachian Mountains in North America are compositionally very like the Caledonian Mountains in Europe. That’s cause they were one big mountain range when all the continents were part of Pangaea.

This makes them among the oldest mountains in the world, once as great as the Himalayas of today.

• The sun and moon both cause the oceans to balloon out, sometimes in competing directions. This means that in different parts of the Earth at the same time, sea level is WAY different. All cause of gravity.

This is commonly known as the tide. Most of the effect is due to the nearby moon: there is a high tide facing the moon because the moon's gravity is stronger, and a high tide away from the moon, because the moon's gravity is weaker. The sun contributes some tidal effect as well, so the most extreme tides are during a full moon and new moon, when the three bodies are approximately in alignment.

• Dolphins may sleep with one eye open cause they’re letting half their brain sleep at a time. Crazy.

• It’s amazing how little sails and ships have changed over millennia.

This is interesting, and unexpected. I suppose it depends on your definition of change.

• How in God’s name did the [Polynesians] find islands in the south Pacific thousands of years ago? I don’t know how you’d find the courage.

This is something I also find wondrous and terrifying.

#learnnewthings schedule:

January 2016 – Water and growth in California

February – Wine

March – Game theory

April – Cryptography

May – Art history

June – The history of railroads in the U.S.

July – Oceanography

August – Football (strategy and theory)

September – Chaos theory

November – Linguistics