Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Wind

[Music] chuck yes ask me where wind comes from oh i know uh it's it's my uncle and uh dude thinks it's funny he's kind of rude doesn't make a difference if we're at the table or not it's terrible doesn't apologize and doesn't apologize or nothing sometimes he's proud of it not cool not cool not cool okay uh asking about meteorological wind oh okay where does meteorol meteorological wind come from i will quote ogden nash ogden nash yes yes the playful poet agnes wind is caused by trees waving their branches that guy was stupid [Laughter] let me tell you right now i do not know where wind comes from i'm gonna be honest i don't know where wind comes from but i know this much it don't come from trees waving hey how y'all doing how would you know because and i'll tell you this is important there's a bit of science here okay you own how do you when it's windy out trees are swaying right so how do how would you test what the cause and effect is of that because two things one wind could be caused by fast spinning anemometers okay the wet the weather vanes it could be you know it could also be caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in japan a big butterfly mothra tokyo um no the the reason is because i hear the wind and then i see the tree move so that means the wind was their pain about what sequence you obtain data the wind didn't hit your ear first and the tree is waiting for it to get through your head and then hit it sometimes it does sometimes i hear the wind and then i see the tree move i'm like that's something rainbow something came by me and moved that tree those are the trees a quarter mile away be all right so no this is very uh it's actually very simple okay uh you have wind which is a re adjustment of air pressure that's really what's going on okay i don't see you say it like that me you say it like that just explained it to me sorry okay no no what you have is uh basically a readjustment of air pressure that's that's all that's what it is that's all it is we're down here no thanks so is the on equal heating of earth's surface oh now that makes sense that's that's what it is okay that's cool and so if it's warmer in one place than another and plus earth is rotating so these factors conspire so that if air ever rises well that wouldn't cause wind as we know it because wind goes horizontally to the surface but if you have rising air because it just got heated what happened what has to happen next you don't you don't create a vacuum below well you do but then what happens you have falling air sorry yes if air rises you'll also have falling air right that's true in total but the pocket of the the pocket of atmosphere directly below where the air had gone up okay what happens there oh it has to be filled it's got to be filled so you get an updraft it gets filled from the sides right from the sides yes oh my god that's how it works yes that's so cool [Laughter] so you have rising air it creates a partial vacuum other which is a pressure difference and then other air says we have to fill that gap let's go there and so there it goes okay nice so if you look at hurricanes for example very very low pressure in the middle you have heated warm warm moist what we call unstable air air is unstable it rises okay in that low pressure system all the clouds in the neighborhood want to go there sweet every everything wants to go to the center of a hurricane it's the cloud nightclub yo man you going to the eye tonight you going to the eye yo yo man i heard the eye is going to be hot tonight [Laughter] so all the clouds try to come in but then earth's rotation sort of veers them to the right no matter which way they're trying to head into the front entrance of the eye club um they they veer to the right and so you have this circulation while the clouds are trying to get to the middle and this gives you that that's that that spiraling storm that spiral effect that and everybody trying to get into the middle and so so hurricanes have famously fast winds because of this like hundreds of miles an hour in in the fastest of them fastest of them now if you have if you have air that is descending okay air that descends first it won't make a cloud okay so descending air is like generally clear skies deserts have descending air oh okay now there's certain parts of the world where the descending air is so sort of total it is sort of gently descending and it can go out the sides but if the area of the descending air is large enough then there's no sideways wind wow these areas of earth's surface especially over the ocean are called the doldrums that's the club that nobody wants to go to sorry you got the hurricane eye yeah and you got the devil exactly it's like man i couldn't get into the eye last night now i gotta go to the dolphins the doldrums so the doldrums are regions of earth's surface where all the wind has ceased and if you happen to be a sailing ship that wanders into the doldrums wow oh my gosh that's bad stuff that's it that's it many a ship have just given up the ghost in the doldrums because you can't you can't move and if they don't have oars uh and there's no wind nothing nothing and they eat up their food supply they eat each other whatever and that's it wow it's like the great it's like the great wind garbage patch of the ocean like the plastic patch it just accumulates it goes nowhere there's the wind versus part of it that way yeah that's terrible it's a fascinating fascinating disturbed analogy it is oh that's terrible though now a couple of things couple other things so mars has famously large wind storms and we call them dust storms because the wind picks up the dust you know the martian surface dust yeah yeah and so you can see this in fact when it happens it cloaks the martian surface and so our telescopes and space probes we can't see what's at the bottom it's basically one of these like sandstorms you've read about in the desert but it's like a dust storm on mars or it's a very clever cloaking device that the martians use to stop us from looking at them when they're doing stuff on the surface of mars yeah exactly truck [Laughter] but do you remember the face on mars listen do you remember the face on mars uh so it was back in the 70s there was like the famous face on mars it was like some kind of a like a structure that had eye sockets and nose and a mouth and it looked like a huge m it was huge huge and we got a couple photos of it during the viking missions and everyone said we got to go back clearly there's life there okay by the way if there's life and that represented it it would have to be life that had sort of a simian face like most life on earth doesn't have a face so that would be weird if life on a whole other planet had a humanoid face that that would just be weird okay just saying but because lobsters don't have what did we notice the lobster monument that was there no because we're only looking for stuff that looks like us all right so we went back and you saw and we had better higher resolution you saw a hint of like where the eyebrows were in the mouth but it was mostly sort of and people said the martians knew we were looking at them yeah covered it up they covered it with their mars dust here's my point uh the martian atmosphere is 1 100th the thickness of earth's atmosphere oh that's terrible there's that's barely it's barely any atmosphere so if you move that air 100 miles an hour yeah you ain't got yeah yeah it's like uh it's like a it's like an infant trying to blow out a birthday candle you know just it's like i'm giving up and that's why the whole scene in the movie the martian where they can't leave they're trying to leave the planet come on dust storm is coming and then the rocket is rocking come on it's rocking back and forth and they take off and they get and they gotta leave mark wadney on the surface because they're afraid they'll topple over from the wind ah man another movie ruined thank you neil no yeah that can't happen then right that just can't even happen yeah yeah it's not yeah it's not happening you might be dusty and you can't you can't see yeah but you're not blowing over any spaceships so it's also not gonna it's also not gonna pick up a rod a metal rod and spear you with it because it's not gonna do that either yeah it's it's not tornado speed right right so the point is mars is also an unevenly heated planet right and that's why you get and correct correct all right wait a minute wait wait wait wait what i gotta ask you this now all right and this is off the explainer chart but i gotta do it okay i know that you know him so did you ask him about that when he wrote this like you're talking about um andy weir andy yeah did did you actually ask him i got all up in his situation but then i what i said was what i said was okay andy so much else in that novel later the movie was was so well calculated and thought through i'm gonna give you a hall pass on this one oh okay because without it he's got no story yeah he's got he had to do it was it was poetic license for a mars hurricane so he could get to the rest of the story yeah so i gave it to him because he did the rest of his homework see i'm not totally evil commentator i will cut you some slack if you're an artist as as mark twain said first get your facts straight then distort them at your leisure okay that's mark twain's edict so i'm all in on that by the way venus is very evenly heated over its surface and we think it has hardly any winds there at all nice yeah yes uh yeah it's it's it's a refreshing 900 degrees well you would vaporize but ignoring that complication no wind needed no wind needed it's so even it's so easy it's not a dry heat it's an even heat you're good [Music] that's the joke i heard about hell they say that you know you ask some evil person how's hell yeah yeah it's it's it's it's hot but it's low humidity so we're that's funny actually chuck we gotta end it there this is this is a a windy starting off with your uncle yes we had a windy a windy explainer for star talk dad always surprising neil degrasse tyson here keep looking up [Music] you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 161,057

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, wind

Id: xDhLMIrUlJQ

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 28 2021