Why Are There Seasons?

Spring is here! Now, instead of building snow forts and licking icicles, we can skateboard and ride our bikes, and we don’t have to worry about Squeaks getting rusty in the snow. [Squeaks squeaks] Speaking of seasons—you know we have four of them: Spring, summer, autumn, and winter. But do you know why we have more than one season? Well, we have seasons because the Earth is tilted. Instead of standing straight up and down, it leans a little bit. Whoa! How’d that happen? A really, really long time ago—billions of years ago—scientists think something big hit the Earth. The impact was so strong that it knocked our planet over a little bit. So now Earth is tilted. And our tilted planet travels around the sun, completing one full trip all the way around every year. I mean, that’s what a year is -- the time it takes for the Earth to go around the sun once. And depending on where the Earth is in its journey around the sun, our exposure to sunlight changes. That means the seasons change. That’s why we have four seasons in one year. Sometimes during the year, part of the Earth tilts toward the sun. Sometimes it tilts away from the sun. When the part of the planet you’re on is tilted toward toward the sun, it’s—you guessed it!—summer. When it’s tilted away from the sun, it’s—yup!—winter. And when it's in between, well, the weather's pretty much in between too. That’s when we have spring and autumn. They’re both a little bit warm, and a little bit cool, and often windy! But if the season also depends on where on the Earth you happen to live, that means that not everyone experiences the same season as the same time. It can be summer in some parts of the world when it’s winter in others. Because those different parts of the planet are getting different amounts of sunlight. When the Northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun and it’s summertime, the Southern hemisphere, is tilted away, so it’s wintertime there. So the tilty-ness of our planet explains a lot. It’s why we have seasons, and why it’s not always winter or always summer all of the time. And it also helps us understand why different parts of the world can experience different seasons at the same time. Thanks for watching, guys. Enjoy your season, whatever it happens to be! See you next time.

Channel: SciShow Kids

Views: 851,390

Keywords: scishow, scishowkids, Jessi Knudsen, Jessi Knudsen Castaneda, Squeaks, science, kids, children, learning, education, seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter, weather, earth, tilt, hemisphere, hank green, sci show

Id: UQjT5uKp2hg

Length: 2min 20sec (140 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2015