BeeHive Geography Question: Which parts of the planet experience Fall/Autumn in October?
In autumn fewer hours of sunlight and colder temperatures trigger a chemical change in tree leaves. That’s why they can turn different colors such as red, orange, yellow, and brown. In some areas leaves become so bright they’re visible from outer space.
Some birds really show off their smarts in autumn. During this season certain species store seeds and other food in tree hollows for colder months. To help them remember where they stashed the grub, these birds’ brains actually grow larger!
Fall officially begins on the autumnal equinox (around September 23)—when Earth is positioned in such a way that the sun shines directly on the Equator. In Lithuania, people burn wooden sculptures to celebrate. In Japan, the event is a national holiday in which kids get a vacation day.
The Taurid meteor shower occurs every year in mid-autumn. Meteor showers are mostly made up of tiny dust particles, but this meteor shower also contains a large amount of pebble-size debris. When this debris enters Earth’s atmosphere, it burns up and creates spectacular fireballs.
Answers to Beehive questions:
Spelling: Autumn and fall are used interchangeably as words for the season between summer and winter. Both are used in American and British English, but fall occurs more often in American English. Autumn is considered the more formal name for the season.
The older of the two words is autumn, which first came into English in the 1300s from the Latin word autumnus. (Etymologists aren't sure where the Latin word came from.) It had extensive use right from its first appearance in English writing, and with good reason: the common name for this intermediary season prior to the arrival of autumn was harvest, which was potentially confusing, since harvest can refer to both the time when harvesting crops usually happens (autumn) as well as the actual harvesting of crops (harvest). The word autumn was, then, a big hit.
Names for the season didn't just end with autumn, however. Poets continued to be wowed by the changes autumn brought, and in time, the phrase "the fall of the leaves" came to be associated with the season. This was shortened in the 1600s to fall.
Around this time, England's empire was fast expanding, which meant that the English language was going places. One place it went was to the New World, and it set up shop in North America in the 1600s. As time went on, the English spoken in America and the English spoken in Britain diverged: there wasn't as much contact between the two groups of English speakers. Throw into the mix the independence of the United States, and the fact that the type of English spoken in America became part of our early national identity, and the gulf between the two dialects of English widened.
A handful of words got caught in the identity crisis, and fall was one of them. Both autumn and fall were born in Britain, and both emigrated to America. But autumn was, by far, the more popular term for quite a long time. In fact, the "autumn" sense of fall wasn't even entered into a dictionary until 1755, when Samuel Johnson first entered it in his Dictionary of the English Language.
Geography: The northern hemisphere of Earth (above the equator) experiences Summer in June through August (approximately) and Winter in December through February. Spring is the change from Winter to Summer, and Autumn (Fall) is the change from Summer to Winter. In the southern hemisphere it is the opposite! Summer is December through February, and Autumn marks the change to Winter, which is June through August. This has to to with "axial tilt" - the way the Earth is tilted toward or away from the Sun as it goes through its orbit.
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