New York, U. London, U. The rain was so heavy, the clouds so dark, the winter chill so penetrating that had Noah's Ark sailed past I might have hitched a ride. But all this has more to do with the time of the year than all the hyperventilating about the Mayan calendar. There is no need to rush to your doomsday bunkers.
On this side of the Atlantic, the world is still turning. By the time the Mayan calendar runs out where you are, it looks you'll be OK, too. Bugarach, France midnight; p. Foreign journalists alone doubled the population of the town rumored to be one of the few places that would have been spared annihilation had the world ended.
People gather at dusk in Bugarach, France a small village in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The mountain town is rumored to be a place of protection should Doomsday come.
For the Southern Hemisphere, the winter solstice occurs on June 20 or Thankfully, after we reach the winter solstice, the days begin to once again grow longer and longer until we reach the summer solstice —the first day of summer and the longest day of the year.
Think of it this way: Although the winter solstice means the start of winter, it also means the return of more sunlight. It only gets brighter from here!
The winter solstice marks the official beginning of astronomical winter as opposed to meteorological winter , which starts about three weeks prior to the solstice. The winter solstice occurs once a year in each hemisphere: once in the Northern Hemisphere in December and once in the Southern Hemisphere in June.
When one hemisphere is experiencing their winter solstice, the other is simultaneously experiencing their summer solstice! We often think of the winter solstice as an event that spans an entire calendar day, but the solstice actually lasts only a moment.
This is shown in the diagram below. The solstices and equinoxes from the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere. Credit: NASA. The winter solstice holds significance across a variety of cultures, as it signals the changing of the seasons. Some ancient peoples even marked the solstice using huge stone structures , like Newgrange in Ireland. In some cultures, the solstice traditionally marked the midway point of the season rather than the start of it, which explains why holidays such as Midsummer Day are celebrated around the first day of summer.
Think about the daily path of the Sun: It rises in the east and sets in the west, arcing across the sky overhead. During the summer, the Sun arcs high in the sky, but during the winter, it arcs lower, closer to the horizon. How can we observe the effects of solstice ourselves? On the day of the solstice, stand outside at noon and look at your shadow.
When we reach the summer solstice on June 20, 21, or 22, the Sun will reach its most northerly spot, directly overhead at the Tropic of Cancer which runs through Mexico, northern Africa, and southern Asia. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year the day with the most daylight hours and marks the beginning of summer. Learn more about the summer solstice! Logically, it would make sense to assume that this is also the coldest day of the year, since we are exposed to less warmth-giving sunlight on this day than at any other time.
But this is not true. There are a lot of factors that affect the temperature of a location on any given day, including altitude, snow cover, and large-scale weather patterns. Snow cover, for example, partially blocks solar radiation from being absorbed by the Earth, which results in less heat being released and an overall drop in temperature. Learn more about the Reasons for the Seasons. It is important for meteorologists to be able to compare climatological statistics for a particular season from one year to the next—for agriculture, commerce, and a variety of other purposes.
Thus, meteorologists break the seasons down into groupings of three months. Meteorological winter starts on December 1 and includes December, January, and February. Did you know? For the ancient Celts, the calendar was based around the solstices and equinoxes, marking the Quarter Days, with the mid-points called Cross-Quarter Days.
Learn more about the Celtic calendar. Thousands of people celebrate the solstices at Stonehenge in England. Due to the alignment of the stones, experts acknowledge that the design appears to correspond with the use of the solstices and possibly other solar and lunar astronomical events in some fashion.
At sunrise at Stonehenge on the summer solstice longest day of the year , the Sun appears to balance perfectly on one of the stones. Here at the Almanac, we love our weather folklore.
Here are just a few of the many proverbs that we have collected in our archives:. Read more winter weather folklore. Winter inspires both joy and woe. Other people dislike the frigid temperatures, blizzards, and wild weather for good reason. In colder regions, winter often means shoveling, snowblowing, dealing with bad roads, and sometimes unbearable temperatures.
In warmer regions, the winter temperatures become very mild or cool, and places such as Florida fill up with people escaping the harshness of a northern winter. What about that winter weather? I live on the NW coast of England old England that is and the Winters in this part of the world are usually cold, wet and windy. However, one of the best scenes in the world is on a crisp sunny winters morning coming over the brow of the hill on the 13th hole at Morecambe golf club and seeing the snow capped hills of the Lake District over the calm waters of the bay, it lifts the soul and takes my mind off the awful golf shot I have just made.
Winter in Chicago was magical when I was a child, challenging as an adult, but always clean and lovely in forest preserves while cross-country skiing, skating or zooming downhill in a toboggan. Now in the Pacific NW, winter is grey, rainy and mild with rarer snowfalls that stop traffic cold! Since I am a "furlough baby" and born in January, Winter will always be a favored season with sweet memories of skating, hot chocolate and home baked cookies, breads and pies.
I miss a bustling downtown, shopping at Marshall Fields and meeting friends"Under the clock", lunching in the Walnut Room and a photo with Santa. Great memories! We here in southwestern Florida love winter. We are glad to see Summer go and take the heat, humidity, storms and bugs with it.
We generally are treated to the best weather in the Country during the six months including November through April. Yes, Summers are pretty nasty here, but those 75 degree January days are worth the Summer suffering. I loooove Winter. What would happen next is uncertain, although the scholars suggested this might have been a prophecy of some sort.
This analysis was picked up "on many New Age websites, associated forum discussions, and even a few book chapters" as evidence that the Maya calendar had predicted the end of the world, according to Stuart.
Houston and Stuart, however, independently revisited the glyphs recently and concluded that the inscription may actually contain no prophetic statements about at all. Rather, the mention of the end of Bak'tun 13 is likely a forward-looking statement that refers back to the main subject of the inscription, which is the dedication of Monument 6.
In an October blog post about his conclusions , Stuart makes an analogy to a scribe wanting to immortalize the New York Yankees' sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies in that year's World Series. If this writer were to use the Maya rhetorical device thought to be in Monument 6's inscription, the text might read:. It happened 29 years after the first Yankees victory in the World Series in And so 50 years before the year will occur, the Yankees won the World Series.
Written this way, Stuart notes, the text mentions a future time of historical importance—the year anniversary of the victory—but it does so in reference to the event at hand, i. According to INAH's Gallaga, this structure of Maya texts is what has confused modern minds, given our penchant for literal, straightforward reading. Even if the Monument 6 inscription refers to a god coming down at the end of Bak'tun 13, it isn't a statement about the end of the world, he said. Read about the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.
Saturno, the Boston University archaeologist, agreed that the reference to a specific date is clear in Monument 6, but added that "there's no text that follows and says, Herein will be the end of the world, and the world will end in fire.
That's not anywhere in the text. Related video: Surviving —Preparation. Rather, Saturno said, the hype around stems from dissatisfied Westerners looking to the ancients for guidance, hoping that peoples such as the Maya knew something then that could help us through difficult times now. In any case, even if the ancient inscriptions explicitly predicted the end of the world, Saturno wouldn't be worried, given the Maya track record with long-range prophecy.
All rights reserved. That's just us. Maya Prophecy for End of the World? If this writer were to use the Maya rhetorical device thought to be in Monument 6's inscription, the text might read: "On October 7, , the New York Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies to win the World Series. They didn't see the Spanish conquest coming.
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