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d ~ 144'076'800 km: day 56

Video update from Chanabaya Chile:

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The team set off to Greenland next week. Keep updated with听our travels via

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Riding on waves out in the sea with nothing between you and nature but a surfboard seems to take more than just technique - it's about understanding the climate. Here is听Mark's take on swells, thrills and heroes...

What is your first surfing memory?

I was 10 years old and I remember getting this little white wash wave and riding it in until my fins hit the sand, It was the coolest thing I'd ever done!!!! From that day on, I wanted to be a surfer.

I've been surfing for 18 years now. I moved up to Queensland when I was 9, and loved the beach, so it was really only a matter of time.

How many tries did it take for you to surf your first wave or for you to make it out to the line-up?

The first wave that I rode was about 6 months after I got a board for my birthday. I didn't have anyone to show me what to do, so I would just hang out surfing the white washes, but then one day I caught a wash that formed into a real wave - then I was hooked.

Where have you experienced your most exciting ride?

I've had so many, it's really hard to pick one, but I would say Teahupoo in Tahiti. The intensity of that wave is amazing and when you get a good one there, it leaves you buzzing for weeks.

Image courtesy of Anthony Warry

听How did it feel to ride Jaws at night in Hawaii?

The first time I ever surfed there I smashed into the cliff, so right from the start I had so much respect for the place. Jaws is one of the biggest waves in the world and it's also one of the most powerful too. When you're on the wave riding, it's an amazing feeling of speed and excitement. It's so much fun being right in the centre point of a huge ball of energy that is just moulding around you.

What are the ingredients for a perfect surf?

Big swells that are coming from way out to sea and when they hit, if there are no winds with them, this is what makes it perfect! The waves are big and clean and very smooth to ride. That's the best.

听

Image courtesy of Maxum

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听Where are your top five surf spots?

1. Teahupoo, Tahiti - just everything about the wave and the place, the water temp is so warm and the colours are amazing too.
2. Namotu, Fiji - it has so many good waves all around it, really good diving and fishing too and the Fijian people are so loving, its cool.
3. Cape Town, South Africa - that's where I have rode one of my biggest waves so far.
4. Jaws, Hawaii - the night ride at jaws is something that I'll never forget and its very special to me.
5. Western Australia - so many good, big waves. That place has them all!

What type of surf board do you use?

I use a lot of different boards. I have tow boards (boards with straps) that are 5'5 and big paddle in boards that go up to 10'6. I will often take about 6-8 boards with me to each location because every day the conditions change and you need the right board to suit how the waves are breaking.

If you could do anything else what would it be?

Maybe play football (AFL or Rugby Union)?

Who are your surfing heroes?

In the surfing world, I really liked Luke Egan because he was a goofy footer like me (right foot forward on surf board) and he was a very powerful surfer! I was also a big fan of the Hopgood brothers, they charge, they are great tube riders and seem like good people, but my main heroes are not actually surfers. I have always really looked up to Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali. I love their work ethic and how they were just the best in their field.

Can you ever see a time when you are not riding the waves?

Never!

In one word how would you describe your relationship with the ocean?

Me

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d ~ 133'785'600 km: day 52

On the other side of the planet, surfers are waiting. Fortunately, Hawaii isn't such a bad place to wait, being home to "the most beautiful beach in the world", luaus, very blue water, and more pineapples than you can shake a cocktail stick at. It is currently the , but those keen to risk their lives on the biggest waves of them all like what was expected to kick start the in Waimea Bay Hawaii rely on the conditions being just right.

Why Hawaii? Is this just an excuse for an exotic holiday? You can surf in lots of places, but these isolated islands win the prize for some of the biggest waves on the planet because of two things. They're in the right place to intercept the huge swells crossing the Pacific Ocean, and they're the right shape not to waste any of the energy heading their way. I suppose that sunny warm islands are good for surfer street cred (can you imagine the Beach Boys in Alaska instead of California?), but it turns out that's just a convenient coincidence.

It all starts with a big storm in the north Pacific. Waves grow in storms because the water surface is pushed along by the wind. You can see ripples form if you blow sideways on the top of a cup of tea, and Ocean waves start in the same way.

If the wind keeps pushing on the waves, they keep growing. But storms make complicated choppy waves, terrible for surfing on. This is why it's so important that Hawaii is far out in the middle of a very deep ocean. As the newly-formed waves race away from the storm, a sorting process happens. Waves with a long wavelength (a long distance from one peak to the next) travel more quickly than waves with short wavelengths. They can also travel further before they give up their energy. Storm waves can travel thousands of miles, and after such a long journey, the nasty messy choppy water has turned into smooth long tidy swells.

Our cool surfer dudes (who are still waiting) are actually waxing their surfboards close to the top of a huge mountain. If they could see for miles underwater, they'd probably have vertigo. Most of the Pacific ocean is about 5 km deep and the seafloor is fairly flat. The Hawaiian islands are tall volcanoes sticking up out of this vast plain. And this is the other reason that Hawaii gets big waves. Shallow water weakens waves, but this isn't a problem in Hawaii. These ocean swells reach the shore with most of their energy intact. If the right combination of conditions occurs, the waves breaking on the north shore of O'ahu can be 20 metres high. When the surfers finally catch their giant wave, they're surfing on moving energy from a storm that happened two thousand miles away, and 1-2 days previously. It sounds amazing, but I think I'll stick to watching.

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For more on听the team's journey through Tierra del Fuego read Series Producer Stephen Marsh's blog on . Look out for听Kate's next听update on what brings everyone to Puerto Williams the southern most city of the world...

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d ~ 120'921'600 km: day 47

The impact of the Earth's orbit around the Sun can be seen on Earth in the form of weather phenomena amongst many other things but weather isn't just something that happens on Earth. Our Sun has its own weather, but you don't have to be on the Sun's surface to know about it. Yesterday at 2am GMT, a particularly violent bit of twisted itself free and was launched towards us here on Earth.

Before you run to fetch your tinfoil hat and hide in the basement, let me just say that this isn't that unusual. Last time it happened you probably didn't notice it at all. Still, this event (classed as an X2 solar flare) is the strongest solar flare in the past four years that has been directed towards Earth.

The Sun and the Earth both have magnetic fields, but the Sun's is far more complex. In an active region of the Sun, the sort of place where a sunspot might form, the magnetic field can be 4000 times larger than normal. These complicated twisted magnetic fields store huge amounts of energy, and when they suddenly readjust and untwist, all that energy has to go somewhere. A lot of it is converted to light of all wavelengths, from radio waves to x-颅鈥恟ays. This massive outburst of light is a solar flare.

Courtesy of NASA

Yesterday's X2 event was so powerful that it also caused a coronal mass ejection, which means that a giant plume of energetic electrons and protons was thrown off the sun's surface. These ones happened to be accelerated more or less right towards us.

The light from the solar flare travels at the speed of light, and it took about eight minutes to reach us after the X2 event. That's how we know that it happened. But all those energetic particles are travelling much more slowly (around 710km per second), and so they'll take 24-颅鈥�48 hours to reach us. Right now, we're in the gap between the two arrivals. When those particles do arrive, they'll disrupt the Earth's magnetic field and may cause a geomagnetic storm. There's a chance that this will disrupt some long-颅鈥恟ange radio communications and power networks. But the good news for me in the UK is that there's a chance of seeing aurora around our latitude.

Courtesy of NASA

Keep an eye on the sky if it's clear tonight, and if you see any coloured light, you may be seeing the direct effect of some of the Sun's weather visiting us here on Earth. I've never seen the aurora - I'll definitely be watching with excitement. If you do see anything that might be an aurora, email us with your photos!

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d ~ 120'921'600 km in Earth's orbit

Today we are 47 days in (GMT) with 318 days to go for us to complete another full orbit around the Sun.

The 23 Degrees team has returned from its adventures in South America to a well earned rest. Well not quite, as the team are already planning a trip to Greenland just north of the arctic circle to go hunting with the Inuit. Even though most of the northern hemisphere is warming up the ice in Greenland has been growing. This is good news for the hunters as they can travel far out onto the sea ice and hunt seals.

On paper that sounds like an easy proposition but in reality there's four flights each way, and then once they land the only form of transport are dog sleds. There are no roads and no motorised vehicles. It may sound primitive but it's worked for the Inuits for hundreds of years and it will get us to where we want to go.

Getting to location is one of the greatest challenges facing the 23 Degrees team. Many of the most exciting impacts of our journey around the Sun takes place in very remote locations and so far we have used jet planes, propeller small aircraft, helicopters, sailing yachts, zodiac motor launches, fishing boats, off-road vehicles, cars, skidoos, good old fashioned shank's pony - that's walking to you and me, and now dog sleds to get where we want to go.

While one team are planning to travel north to the ice-bound east coast of Greenland another are organising a trip down south to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Here they will face a completely different set of challenges. It won't be extreme cold and ice hunting but working with around sixty thousand Sun worshipers. What's brought them is the at the Temple of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza. They've all come to witness the special moment when the Sun lights up a serpent sculpture carved into the side of the temple.

The Temple of Kukulkan is a true ancient wonder. It was built by the Mayans over a thousand years ago and was created to track the passage of the Sun. There are 365 steps to the top, one for each revolution the planet makes on its axis in a year. We just had to plan this into our production - it represents the true essence of our series.

Both these trips will be challenging in their own ways, but there's one factor that can make or break a shoot, a factor that we have no control of at all. And that's the weather. If it's cloudy on the Equinox there will be no lighted serpent, if we get torrential rain, the ceremony will be a damp squib. So even though we are making a series about the Earth's journey around the Sun, nothing is predictable and even with the greatest planning - if the weather misbehaves it can ruin a shoot.

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d ~ 108'057'600 km in Earth's orbit

We are 42 days into our journey around the Sun and already so much has taken place. Every step of the way the 23 Degrees team will be charting the progress of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. We orbit inside the atmosphere of the Sun so the impact of space weather on our planet is also of particular interest to us. As part of the process we will be providing regular roundups on the conversations on the blogosphere, YouTube and Twitter. What have you been talking about this week?

For us the top story this week has been the three dimensional images captured by NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites giving us a full 360 view of the Sun. This new 3 dimensional view will be of huge significance to scientists' better understanding of solar physics and therefore improve space weather forecasting.

What has made an impact on you this week?

For some winter is slowly winding down - and the arrival of spring is a hot topic, or has spring already sprung? 主播大秀 Nature UK has been keeping their eyes peeled and Twitter is full of 'spring has arrived' tweets. What signs of spring have you spotted?

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d ~ 102'912'000 km: day 40 of Earth's orbit

听

Stephen Kirk sent us this video of his walk up in the Scottish Highlands on February 3rd. It really shows the impact of the Gale force winds of 70mph that struck Scotland last week.

We are all on this journey together and we have a long road ahead of us mapping the Earth's journey for a full orbit around the Sun. Keep updated with our blog and email us your videos and images as and when you experience weather phenomena where ever you are in the world. Be our eyes and ears.

Thanks Stephen

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d ~ 102'912'000 km: day 40 of Earth's orbit

Your average cute fluffy cumulus cloud consists of about 400 metric tonnes of liquid water. And it's up there, a couple of kilometers above your head, looking innocent while apparently defying the laws of gravity. Surely, clouds should fall down. Why don't they?

The first thing to know about these clouds is that they're not static. They're like a fountain inside, as warm air from below pushes up through the middle of the cloud. When each individual updraft reaches the top, it pushes out a bump of cloud that we can see. That's why cumulus clouds are lumpy on top - each bump is the result of one of the warm air plumes that helped build the cloud. Here's a great time lapse video of this internal fountain process.

You can see the continual building of clouds from successive thermals. The important point to take from this clip is that a lot of the air inside a cloud is moving upwards.

How about the water?

The liquid water in a cloud is in very tiny water droplets, and each droplet is around 0.01mm in diameter. That means that if you took a lump of water with the same volume as a sugar cube and you split it into a billion pieces, each fragment would be the same size as a cloud droplet. The droplets are very spaced out, so the amount of liquid water in a litre of cloud is pretty small. That's why you can't drink fog.

If there was no air in the way, gravity would make a cloud droplet and a lump of lead fall at the same speed. But air pushes back on things that are falling through it, and that push becomes more important as the object gets smaller. I like the way that said this, although in a different context: "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, and a horse splashes." Yuck. The tiny cloud droplets have a very large surface compared with their mass, so the air slows them down even more than it slows the mouse and the final droplet speed is only about 3mm per second.

The end result? Individual cloud droplets are falling down, but very very slowly. And the air that carries them is moving upwards faster than they're falling. Imagine a slinky coming down an escalator moving upwards, and you'll get the idea. So those tiny droplets are stuck, up there in the cloud. And that suits me just fine. I don't have an umbrella that would withstand 400 tonnes of water falling on it all at once!

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d ~ 90'048'000 km: day 35 of Earth's orbit

Kate Humble and the 23 Degrees team have travelled down to Puerto Williams, a town sometimes called the southernmost city in the world. It's located in at the very southernmost tip of South America.

The 23 Degrees team are embarking on an epic journey down to the Southern Ocean on a 66 foot ketch called the Santa Maria Australia. They are sailing south west down the Beagle Channel, following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin who travelled this route 179 years ago on the HMS Beagle.

The team's mission is to discover what powers the weather in Tierra del Fuego and in the southern hemisphere.

They get their first clue a few kilometres down the Beagle Channel, when they come across a rather unexpected sight, a large glacier. The reason it's unexpected is that the Beagle Channel is on the same altitude south [55 south] as the Lake District in Britain. And even though the Lake District is hilly you don't see too many glaciers there. It's even stranger when you realise that it's summer in the southern hemisphere at the moment and glaciers are really sensitive to summer heat. The hotter the summer the more likely the ice is to melt, and the glaciers to retreat.

What makes it even more intriguing is that Perihelion happened just a month ago. Perihelion is the point on our orbit around the sun when the planet is closest to the sun. During Perihelion the planet gets 7% more sunlight than when it's furthest away during July. Also at this time of the year the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, so in theory it should be hotter. But it's not or the glaciers would melt away. Summers in the southern hemisphere are actually cool; in fact they are actually cooler than summers in the northern hemisphere.

To discover why Kate and the team are sailing through the Beagle Channel to the open sea of the Southern Ocean on the way she hopes to see a miniature forest with trees that are only a metre tall. These gnarled stumpy trees are caused by the incredible winds that blow across the land 24/7.

Once they get out on the open sea she'll see first hand what's controlling the climate. They are surrounded by seas; to the west is the Pacific, to the east the Atlantic, and the south the Southern Ocean. The only land around here is the narrow strip of Tierra del Fuego. But there's very little land across the rest of southern hemisphere, it's mainly ocean and that's the key to the climate. It's all about the difference between how land and water react to heat. Land reacts fast and warms and cools rapidly, so where there are large landmasses it gets very cold in winter and hot in summer.

The oceans react very slowly to heat so they take a long time to warm up and cool down. So they are still cold in mid-summer and warm in mid-winter. The warmer water in the oceans keeps the temperatures of the air warmer just as cold oceans will keep temperatures colder.

Because there is much more water than land in the southern hemisphere the oceans dominate the climate, so even though it's mid summer the large areas of cool oceans keep temperatures down. The cooling influence of the oceans is so powerful that it counteracts the effects of Perihelion. So even though the southern hemisphere is both closest to the sun, and tilting towards it, the power of the oceans keeps summers cooler.

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d ~ 90'048'000 km: day 35 of Earth's orbit

1000km (620 miles) wide and packing winds of 300km per hour (186mph), the recent cyclone Yasi was possibly the biggest and most powerful to hit the Australian coast in recorded history.

NASA Earth Observatory

It was the strongest storm globally since , which hit the Philippines in October 2010 and comparable to which raged across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico in 2008.

So what's the difference between cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes? Simply geography. They are all the same phenomenon, but given different names around the world. Cyclones in the southwest Pacific and Indian Ocean, typhoons in the northwest Pacific and hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic and eastern Pacific. To make things easier, I'll just refer to tropical cyclones from now on!

The habitat of these heat-fuelled beasts is confined to a zone between 5 and 30 degrees of latitude north and south of the equator. Any closer to the equator and our old friend the Coriolis force is too weak to induce any spin to the developing storm, while outside of the 30th parallel there just isn't enough heat to provide the necessary energy.

To make a tropical cyclone, you need very warm sea water with a temperature of at least 27C. This is why the storms occur seasonally, once summer sunshine has pushed sea temperatures beyond the threshold. They work like a huge heat engine, sucking up very warm, moist air from the sea surface which is then lifted and condenses into clouds. This releases even more heat which keeps the air buoyant and moving upwards before it finally cools and flows outwards at higher levels.

Cyclones play a very important role in transferring heat from the tropics to higher latitudes, acting as a natural safety valve. They also provide a large percentage of the annual rainfall in places such as the Philippines.

So despite the destructive power of cyclones, without their sustaining rain survival would be much more difficult in many parts of the world.

More on Tropical Cyclones:

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d ~ 87'475'200 km: day 34 of Earth's orbit

You may not believe it considering the amount of snow we had before Christmas but in metrological terms the weather in the UK this winter has been relatively calm and stable.

漏 British Crown copyright 2011, the Met Office

The storm is caused by cold air from the North Pole crashing into warm air from the south. When the two air masses crash into each small eddies of unstable air develop at the boundary between the air masses. In these eddies warm and cold air swirl around each other and can grow into a storm.

The storm heading towards Europe is one of two storms currently in the Atlantic. With so little activity in the Atlantic winds are rushing directly from the US to Scotland. This is what's generating the very high wind speeds that are hurtling towards Scotland.

The path of the storm across the Atlantic is steered by two "gatekeepers" - a region of high pressure over the Azores in the south and low pressure region over Iceland in the north. Differences in the relative strengths of these pressure centres and the changes they produce are called the North Atlantic Oscillation.

For the last few months it's been in a generally negative phase with the low pressure over Iceland tending to push any storms south and keeping the weather over the UK very cold but also quite calm and dry. In the last few days this oscillation has moved into its positive phase, where the high pressure over the Azores gets higher and the low pressure over Iceland drops lower. In this positive phase, storms like this one, are generally pushed towards the UK rather than further south.

If you are affected by the Storm in Scotland and can take any images or video please send them to the 23 Degrees team but only if you can do so from a place of safety.

More on this story: 主播大秀 News

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d ~ 82'329'600 km: day 32 of Earth's orbit

Mention the word "weather" to your average Brit, and rain is probably the first image to come into their mind. From refreshing spring showers to gloomy grey downpours, our national relationship with the weather is often distilled down to the question of whether or not we need to take an umbrella when we pop down to the shops.

The one of the driest places on Earth. It's an amazing place, but I think that it's most interesting because it shows how much we take falling water for granted. We live right inside a waterfall the size of a planet, and we almost never notice. Liquid water is heavier than air, and if water was always liquid it would all stay in the oceans. Rain would be impossible and every scrap of land would look like the Atacama Desert.

Fortunately, energy from the sun and the process of evaporation save us from this fate. There are always water molecules evaporating and condensing again at the surface of the ocean. Imagine a boundary between two countries, with people coming and going every day across the border. If the numbers crossing each way stay the same, the total number of people in each country doesn't change even though lots of people have switched places. But if more people travel one way than the other, the total populations do change. The sun provides the energy to do exactly this at the ocean surface. Even a small increase in temperature, causing a small increase in the amount of evaporation, can result in a large amount of extra water ending up in the atmosphere after enough time. During daylight, vast amounts of water move from the ocean to the atmosphere.

Once the water is in the air, wind (also powered by sunlight) carries it higher and often also moves it hundreds of miles sideways. The sun provides an immense amount of energy to lift all this water up very slowly, but we know that what goes up must come down. And if the water condenses and forms raindrops, it comes down an awful lot faster than it went up.

Above our heads are stately rivers of water, either visible clouds or invisible water vapour, being carried around by the wind.

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