Tropics

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A noontime scene from the Philippines on a day when the sun is almost directly overhead.

The tropics are the region of the Earth near to the equator and between the Tropic of Cancer in the northern hemisphere and the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere. This region is also referred to as the tropical zone and the torrid zone.

This area includes all the areas of the Earth where the sun reaches a point directly overhead at least once a year. The word "tropics" comes from Greek tropos meaning "turn", because the apparent position of the Sun moves between the two tropics within a year.

Tropical plants and animals are those species that live in the tropics. Tropical is also sometimes used in a general sense for a tropical climate, a climate that is warm to hot and moist year-round, often with the sense of lush vegetation. However, there are places in the tropics that are anything but "tropical" in this sense, with even alpine tundra and snow-capped peaks, including Mauna Kea, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the Andes as far south as the northernmost parts of Chile and Argentina. Places in the tropics which are drier with low humidity are such as the Sahara Desert and Central Africa and Northern Australian Outback.