Re: Are there places on Earth with more than four seasons?

No, there are no places on Earth with more than four seasons, but
there are some places with just two. It all depends on what you mean by
'seasons'.
        Some people use the word 'seasons' to mean 'the weather is really
different for a long while' - as when summer is really different from
winter, and so on. In that case you can find places on Earth where there
are really just two types of weather - summer and winter. These places
tend to be near the Equator where it is either hot and rainy or hot and
dry.
        When you go nearer the North or South poles you start noticing four
different types of weather through the year. The winter, with snow on
the ground and frost, the spring when the warmth is increasing and
plants
start to grow, the summer when it is warmest, and the fall when the
warmth is
decreasing and the plants stop growing.
        However, other people define 'seasons' by the calendar only and in
that case there are only four seasons any place you go - summer, fall,
winter and spring. The winter season is usually taken as December,
January and February, with spring being the months of March, April and
May.
Summer is June, July and August, and fall or autumn is September,
October and
November.

        The main reason there are only these 4 seasons is that we are on a
planet that orbits a single star - the Sun - and that our planet tilts
its axis so that half the year it is pointing away from the Sun at the
North
pole and half the year it is pointing towards the Sun. If we were on a
planet that circled a binary - two stars - then we might se two Suns in
the sky and depending on the orbit around these two stars we might have
very
many seasons indeed, depending on how the orbit gave us more and less
starshine through the year. It could be that conditions for life on a
planet circling a binary star would be so variable that life never
evolved on that planet and then there would be noone on it to make
calendars and
rake leaves and plant bulbs and worry about seasons.


Peter Thejll
Danish Meteorological Institute