Tropics

The tropics are the geographic region of the Earth centered on the equator and limited in latitude by the two tropics: the Tropic of Cancer in the north and the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere.

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This area lies approximately between 23°30'/23.5° N latitude and 23°30'/23.5° S latitude, and includes all the parts of the Earth where the sun reaches a point directly overhead at least once during the solar year. (In the temperate zones, north of the Tropic of Cancer and south of the Tropic of Capricorn, the sun never reaches an altitude of 90° or directly overhead.) The word "tropics" comes from Greek tropos meaning "turn", because the apparent position of the Sun oscillates between the two tropics with a period that defines the average length of a year.

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Tropical plants and animals are those species native to the tropics. Tropical is also sometimes used in a general sense of a place that is warm 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.

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In Köppen's scheme of climate classification, a tropical climate is defined as a non-arid climate in which all twelve months have mean temperatures above 18 °C (64.4 °F).

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Equator: The equator is an imaginary circle drawn around a planet (or other astronomical object) at a distance halfway between the poles. The equator divides the planet into a Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. The latitude of the equator is, by definition, 0°. The length of Earth's equator...

Latitude: Latitude, sometimes denoted by the Greek letter φ, gives the location of a place on Earth north or south of the Equator....

Tropic of Cancer: :Tropic of Cancer is also the name of a novel by Henry Miller, first published in 1934....

Tropics related Images and Photos (experimental)

The Tropics	Broome Tropics	Banana Tropics I	Banana Tropics II
Victorian Tropics II	In the Tropics	Window in the Tropics I	Paradise In The Tropics
Time Out in the Tropics