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There you have it. Another myth, going down the Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. The Simpsons episode " Bart vs. Australia ," which involves the oldest Simpson kid getting indicted for fraud in the Commonwealth, starts with a scene in a bathroom. Bart has noticed that the water in the sink always drains in a counterclockwise way; Lisa informs him that, in the Southern Hemisphere, it drains the other way. Bart doesn't believe her.
To find out for sure, though, he calls a number in Australia—collect—and … hijinks ensure. Mind blown even more because this was the inciting event on a Simpsons episode , and everybody knows cartoons are never wrong. So there is indeed a Coriolis effect , and we see it on grand scales -- hurricanes in different hemispheres tend to rotate in different directions, because the underlying Earth is spinning, and the effect is exaggerated as you move farther from the equator.
Fraser explains:. On the scale of hurricanes and large mid-latitude storms, the Coriolis force causes the air to rotate around a low pressure center in a cyclonic direction. Indeed, the term cyclonic not only means that the fluid air or water rotates in the same direction as the underlying Earth, but also that the rotation of the fluid is due to the rotation of the Earth. Thus, the air flowing around a hurricane spins counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and clockwise in the southern hemisphere as does the Earth, itself.
In both hemispheres, this rotation is deemed cyclonic. If the Earth did not rotate, the air would flow directly in towards the low pressure center, but on a spinning Earth, the Coriolis force causes that air to be deviated with the result that it travels around the low pressure center.
So it works on large scales. But on small scales like in your toilet, sink, or bucket , the rotation of the Earth itself at a decidedly pokey rate of one rotation per day is much weaker than other forces -- like the force of water jets in a toilet, or the force of water hitting slopes in a sink. In tracking down where this drain-direction myth originated and how it got so firmly lodged in the heads of people like me, many sources discuss the otherwise awesome Michael Palin documentary Pole to Pole , in which Palin visits the equator in Kenya and observes a tourist trap in which a man "demonstrates" via fakery the draining of water in different ways on the equator itself, and just north and south of it.
Palin doesn't point out that it's fake. I remember seeing this documentary when it came out, and it may be where I picked up the notion -- it seems like such an appealing demonstration of science, such an "ah-ha! We're all tiny ants on a huge spinning globe! What wonders! Sadly, it's BS.
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