A Khawaga’s Tale: Here comes the sun

We are not only on the verge of a new leader of the free world, which should be known at breakfast on Wednesday morning, but we are on the verge of the cold weather too.

By my calculations it is just a little early yet to reach for the woollies, I think we have at least another week of temperatures in the high 20s.

A few Cairenes ran for their scarf last Monday, but it warmed up over the weekend. My prediction; the temperature will drop to the low 20s on Wednesday Nov. 12 and that will be it for the warming sun until mid-February.

Cairo is a slave to the sun and with the tilt of the Earth turned towards the southern hemisphere more and more, we are getting less and less sun each day and the nights are drawing in.

The sun is now tracking low across the southern sky, with the Dec. 21 solstice fast approaching, when it will be directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, and as we are just 7° N of the Tropic of Cancer, we are thus heading towards our shortest day.

You can visit the Tropic of Cancer, approximately 23.5° N, and south of Aswan. I’ve never been, but I suspect there is a line painted on the ground at Philae Temple, where you can witness the summer solstice on June 21.

So, give it another week, and the biggest influence over our climate will be too low in the sky to keep back the moist cool air seeping in from the Mediterranean. Then reach for the scarf and winter woollies.

Egypt is a bit of a paradise for the earth science boffin. There is a divergent plate boundary, where a rift has formed between Africa and the Arabian tectonic plates, which began to part about 30 million years ago.

Thirty million is not that long in geological time; in fact the rift that runs into East Africa is the youngest geological break-up on the planet, with the Red Sea continuing to widen about 2 cm per year.

In the mountains of South Sinai veins of basalt and other volcanic intrusion streak through the granite rock giving them a striped appearance. But allegedly traces of the once volcanic past exist in the hot springs in the caves at Jebel Musa and two warm mineral springs near Tor.

In Dahab, you can scuba dive through lava tubes and I remember the Canyon dive at the Blue Hole to be some type of hollowed out lava flow.

Source - Egypt Daily News