David Waehner, age 11p of Elm Grove, Wis., for s question:

Are there seasons at the equator?

Any point on the equator is exactly halfway between the earths two poles, which means that it is narrow enough to ,jump across. However, it runs all the way around the wide waist of the world, making it almost 25,000 miles long. Nevertheless, a narrow region at the equator has a climate all its own, different from the climates a few miles to the north and south,

The equator runs across Equador, Columbia and Brazil. It then crosses the Atlantic to Africa, passes through the heart of the Congo, across Lake Victoria and Somaliland to the Indian Ocean. It passes through Borneo, Sumatra and a few other Indonesian islands, then crosses the Pacific back to where we started in South America, Only about 6,000 miles of this distance are over land and about 19,000 miles are over the ocean.

The climate at the equator is modified somewhat by land and ocean,, islands and continents, highlands and lowlands. Some regions are wetter or drier, warmer or cooler than others. Africa’s Mount Kenya, at the equator, is crowned with perpetual snows. But in the main, the daily temperature throughout the year varies no more than two or three degrees and any month is likely to be as rainy as any other month in the year. However, just a few miles north or south of the equator, there is usually a wet and dry season and as a rule the wet season is the hottest season.

Through the year, the daytime temperature at the equator changes very little. However, there may be a difference of 16 degrees between the day and night temperatures. In the main, the winds are calm, for the equator lies in the doldrums, a belt of light, rising air. However, baffling winds tend to whip up from any directions and sudden thunderstorms arrive with pelting rain.

On the land areas at the equator] a thunderstorm is almost sure to occur every day when the sun is highest and hottest.

The equator is a great circle slicing the globe into the northern and southern hemispheres. It bisects, or cuts exactly in half, the circle of illumination which divides the globe into day and night. Half of the equator is always in sunlight and half in darkness and since the earth turns around once every 24 hours, day and night at any point along the equator are always equal. This is one reason why the equator does not have changing seasons as we do. Our summers are hot because the days are longer, our winters are cold mainly because the nights are longer.

We think of the tropics as a hot region and that the equator, midway between the tropics, must be the hottest spot in the world. But this is not so. Many regions along the equator have daily temperatures between 70 and 80 degrees and temperatures of 90 degrees or more are very rare. Highlands are cooler than lowlands, for here as everywhere, the temperature tends to drop one degree with every 300 feet we rise above sea level.