25 Slow Motion Taking Your Time

CHAPTER 1 What Moves Slowly? ARE YOU BUSY TODAY? ARE YOU RUNNING FROM PLACE TO PLACE? ARE THERE FAST-MOVING CARS ON THE ROADS AND FAST-MOVING PLANES IN THE SKY? Our world is moving and changing all the time. Some changes are very fast; for example, after a lot of rain a fast-moving river can wash away land. But not everything moves quickly. Some changes take millions of years. You can't see these slow changes— but they are happening every day, every week, every year. It's the same in the plant world. Some things grow quickly, and some grow very slowly. The oldest living tree in the United States is a 5,000-year-old pine tree in California, named Methuselah. It's a very slow-growing tree! Some animals also grow slowly and they move slowly, too. When you're moving quickly from place to place, think about Jonathan. He's a tortoise, and he lives on St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean. Jonathan is about 178 years old— he's the oldest tortoise in the world. He lives his life very slowly. He doesn't move quickly. He takes all day to eat his food. Maybe moving slowly helps him live longer. So, stop your busy, fast-moving life for a second. Think about all things slow.

CHAPTER 2 Slow Water WATER CAN MOVE VERY QUICKLY. WE SEE IT RUNNING DOWN MOUNTAINS, IN RIVERS AFTER RAIN, AND IN THE OCEAN IN BAD WEATHER. BUT WATER CAN MOVE VERY SLOWLY, TOO. When there are no mountains and the land is flat, the water in a river moves more slowly and gets warmer. You can see this in the Everglades in Florida. The Everglades is the name of a large piece of land that is almost flat. In some places, there is some land above the water. In other places, the land is a little below the water. Water travels through the Everglades to the ocean very, very slowly. The Everglades has hot weather and warm, slow water. So it is a good place to live for many different plants, animals, and birds. There are so many plants that some people call the Everglades the "River of Grass." Alligators love the Everglades. These animals can swim in water and walk on land. They can find a lot of food here fish, birds, and other animals. Alligators don't like people. They move away from them. But don't get too near to these big, strong animals and their long teeth. Or they may eat you!

Florida is very warm. The water there moves slowly— but it does move. Travel up to Alaska, and you're going to see very different slow-moving water. The water there moves slowly because it's ice! There are more than 100,000 glaciers in Alaska. Many people think they are ice mountains. They're not— they are rivers of ice. This ice moves all the time. Most glaciers move about 0.3 meters a day but can move as fast as 31 meters in one day! What makes these slow-moving glaciers? In cold weather, water comes down from the clouds as snow. The top layer of snow is heavy. It makes the lower layers of snow into hard ice. Ice in high places slowly moves down to the ocean. Some glaciers are so small you can walk over them in one or two hours. But others are very big. The biggest glacier in the world, the Lambert Glacier in Antarctica, is more than 40 kilometers wide and more than 400 kilometers long! It's possible that one day soon the world is going to get warmer. Then the slow-moving glaciers are going to change into fast-moving rivers again. Alaska and the Everglades are very different places. But they are both places where there is a lot of slow-moving water.

CHAPTER 3 Slow Land IT'S NOT ONLY WATER THAT MOVES SLOWLY. THE LAND UNDER OUR FEET IS MOVING VERY SLOWLY, TOO. Think about a mountain on a very wet and windy day. The wind and the water break small pieces from the rocks. These pieces move down the mountain. Maybe they fall into a river. Very, very slowly, they cover the water, and the water goes under the land. The river becomes land. This is a big change and it takes millions of years. Under the land, there are more changes. More than 300 million years ago, trees and plants covered a lot of the world. These trees and plants died, and the land covered them. Very slowly, the trees and plants changed into coal. It takes a long time for the land to change. We can't see the mountains move. We can't see trees change into coal. But we can see things that move slowly in the plant and animal worlds.

Look at the trees near you. Some grow very quickly, but others take hundreds of years to get big and tall. The world's slowest-growing tree is a White Cedar in Canada. After 155 years, it was only 10.2 cm tall! Interestingly, many slow-growing trees live longer than fast-growing trees. It's the same for animals. Remember Jonathan the tortoise? Tortoises move slowly because they have heavy, hard shells on their backs and short, fat legs. They don't need to run away from other animals because these shells make them safe. And they don't need to move quickly to catch their food because they eat plants and other slow-moving animals. The world's slowest animal is the sloth. Sloths live in trees and they sleep a lot up to 20 hours a day. When they're not sleeping, they don't move much! They stay in trees and get most of their food and water from the plants and fruit near them. When they come down from the trees and want to go to another place, they move about two meters a minute only 120 meters in an hour. We walk about five kilometers in an hour. So, not everything in the world wants to move fast!

CHAPTER 4 Slow Sky WATCH A BIRD OR A PLANE FLY ABOVE YOUR HEAD. THEY MOVE VERY QUICKLY, DON'T THEY? BUT NOT ALL FLYING THINGS ARE SO FAST. Every year, millions of people fly between cities and countries because a plane is much faster than a car or train. But some people don't want to fly quickly. They want to know the land below. To really see it, you need to fly slowly. You can't see much from a fast airplane high above the clouds. A hot air balloon is better! The wind moves these balloons. If the wind is not strong, they move very slowly through the sky. In France in 1783, brothers Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier were the first people to travel in a hot air balloon. In 1785, Jean Pierre Blanchard and an American, John Jeffries, flew from England to France in a hot air balloon. Their balloon started to go down into the ocean. They threw everything heavy out of the balloon into the water below. But the balloon didn't go up. They took off their clothes and threw them into the water! The balloon moved up into the sky again. It took them 2.5 hours to travel less than 40 kilometers. Now it only takes seven hours to fly from New York to London— and that's more than 5,500 kilometers!