Precipitation

I know, you're thinking that I'm thinking about April showers. Wrong.

I had my car washed today, and as I was waiting, I happened to pick up and leaf through a National Geographic for 2002. One of the articles was on endangered birds, and the area in focus was New Zealand.

There were absolutely gorgeous pictures of Fjordland National Park on the South Island, with incredibly tall waterfalls spearing down through tree covered rocks. The caption said the rocks rose 6500 feet above the Tasman Sea and bore the brunt of all the storms coming in from sea.

Now, I thought that it was incredible that Ketchikan, on the Inner Passage of Alaska's Pacific coast receives over THIRTEEN FEET of precipitation a year. But this area in New Zealand gets more than TWENTY ONE FEET of precipitation, making it one of the wettest areas on Earth.

You'd have to have gills to live there!