Where Is The Wettest Desert? | QI
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- Опубліковано 13 жов 2024
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This clip is from QI Series G, Episode 4, 'Geography' with Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Jo Brand, Rob Brydon and Jimmy Carr.
Rob Brydon's welsh impression is superb.
But he IS welsh. Thats his normal voice.
I’ve got to assume this is sarcasm 😂
He’s absolutely nailed the Porth Talbot sound. Genius
@@simontay4851 After careful consideration, we're just not sure.
Not as good as his man trapped in a box
Bloody hell, I’ve never heard Rob Brydon sound so hectic 🤣🤣🤣
This was in 2009 so his early years 😂
I thought it might be Antarctica because it receives so little precipitation but also has a massive amount of (frozen) water. Not technically wet, I know, but it's the sort of tomfoolery that I'd expect
It really should have been. The elves got this one wrong.
No, the dry valleys of Antarctica are agreed to be the driest places on earth. It's too cold for it to even snow there, so nothing to even form ice from (I have a whole book on it! Yes, I'm a nerd 😂)
from my limited reading, a desert is where this little or no rainfall and drinkable water.
Antarctica, continent covered in ice and doesn't rain. desert?
@@wretchagd4259 Antarctica is a desert, it just isn't wet. I thought the answer would be an ocean, though.
I thought the same, although other commenters here beg to differ!!
It's more accurate to say the big salt lake is level instead of flat, although colloquially we all know what is meant either way. It is the same with large bodies of water that have a surface which curves with the shape of the Earth. They are not flat, strictly speaking, but their surface is perpendicular to the direction of gravity at all points, which means they are level. Level essentially means that if you were to put a ball down it wouldn't roll away by itself.
Well yeah, but everybody understands flat.
@@ijobrien3 There are some people who don't understand it like the rest of us do and have some pretty weird ideas about the shape of the Earth.
I thought flats is just a name like meadow, forest, canyon, etc
Just LOVE Jo Brand - i could listen to her eye rolls and sarcastic whimsy all day.
One joke Brand is awful.
@@Ubique2927there is a reason why they always have her husband jokes on the klaxon - very predictable.
Had a friend who once set the land speed record in the carburetored gas engine class at the Salt Flats. He became a radiologist -- partly because it made him enough money to race his cars and it allowed his schedule to be Monday afternoon through Friday morning, so he had his weekends free to actual!y race them. We always thought it also offered the additional advantage of being able to read his own x-rays & MRIs after a crash -- something he's never done, so it's a moot point.
Jimmy looking increasingly confused is great
When I clicked the video I thought the title said "wettest dessert". Naturally I thought what... a glass of sugar water?
I thought it was going to be "the Moon" or something like that.
Also, these past years the Bonneville Speed Week (the annual high speed event) had to be cancelled a few times, because of rainfall, and standing water in the Salt Flats. Made for gorgeous pictures, but impracticable running.
What are you talking about, there is no moon!
@@dielaughing73 Quite right.
@@dielaughing73 no, that's not true, there are more than one
@@ambergris5705 depends which season of QI we're talking about!
The Moon has zero atmosphere and no precipitation, it cannot be the answer because it is drier than any place on Earth.
Actually the wettest desert is in Antarctica and covers most of it. The snow has slowly accumulated over millions of years but never melts because of the cold.
0:33 I loved "The World's Fastest Indian". It was like Forrest Gump on a motorbike. 😀
As a person who lives in central California it's kinda hilarious to hear them talking about places like Sacramento and Sonora like they are these mystical foreign lands with great landscapes and beautiful landmarks. Sonora is nice but it's annoying to drive around. Sac is just Sac; not terrible but never the city I want to be in.
Well to them it is a foreign, distant place. I do get what you mean, though-I think the same when people talk about kangaroos as amazing and unbelievable but I just think of them as those carcasses that litter the side of the highway.
@@Elriuhilu I've lived in Alaska for over 3 years now, but moose are still impressive animals. We once had one immediately adjacent to our front window.
@@Elriuhilu I think the same when people talk about ' Californians ' as amazing and unbelievable but I just think of them as those carcasses that litter the side of the highway. Sorry , couldnt help it :))
Rob acting like he's at a job interview and is drastically underqualified.
spot on! or the teacher's pet who's not really a great student
The Sonoran is not in California. It is only in south central Arizona and Mexico. It is also the only place the iconic saguaro cactus grows.
I don’t remember opening my front door in Sacramento and seeing it
@@ADRgmanI’m a lifelong San Diegan, very familiar with the nearby portion of the Sonora desert just to our East. It is indeed in California, as well as Arizona and the Mexican states of Baja California, Baja California Sur and Sonora.
@@ADRgmanThe Sacramento portion of the question referred to the mountain range there, not the desert.
@@LB-ge8ih I stand corrected. I’d been told that when the saguaros stop, so does the Sonoran desert. I’ll have a word with the Arizona branch of armchair know-it-alls. Thanks.
@@CarlosBenjamin Funny fact, from KQED: “Our portion of this desert lies in eastern San Diego County and in Imperial County, along the Colorado River hence the name. This desert is exceptional to the rest of the Sonoran in that it does not have the saguaro cactus and most of the rainfall occurs in the winter, rather than the summer.” So the portion in California really IS different for the lack of saguaro. I didn’t know that, but since you mentioned saguaro I thought I’d see what I could find. I guess the California portion is just super odd - but then again, so are Californians. 😁
First time I visited the Sonora Desert it rained and snowed the first two days. Weird seeing those Saguaro cacti with snow on them. The canyons have warning signs to evacuate if you see clouds passing overhead, because floods can travel great distances very quickly.
aww Jimmy such a good sport to pitch him his Hugh Grant! wonder if Rob could even do it without putting his hand to the back of his head
The Sutter Buttes is north of Sutter which is 45 minutes north of Sacramento.
ironically flat earthers use this lake as "evidence" the earth is flat.... while it's so big you can measure the curvature of earth on it....
Bonneville is still very much a lake. In the spring it floods and as the water evaporates the releveled salt pan is exposed which is why they can race on it. Having said that though, one must be very careful where they go on the salt pan because sometimes the water is only inches below the surface and you can easily penetrate the surface and become stuck. When you drive the highway across the lake you can see evidence of water all along side the road surface. You should also fuel up before crossing the lake because there are NO SERVICES on the lake except for a couple of tourist rest areas.
Bin there, dun that........
Rarely do QI questions about exotic or unusual places give me the ability to say "I have been there." In this case I have.
As someone who hasn't traveled, I've been to probably less than 1% of 1% of 1% of places
Anthony Hopkins's accent in World's Fastest Indian was a bit odd because the character was from the region of Southland, which has a distinctive twang most people don't hear very often.
Yeah but it was still wrong a lot of the time. Not bad for an American but still a laugh.
@@MeppyManAre you referring to Anthony Hopkins as American? If so, I’m sorry to disappoint you but he’s actually Welsh and therefore from the British Isles! 😀
@@MeppyMan Anthony Hopkins was born in Margam , Port Albot , Wales.
Salt Lake Apartments. 😂
Should have got a better response 😊
By some definitions there are deserts underwater in the ocean. I thought they were going for that
I've never thought of monkeys when I think of Gilbralter. I think of the movie with David Niven. 🙂🖖💕😊
I think of all the sieges
🌎
A desert, geologically, is defined as a region where evaporation exceeds precipitation. This applies to the eastern Mediterranean sea which is the wettest desert. It's water level is only sustained by the Nile inflow.
Why not Uyuni then as a salt flat?
Something has to be done about us being terrorised by Temu ads its getting out of hand
THE SONORAN DESERT IS NOT IN CALIFORNIA, DEAR STEPHEN! That's the Mojave Desert. Sonoran is in Arizona, New Mexico, and part of northern Mexico. You know how you can identify the difference between the two? Saguaro Cacti will only grow in the Sonoran Desert, not the Mohave. And the Saguaro are the cacti you see in all those westerns and cartoons to show that "you're in a desert." (It's the tall cacti with all the arms.)
The Sonoran dessert covers parts of Northern Mexico, but also extends into Southern United States, including California
The Great Basin desert, The Mojave desert, and the Sonoran desert all have parts in California
Each of these 3 desert regions have different climates and ecologies. When traveling from on desert regions to another, one can be quite shocked by the sudden change in the landscape
The Sonoran desert extends into California, but the wet part is in Arizona.
@@EebstertheGreat Hehehe... don't know if I should be happy, sad, or confused that I live in "the wet part." ;)
Stephen just reads the cards. You have to blame the QI elves.
A part of me expected the Librarian to come along and clonk Rob on the head for saying "monkey"...
(Referring to Discworld, in game form, from the 90s, where a young Brydon provided many voices!)
Wait wait he never said the name of the mountain range in California.
yeah I kept waiting!
Jimmy Carr looks so thin
I would suggest that the wettest deserts are in the deep ocean which have almost no life but obviously are pretty wet. Depends how you define a desert: Is it lack of water or lack of life?
The definition of a desert is "an area of land that receives no more than 25 centimeters (10 inches) of precipitation a year".
...it's never had anything to do with the amount of life, not sure why you think that
@@gyroscope915 That's a possible definition of a desert, but it isn't widely used. Typically people define deserts either by their aridity (which depends on precipitation, temperature, and insolation) or by their arid-adapted flora and fauna, or by both. A very hot, dry place can be a desert even if it gets 30 cm of rain a year, due to the huge potential evapotranspiration.
@EebstertheGreat right but neither of your definitions have anything to do with the lack of life either.
@@gyroscope915 Agreed, it's about a lack of water, not a lack of life.
Gotta disagree about the last one. The wettest desert is obviously Antartica. It's classified as a desert and is full of solid water, aka snow.
Actually Antarctica is considered the driest desert. Parts of the continent see less precipitation than the Atacama
Frozen water isn’t wet.
@aodhanmonaghan4664 exactly! They're even called the dry valleys of Antarctica, and this is agreed to be the driest place on earth
While yes technically Antarctica is dry because the water is frozen, it does directly border with oceans. That means it's touching lots and lots of water and is indeed wet at the perimeter. So yes Antarctica should be the answer.
@Kyle-nm1kh
Not at all
Desert is measured by rainfall/precipitation rates.
There's hot deserts like the Arabian, Saharan, Australian etc and cold deserts like the Gobi and Antarctica.
Large parts of Antarctica have had no precipitation (rain, hail or snow) in thousands of years. That's what makes it one of the largest and driest deserts. Proximity to sea means nothing. Atacama desert is next to the Pacific ocean and yet parts have had no rain in over 10,000 years. The plants get moisture from fog which doesn't count as precipitation (which needs to fall not float)
Salt Lake Flats is also great for demonstrating that the Earth is flat. A lot of missing curvature.
Only because flat earthers don’t understand that 8” / mile^2 is a rough approximation used by 19th century mariners rather than a formula to describe earth’s curvature. This should be obvious to anyone with even the slightest education as a squared formula like that would result in a parabola, which is obviously not what a spherical earth is.
I didn’t think we could see the curve from earth?
They're so bored without the impressions lol
I say that American plains are the wettest desert, because it goes through centuries long periods of thunderstorms and dust storms and no one knows why
well that's not a desert by any commonly shared definition but have fun with that
Back in the day, when Q.I. was actually "I," and watchable.
A "desert" is a place with no human settlements.
A place with lots of flora and arable land could be called a desert, if no humans live there.
just... no. you can make up your own definitions of words, but they will be useless for communicating with anyone else.
@just-tess That's the original definition, it's a desert because it's deserted.
Your mom's pants?
This went completely over my head, not funny at all.
ironically flat earthers use this lake as "evidence" the earth is flat.... while it's so big you can measure the curvature of earth on it....