To make life easier and eliminate possible inconveniences, people have learned to come up with various inventions. Using physics, you can make the forces of nature work to your advantage. What is a gutter? According to the explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, there are several answers to this question.
What is a gutter: the meaning of the word
First of all, a gutter is an artificial elongated recess of a rectangular or semicircular shape, used to drain water or pour something. Gutters can be carved from stone or wood, hollowed out in rock, made of metal materials. The principle of operation is such that the gutter contributes to the unimpeded flow of the substance along the walls from one edge to the other.
The most common example of gutters in everyday life are drain pipes installed around the perimeter of each building and draining rain and melt water from roofs.
Safety chute
This interesting term refers to a special recess in the railway tracks, designed to providehuman safety in the event of a fall on the rails. The free space between the rails is formed due to the absence of sleepers. Most often, safety gutters are equipped at metro stations. If it so happened that a person was on the tracks of the train ahead, do not panic and try to climb onto the platform. It is enough to lie in the gutter parallel to the rail, cling to the bottom and wait for the train to pass.
What is a gutter in nature
Gutters can be not only made by man, but also created by the power of nature. From this follows the second definition of the phenomenon as a long and narrow depression on the bottom of the sea or ocean. Interestingly, such a trough often becomes the base of a volcano or the epicenter of an earthquake.
This element is formed in the process of plate convergence, when the oceanic crust is pressed under another continental or oceanic crust. The longest oceanic trench on the planet is the Peru-Chile Trench, and the deepest is the Mariana Trench, stretching almost 11 km towards the center of the Earth.
