Worried about your weight? Thank your lucky stars that you live in the high Chihuahuan Desert. If you were a lowlander, you'd weigh even more! What? Desert living makes you a lightweight? No, it's the "high" part. All else being equal, the higher the elevation, the less a person weighs. That's because weight depends on two things: the amount of material making up the objects involved—their masses—and the distance between the centers of the objects. Unfortunately for the overweight, the mass of your body doesn't change no matter how high you go—just the weight.
Now if you want to lose a LOT of weight, take a trip to the moon. Since
the moon is much smaller than the earth, it has a lot less mass, and gravitational
attraction is much weaker. To calculate your moon weight, merely divide your earth
weight by six. While you're on the lunar surface, you aren't free of
earth's field of gravity, but you can ignore it because both you and the moon are
in free fall—but that's another Desert Diary.
Contributor: Arthur H. Harris, Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.
Desert Diary is a joint production of the Centennial Museum and KTEP National Public Radio at the University of Texas at El Paso.