Carroll, Michael Thomas, and Carroll, Daniel (2023) The Tropics. In: Carroll, Daniel, Stalewski, Harry, and Rathnamma, Bhanu Mariyappa, (eds.) Paediatric Surgery: Clinical Practice in Remote and Rural Settings, and in Tropical Regions. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, USA, pp. 1-6.

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Abstract

The tropics, or equatorial regions, for centuries have stirred interest among people living outside of the region. Old Western literature often represented the tropics as a wild, unconquerable natural wilderness, or as “Garden of Eden” style tropic paradise. According to the geographic definition, the tropics are the regions of Earth surrounding the equator between the lines of the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere and the tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere, including all zones on Earth where the Sun contacts a point directly overhead. Tropical rainforests are also widespread within the geographical tropics; however, they do not experience wet and dry seasons, having equally distributed rainfall throughout the year, being consistently wet, humid, and warm. Economic growth in the tropics has been significantly stunted for several decades, since a debt crisis in the 1980s devastated the economies in many tropical countries, especially in Latin America.

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