The Mexican Wave Experiment: "Waves" Travel Clockwise in Northern Hemisphere

Remember someone telling you that water circle down the drain either clockwise or counterclockwise depending on where you are on Earth? Well, it turns out that directionality also happens in a "wave" during sporting events (also called a "Mexican wave" for you Brits).

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author of The Wave Watcher's Companion found out:

It was not the most robust study, I admit, but I did watch 94 different YouTube videos of Mexican waves. (Looking back at it, this was clearly a displacement activity designed to avoid getting on with writing my book.) Sixty-nine of them were of waves travelling around stadiums within the Northern Hemisphere. Of these, I counted 40 going clockwise and 29 counterclockwise, a ratio of 58:42 in favour of clockwise. The other 25 videos were of waves at games in the Southern Hemisphere. Of these, 10 waves went clockwise and 15 counterclockwise, a ratio of 40:60 in favour of counterclockwise.
I asked a professional statistician if these results were significant. She told me that I can be 96.6 per cent certain that the probability of a wave going one way rather than the other is different between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. There is a high probability of a hemispherical difference. It certainly looked like waves are more likely to go clockwise in the north and anticlockwise in the south, but I hadn’t watched enough videos to be able to say this with the 95 per cent certainty that is considered significant.

http://themexicanwaveexperiment.org/node/20

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I can tell you that Mexican waves in Australia (which is in the southern hemisphere last time I checked) travel clockwise 99% of the time. Just like the water down the drain problem, it depends on which direction it's started.