An Ocean of Air (36 page)

The air here in Greenland seems somehow more substantial than it ever is farther south. Perhaps it's the cold, or the manifest absence of smoke and industrial pollution, but you feel aware with every breath that something sweet and fresh is entering your mouth and filling your lungs.

Robert Boyle would have had little difficulty in persuading the residents of this small Arctic town about the power of the atmosphere or its substance. They feel it almost every winter, when the Piteraq winds appear. Heavy, cold air pours down from the icecap; it gathers speed as it is funneled down the glacial valleys until it arrives in town with the force of a hurricane, to tear off roofs and shatter windows. During a Piteraq is the only time the sledge dogs are allowed to roam free from their chains and seek shelter where they can—the air can be more than strong enough to hurl them into the sky.

Søren is Danish, but he has lived here for decades, and he has developed his own private scale for the Piteraq winds. Level one is when his oldest anemometer—a type of wind-measuring device—gives up the ghost. Level two, at about one hundred knots, is when the second one follows suit. Level three is when the welding of this second anemometer breaks loose and begins to flap uncontrollably, like a helicopter with only one rotor. And level four is when all his instruments blow away.

We are approaching summer now, and the winds are gentler. Still, today's breeze was enough to transform the bay. Yesterday the water was practically clear; today it is crammed with floes of ice that have been blown in from the open sea. Years of partial melting and refreezing, slamming together and ripping apart, have sculpted these floes into the shape of whipped meringues. And here and there, an iceberg towers above the sea ice. Each one of these tall bergs was born in the heart of this frozen land and has spent thousands of years sliding gently toward the coast before it picked up pace on the steep side slopes, broke off into the water of the fjord, and is now sailing out to sea.

Greenland is a sensitive soul, a high-strung region of a restless planet. A slight nudge downward in temperature can make the entire fjord freeze; another nudge and there's nothing but open water. I'm here to witness some of these changes, effected by the atmosphere. For Greenland's sensibility
means that the sinister side of carbon dioxide is already making itself felt. The icecap here is melting; the glaciers are speeding up and delivering ever more icebergs to the sea; the sea ice, haven for seals, hunting ground for polar bears, is on its own downward route to extinction. Satellites show that the summer minimum in sea ice has shrunk by 8 percent per decade over the past thirty years, and by the end of the century summers here will be all but ice free.

The Inuits here say they are unconcerned by this prospect. They are hunters, not farmers. They are accustomed to change, to reading the signs of our restless planet and reacting to them. Theirs is an entrepreneurial attitude to weather and climate, one that the rest of us will do well to learn as the changes affecting Greenland make their inevitable way south.

But Greenland also counts on the natural warming that carbon dioxide brings and the capacity of the air to redistribute the world's warming wealth. William Ferrel's third giant wind cell descends hereabouts, bringing with it warmth from the south. There's not much life on view on this frozen island, but without Ferrel's wind cells there would be no life at all.

Above the layer of wind and weather, Søren's balloon must now be swelling as it rises into the thinning air. On the ground it was only about a meter wide, but it will eventually grow to four times the size, as the hydrogen inside meets less and less resistance when shoving against the thin latex skin.

Perhaps it has already passed through Joseph Kittinger's vantage point, twenty miles up. Around it is the blackness of space; in the distance, the gentle curve of Earth with its thin blue line of atmosphere; below it, a few wispy clouds, and me.

It must be encountering our planet's outermost defenses. There might even be an aurora, flickering into life in the black sky above Søren's balloon. On the ground I am dazzled by the perpetual summer sunlight, but I know this is prime aurora territory, and if I were here in the winter darkness I would see the lights for real. This is the very place where Earth's magnetic field lines guide radioactive beams from space into the waiting arms of the ionosphere; where the aurora borealis shows the protective power of our air in action. Clamped to the sea floor of our ocean of air, I
try to picture its uppermost layers. But in spite of everything that I've read, I can scarcely believe that air too thin for me to breathe is yet strong enough to fend off everything that space can throw at us.

Yet it is. In October 2003, a series of explosions rocked the outer surface of the sun. A massive flare flash fried Earth with x-rays equivalent to five thousand suns. A slingshot of plasma barreled toward us at two million miles an hour. The radioactivity it contained was the equivalent, said one scientist, of taking every nuclear warhead that has ever been made—not exploded, mark you, but
made
—and detonating them all at once.

And yet nobody on Earth felt a thing (though perhaps you were lucky enough to see the light show). The most massive solar flare since records began and one of the biggest radioactive maelstroms in history together met a far more formidable foe. They each arrived, and then, one by one they simply bounced off ... thin air.

I have been writing stories about parts of the atmosphere for over a decade, and yet it might never have occurred to me to look at the air as a whole if it hadn't been for the questions people kept asking me. Thanks, therefore, to Fred Barron who wanted to understand about the winds and to Simon Singh who wondered how we first discovered that the atmosphere has layers and what each layer really does. It was Simon, too, who suggested that I calculate the weight of the air in an "empty" concert hall, the results of which surprised me much more than they did him. Thanks also to the many people who wanted to know more about how the atmosphere was changing. After ten years of preaching about climate change to only, it appeared, the converted, I'm thrilled that this has finally become such a hot topic.

However, it was the image of Joseph Kittinger's jump that finally convinced me to write about air. Thanks to Jonathan Renouf who alerted me to Kittinger's existence, and loaned me tapes of a fabulous BBC program about the atmosphere that contained some of the original shots from Kittinger's on-balloon camera as he fell. (Jonathan was also helpful with information about Stardust, the plane that vanished in the southern jet stream, since he was writer and producer of the Horizon program on the subject.)

As I watched the video of Kittinger's extraordinary leap, I stared at the thin blue line of the atmosphere that hovered over Earth's curved horizon. And after he jumped I watched him, floating on a sea of what he later said seemed like nothing. I was enchanted by the paradox of this atmosphere that Kittinger fell through. How can something so delicate also be so powerful? An unsung hero full of fragility and fire: What more could a writer ask for?

And so I set to work. And the more I investigated, the more I realized that an extraordinary cast of characters had collaborated to show us the
power of air. One of my favorites, and the hardest to pin down, was William Ferrel, the diffident West Virginia farmer who figured out the trade winds by drawing circles with a pitch fork on his barn door. Thanks to John Cox for help with sources about Ferrel's life and work. Thanks also to the fine folks at the National Academy of Sciences for sending me a copy of the sole autobiographical sketch that this remarkable man left behind, when I had exhausted all other possible sources. (How could the British Library have two sets of the entire series in which this sketch appeared and yet have that volume in each set be missing? And how could I fail to find it in the few remaining collections in the rest of the UK? And even at the few U.S. universities I tried in desperation. I half suspected the shy Ferrel of reaching beyond the grave to efface the few written details that remained of his life before I could read them.)

In all other respects, the British Library was as valuable as I have come to expect, as were the ever-helpful staff of Reading Room Science 2. Thanks also to the staff and curators of the wonderful London Library. For some reason this element of literary London remains largely hidden. And yet the charming, archaic building in St. James Square houses a treasure of ancient and modern volumes in its labyrinthine stacks.

Best of all, you can borrow books from the London Library and take them away with you. In my case I took them to France where I wrote the first half of this book in the tiny but welcoming village of Condeissiat in Ain. Thanks especially to the Famille Sinardet, and at Les Fausses: Hélène, Jean-Chris, and Hubert, not to mention Sammy, Choupette, and Clochette. Hélène kept me supplied with her peerless tartes à la crème, the boys with cheese, wine, and good English tea, while the animals provided me with distractions when I needed them and left me alone (more or less) when I didn't. And Hubert greeted me at the end of each working day with the simple question "How many words?" which focuses the mind tremendously.

The second half of the book I wrote back in London during what seemed like a very long, cold winter. (Though Hubert was now away in Antarctica, he helpfully left me with an iPod recording saying: "How many words?"...pause..."Well done!" The fact that he didn't bother to
record an alternative in case the words hadn't come also proved unexpectedly encouraging.)

During that winter Fred Barron—the best of neighbors and of friends—made me laugh and fed me steaks and classic movies to keep up my strength. He has been fabulous throughout my writing of this book. From the beginning he has shared my excitement first over the topic and then the characters. When I came across a new story he was usually the first to hear it, and I think the people I wrote about began to seem as real to him as they did to me. Being a comedy writer, he was also quick to spot the places where I'd unwittingly blown my own punchline.

David Bodanis, my friend and mentor, was also there from the start. Chapter 1 especially owes a great deal to his excellent advice. He also helped me immeasurably with what I find to be the hardest part of writing a book—the beginning.

People who read and commented on the manuscript include Robert Coontz, Richard Stone, John Vandecar, Karen Southwell, Dominick McIntyre, Fred Barron, David Bodanis, Elan McAllister, Michael Bender, Andy Watson, John Mitchell, David Rind, and Stephen Battersby. Rosa Malloy employed her considerable talents for spotting where explanations grew tangled or stories grew overlong. All of their comments and criticisms improved the manuscript substantially; of course, any remaining errors are my own.

Thanks to my agent, Michael Carlisle, for his unstinting efforts on my, and air's, behalf. And thanks especially to two of the best editors in the business: Andrea Schulz at Harcourt and Bill Swainson at Bloomsbury. Together they helped me shape the manuscript where it needed shaping, yet refrained from fixing any parts that weren't broken. (Though I am fairly sure they weren't in collusion, their opinions also coincided uncannily, which was very reassuring.)

Many other people have lived graciously along with me, while I was living with air. Thanks for particular support and tolerance go to John Vandecar, Karen Southwell, Stephen Battersby, and Dominick McIntyre.

Finally, thanks to my wonderful family: Rosa, Helen, Ed, Christian, Sarah, Damian, Jayne and the kids, and Hubert. Only you know how little I could do without you.

PROLOGUE

The main information for Kittinger's spectacular leap comes from his own memoirs, in Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr., "The Long, Lonely Flight,"
National Geographic
(February 1985), pp. 270–76, and Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr., "The Long, Lonely Leap,"
National Geographic
(December 1960), pp. 854–73; as well as Johnny Acton's entertainingly written
The Man Who Touched the Sky
(London: Sceptre, 2002), and Craig Ryan's graphic and detailed
Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space
(Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995).

"Man's Farthest Aloft," by Captain Albert W. Stevens in
National Geographic Society Stratosphere Series,
vol. 2 (1936),
[>]
, gives a charming description of the state of the art before Kittinger.

CHAPTER
1

The Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence has an excellent Web site called "Horror Vacui," which gives thumbnail sketches of the main characters in the discovery of the weight of air, and also has some nice pictures. You can find it at
www.imss.fi.it/vuoto/
.

Though there are hundreds of books about Galileo, most of them focus on his earlier life and his more famous discoveries, and few mention his experiments on air. The best way to find out what he did is to read his own, highly entertaining, words. The experiments described here are in his book
Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences,
first published in Leiden in 1638. The version I used was translated by H. Crew and A. de Salvio (New York: Macmillan, 1914). Nearly four centuries after the book was written, it still makes a great read.

One of the best sources for the relationship between Torricelli and Galileo, and for much else about the early development of pneumatics, is W. E. Knowles Middleton's
The History of the Barometer
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). Though—unlike Galileo's books—it isn't written in the world's most entertaining style, the book is comprehensive and clear, and has some gorgeous facsimiles of the original letters and diagrams. There is also a useful entry on Torricelli in the
Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
editor-in-chief, Charles Coulston Gillispie (New York: Scribner, 1970–80). Blaise Pascal's
Physical Treatises
is also a good source for Torricelli's work, as well as Pascal's own. I used the version translated by I. H. B. and A. G. H. Spiers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937).