Atlantic (60 page)

68
  The
Arabia
was the last wooden ship ever built for Cunard: she had two masts, two funnels, and two paddle wheels.

69
  U.K. Patent No. 12,039, granted to Marconi on July 2, 1896, was for “Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus thereof.”

70
  
Immigrant
is a late-eighteenth-century word—which according to an obscure but prescient travel writer named Edward Augustus Kendall, who wrote in 1809 an account of his travels in America, “is perhaps the only new word, of which the circumstances of the United States has in any degree demanded the addition to the English language.”

71
  Marsden was also a renowned numismatist, whose coin collection is now in the British Museum, and an authority on Eastern languages—he produced a definitive dictionary of Malay, in which he was fluent. He is remembered in naval circles as being the man who woke the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1805 to tell him of the British victory at Trafalgar, as well as of the death of Nelson.

72
  Not always in vain: I once traveled in the cockpit of a Concorde, leaving London just before sunset. The sun dipped into the Bristol Channel as we left; it then rose again out of the western Atlantic horizon as we reached supersonic cruising speed, hovered in front of us for all of the journey, then slipped back below the Blue Hills of Virginia as we touched down—at a local time earlier than when we had departed.

73
  Including one sitting before a very large computer screen that shows in real time images of every single aircraft in the world that happens to be airborne.

74
  Or so it was said. Some have argued it would have been impossible for him, since he had a badly damaged leg.

75
  Waypoint names can sound very strange, but for that reason are five-letter nonsense words easily committed to pilots’ memories. The main British Isles waypoints on the near edge of the Shanwick sector are named RATSU, SUNOT, PIKIL, RESNO, VENER, DOGAL, MALOT, LIMRI, DINIM, SOMAX, and BEDRA; those on the far side, marking the edge of Gander’s responsibility—a much longer line, considering the size of territory—run from MUSVA, off the coast of Baffin Island, to VODOR, off Nova Scotia. Our BA 113 entered North American airspace at HECKK, not far from the point where Leif Eriksson landed in the tenth century.

76
  After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, nearly forty big commercial jets bound for America were diverted to Gander, and the town of 10,000 suddenly found itself playing host to an additional 6,000 bewildered newcomers. Many later spoke movingly of how hospitable the Canadians were; the Canadian premier later came to Newfoundland and told an audience in Gander, “You did us proud.”

77
  The Institute for Atmospheric Physics near Munich, in a project called SeaKLIM, carried out in conjuction with the University of Bremen.

78
  It stands for SCanning Imaging Absorpion spectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartographY.

79
  Most notable among the nuclear sea dumpers were the Russians, who hefted entire reactors into the sea, scrapped and sank atomic submarines, wrecked in remote bays legions of barges with nuclear munitions aboard, and placed thousands of tons of power-station waste into the ocean—mostly in Arctic waters near Novaya Zemlya. The Japanese government was also disquieted by reports saying that nuclear material was dumped at sea in the North Pacific, near Sakhalin Island.

80
  The NET, based in Philadelphia, is one of the many so-called Pew Trusts, founded by the children of the founder of the Sun Oil Company.

81
  The modern concept of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), when finally codified by the United Nations’ 1982 Law of the Sea, has impressively shrunk the reality of the “high seas” on the Atlantic Ocean. For while the narrowest cinch of the ocean is that of about 1,700 miles between Ponte de Calcanhar, near Natal in Brazil, and Sherbro Island, off Sierra Leone, the two closest EEZs—between the Cape Verde Islands and Brazil’s St. Peter and Paul Rocks, are separated by only seven hundred miles of truly unclaimed ocean. At its widest—EEZs included—the Atlantic high seas between Cape Town and Tierra del Fuego extend some 4,200 miles.

82
  It was an attempt in 1982 by an Argentine scrap-metal dealer to dismantle one of these disused stations—though refusing to have his teams’ passports stamped by the resident British magistrate, on the grounds that Argentina did not recognize London’s sovereignty over the islands—that led to the invasion of the Falklands and to the subsequent brief and bloody war to restore British rule.

83
  We had to charter a small plane to ferry us in groups back from the settlement to an airfield in western Iceland. The pilot, a heroic figure named Bjorn Palsson, was killed shortly after so bravely helping us—and when I visited Iceland to research this book and mentioned his name, all remembered him, even though forty years had passed. At the time none of us knew he had long been famous in Iceland as a “rescue pilot,” the kindliest of daredevils.

84
  Alas, scientists turn out not always to be the paragons of rectitude one expects: the leaking in November 2009 of thousands of e-mails from a noted climate research center in England caused widespread alarm, with researchers shown to be performing “tricks” with their statistics, hiding figures, and grumbling about the freedom of information laws that have robbed them of their earlier ability to hide details of their work.

85
  The truth of the ice-free Indian Ocean assertion rests largely on the agreed location of the northern limit of the Southern Ocean (the line where the southern Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans end). In the official ocean-defining document SP23, referred to in chapter 2, the International Hydrographic Organization places this limit at 60 degrees south. The government of Australia objects, however, demanding that the Southern Ocean be seen to extend all the way up to its own southern coastline. Icebergs seen close to Australia’s Heard and McDonald islands are thus, by the strict application of the IHO’s definition, actually in the southern Indian Ocean.

86
  There has been much hysteria over the melting of the Greenland ice cap and the supposed speed-up of its glaciers—a widespread belief once championed by former U.S. vice president Al Gore. But lately the glaciers have slowed again, and to levels last seen in the twentieth century, which has removed some of the politically convenient drama from the situation. Most climate scientists still believe, however, that slow and steady melting will continue.

87
  Much is made of the plight of those impoverished low-lying countries that are likely to be submerged. The Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific are most frequently mentioned, and some small islands off the coast of Bangladesh have begun to disappear already.

88
  Many Liberian towns were named to honor an American president—Monrovia, the capital, was named for President James Monroe. Buchanan might be supposed to honor President James Buchanan, but it was in fact named for his cousin Thomas, the country’s first governor when it was still an American colony.

89
  In the North Pacific such storms are named for the Cantonese combination for great wind,
da-feng
, hence
typhoon
; while in the Indian and South Pacific oceans
cyclone
, the generic scientific name for a circular storm, remains good enough. With hurricane science so currently fashionable, new words are being cheerfully invented: a student of historic storms is now known as a
paleotempestologist
.

90
  The sea does not smell out at sea: a sailor notices the aroma only on approach to land, where it is caused by the reaction of dimethyl sulfide and seaweed, and should more properly be called
the smell of the shore.
Where the gas is emitted in mid-ocean it rises into marine clouds and is distributed around the planet, where it joins the complex matrix of elements that go to make up life. To add further to the heroic reputation of this tiny creature, the trillions of
E. huxleyi
’s cast-off shells that fall to the ocean bottom end up forming calcareous deposits, like chalk.

91
  This is not to diminish the claims of both India and China to having some early interest in and aptitude for earth sciences, but until very lately modern developments in seismology and vulcanology have been nearly exclusively Western.

92
  There is a widespread belief in the geophysical community that there is only a finite amount both of land and water on the planet, and that both are constantly reordering their shapes and relations to one another, and in a cyclical manner. The regular reordering of the oceans even has been named the Wilson Cycle, after the Canadian father of the plate tectonic theory, J. Tuzo Wilson. The believers hold that continents, too, break apart and re-form themselves every 400–500 million years, and that the earth as presently configured is in a state halfway between the maximum spread of its continental fragments and their next re-formation into a single massive one.