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HANDBOOK
Stars & Constellations  Atmospheric Phenomena
Weather  Clouds  Air Quality  Climate Change

John Watson & Michael Kerrigan


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10 MAKING SENSE OF OUR UNIVERSE


1: MAKING SENSE
OF OUR UNIVERSE

MAKING SENSE OF OUR UNIVERSE 11


The Mayans
T he Mayan people of Central America, as well as the Aztec of
South America, developed their own astronomical models to a
great degree of mathematical precision—even if they are more pop-
ularly known for their sacrificial rituals. From around 2000 CE,
from Mexico to Guatemala, the Mayan cosmology thrived until the
arrival of Europeans, grounded on a powerful priesthood and trad-
ing society, which built remarkable pyramidal temples within
highly developed city states. Their cosmology was based on the idea
of a world tree, Yakche, whose branches were the heavens, Cab,
leading down through the earthly trunk, Caan, to the roots of the
underworld, Xibalba. Their polytheistic culture worshipped sun,
moon and many other sky and earth deities, and their astronomi-
cal skills were accurate and clearly documented. They created one of
the first precise calendars; they aligned buildings with stars and

24 MAKING SENSE OF OUR UNIVERSE


solstice events; and they devel-
oped a base-20 number system to
help them deal with the huge
numbers demanded by cyclical
astronomical calculations. They
produced the earliest known
book of the Americas, known as
the Dresden Codex (bought by the
German town’s library in 1739),
which consists of 74 colorfully
painted fig-bark pages attributed
to eight or more individual scribes
(who used local dyes, including
the celebrated Mayan Blue). This
document easily rivals the much
later illuminated manuscripts of
medieval Europe. It has been
dated to the twelfth century CE
and contains remarkably accurate
astronomical tables; it also con-
tains predictive astrological tables
on the timings of floods, illness,
medicinal practices and planting
schedules. The Venus Table is the
highlight of the codex, showing
accurate readings of the move-
ments of this especially bright
planet. Venus was an important Above: An image from the Dresden Codex.
celestial marker for the Mayans, Opposite left: A Mayan temple; many
astrologically organizing life and temples also functioned as calendars.
war, as well as determining their Opposite right: El Caracol (the snail), a
religious calendar. Mayan observatory at Chitzen Itza, Mexico.

MAKING SENSE OF OUR UNIVERSE 25


Right: A woodcut
of a Ptolemy map by
Johane Schnitzer
(Ulm: Leinhart
Holle, 1482). In
addition to mapping
the heavens,
Ptolemy also
devoted much of his
time to mapping the
Earth. His
Geographia
continued to be
printed and used
until the early
Renaissance.

54
Galileo (1564–1642) is known colloquially as the “Father of
Science” and was a great Italian Renaissance astronomer and
teacher based in Padua. Galileo Galilei, to give him his full, har-
monious name, was a Copernican who developed the telescope as
a means of observing the stars and with which he discovered the
moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, which proved that the
Earth must go around the Sun, rather than vice-versa. He was the
first astronomer to stand up against religious restraints on science
in Roman Catholic Europe, when he was put under Papal trial in
1633. His heliocentric views ran counter to the official stance of
the Vatican, which effectively censored his work and kept him
under house arrest until his death in 1642.

Above left: Galileo’s sketches of the Moon revealed


that the surface was mountainous.
Above right: Galileo’s observations of the moons of
Jupiter upset the notion that all celestial bodies must
revolve around the Earth.
Left: Galileo Galilei.
Right: Johannes Kepler

MATHEMATICAL MUSIC
Galileo and Kepler shared another inter
est: music. But
rather than playing instruments, they were
interested in
the mathematical and physical aspects
of musical scales
and instruments.
Galileo came by
this interest natu-
rally: his father,
an accomplished
lute player, estab-
lished a important
physical law deter-
mining the con-
nection between
the tension of a
string and its
musical pitch.

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was a genius of mathematics and


astronomy who finally grounded the whole modern Copernican
revolution in undeniable scientific proof. He was a pupil and pro-
tégé of Tycho Brahe, and went on to delineate the laws of plane-
tary motion and invented the refracting Keplerian telescope in
1611. His publications included the Mysterium Cosmographicum
(“The Cosmographic Mystery”), but the most revolutionary was
Astronomia Nova (“A New Astronomy”), which contains his
enlightening treatise on Mars: he described the red planet moving
in an ovoid, elliptical orbit and not a circular one. He also proved
that these orbits were slower at their furthest reaches from the sun.
This laid the foundation for exact and predictive calculations of
planetary motion and for the biggest question yet: what force
actually moved the planets?

MAKING SENSE OF OUR UNIVERSE 61


72 SEEING STARS: THE CONSTELLATIONS
2: SEEING STARS

SEEING STARS: THE CONSTELLATIONS 73


The Big Bang
W e know that the universe is expanding outward, we know
that the stars and galaxies are generally moving away from
each other, and with the discovery of Cosmic Microwave
Background Radiation in the 1960s we know the universe has a
temperature that comes from a very early hot fever. There must
have been a source—a point in the universe where all this matter
expansion and uniform radiation originated. It had to be a singu-
larity, a particular point in space and time where everything came
from. But what happened, and from where and how did that sin-
gularity appear? The modern echo of this early universe is now
firmly believed to have originated in a singularity we call the Big
Bang. It may be too big to imagine or explain properly. Some,
understandably, believe it to be the “instant of God,” while others
believe it to be scientifically explainable. And this might not have
been the only singularity—perhaps there were billions more!

Opposite: From time immemorial humans have


ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
looked up and seen their own shapes and stories in
English physicist Stephen Hawking has
the patterns made by the brightest stars.
done groundbreaking research on black
Below: A night scene showing the Big Dipper and e that
holes. He was among the first to prov
the other stars that comprise Ursa Major. a fairl y
singularities and black holes were
He has
common feature of our universe.
ordial
also argued for the existence of prim
mini black holes, created after the Big
s of a
Bang. Despite the physical limitation
Haw king is
serious neuromuscular disorder,
one of the most celebrated thin kers of
lar
modern times, and his books on popu
of Tim e,
science, such as A Brief History
have become bestsellers.

74 SEEING STARS
SEEING STARS 75
The Early Universe
T he only remnant of our early universe is the Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation—a kind of universal static
that hisses everywhere but is so faint it brings no light from the Big
Bang itself. The earliest we can look back is through infrared tele-
scopes such as the Spitzer Space telescope, which has discovered
faint galaxies with extremely flat light wavelengths that were
formed about 500 million years after the Big Bang.
It is theorized that the universe at only half a million years old was
still very much a homogenous soup of gas and basic particles such as
hydrogen and helium and lithium. A few million years into its youth,
the universe began to develop clustered matter, like strands of woven

LITTLE AND LARGE Right: Our early universe


y are often either
Because the numbers used in astronom was a volatile environment,
l, scientists often
unfathomably large or incredibly smal with massive stars rapidly
er than writing
use abbreviated forms of numbers rath forming and dying, exploding
al point. The
all those zeros before or after the decim into spectular supernovas or
from the smallest
following list gives the abbreviations collapsing into black holes.
idea of scale, the
known quantity to the largest. For an The death of these early stars
gram , and that
mass of a proton is approximately 1 yocto provided the material
of the Earth 5970 yottagrams. necessary for our universe
today, including our planet
 Yocto-: 10-24√  Deca: 101 (=10) and ourselves.
 Zepto-: 10-21  Hecto: 102 (=100)
 Atto-: 10-18  Kilo: 103 (=1000)
 Femto-: 10-15  Mega: 106
 Pico: 10-12  Giga: 109
 Nano: 10-9  Tera: 1012
 Micro: 10-6  Peta: 1015
 Milli: 10-3  Exa: 1018
 Zeta: 1021
 Centi: 10-2 (=0.01)
 Deci: 10-1 (=0.1)  Yotta: 1024
78
yarn in which early galaxies began to clump and spin—early hydrogen
and helium stars began to pop up like lanterns in the night. These were
supergiant megastars, often thousands of times the size of our own
sun, but these unstable stars collapsed readily into supernovas and
black holes. However, this was a crucial stage in our evolution as the
universe was becoming more complex and developing heavier parti-
cles such as carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron, which would help build
new and more vibrant stars. Supernova explosions spread these parti-
cles throughout the universe with impressive and very colorful cosmic
sneezes. Eventually, we arrive 13.7 billion years into our current uni-
verse, where our own tiny Milky Way galaxy is forming about 50 new
stars each solar year. From here, locked within carbon-based bodies,
we stare out in wonder at the very stars from which we are made.
The Constellations
W e see shapes in anything, and it is no wonder when we look
at the stars that we imagine our grandest fantasies and sculpt
our deepest concepts. When we group stars into a shape or imagi-
nary object we are creating an arbitrary asterism. These asterisms are
only important to us; they are the fixed shapes we see in the heav-
ens from our own particular corner in the universe. Who knows,
maybe life elsewhere includes our own star Sol as the crux of some
alien’s constellation important to her own way of life.
Constellations are not local collections of stars in the way star clus-
ters are; they are often relatively distant from each other, but on our
flattened plane of vision they appear as fixed shapes moving in cyclic
and predictable orbits around our night sky. In their first instance,
they are useful navigational points as they are so distant that they
remain in almost precisely the same point in the sky at the same
time each year, only appearing to travel with the dip and wobble of

94 SEEING STARS
STAR MAPS
Star maps were created to be guides
to the
night sky. The one at right is a
typical
European star map, with elaborate
draw-
ings of the mythological character
s on
which the constellations are based. The
first
star atlas to show the entire celestial
sphere
was Johannes Bayer’s Uranometria (160
3).
The star maps of different cultures vary
with
their different constellations. A trad
itional
Chinese star map would look muc
h different
than a European one. The oldest repre
sentation of
a constellation is thought to be an ivory
tablet found
in Germany. Carved with what look
s like the figure
of Orion, the tablet is 32,500 years
old.

our Earth’s rotation. The Southern Cross in the southern hemi-


sphere, and the Big Dipper in the northern hemisphere, point
respectively to their unmoving pole stars. In cultural terms, the stars
have always held our heroes and villains, and more fanciful shapes
can be imagined to house otherworldly gods and creatures. The stars
weave their way deeply into all our cultures as reflections of power,
control, life, death and ambition. They are the shapes of our earliest
narratives and sketches of our projected desires.
The Zodiac is our main constellation group, dividing the ecliptic
plane around which the Earth spins into twelve sections. These
important asterisms are an imaginary circle of creations designed
to map our emotional and physical place in the yearly cycle of life.
Without them we would be intellectually impoverished, oblivious
to the helpful structure of the universe and the educative patterns
of our own planet’s motion through the solar system.

SEEING STARS 95
Gemini
The Twins. Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda, represent all our dual-
ist myths and are rich in metaphor for the heavenly search for
immortality. They were two devoted mythical twins; one brother
died heroically and the other beseeched the gods to allow him to
follow his soulmate into death and immortality. According to
some versions, Pollux was the son of Jupiter, while Castor was the
son of a mortal man. In the Roman myth, Jupiter (Zeus) allows
Pollux to share his immortality with Castor, with the provision
that they must alternate their lives on Olympia and in Hades
(heaven and the underworld).

GEMINI –
THE TWINS
 Abbreviation: Gem
 Genitive: Geminorum
 Brightest Star: Pollux
 Right Ascension: 7 hours
 Declination: 20 degrees
 Visible between latitudes:
90 and -60 degrees
 Best seen: February

Opposite: The Medusa (left) and Eskimo nebulae,


both found in the Gemini constellation.

100 SEEING STARS


This constellation is a distinctive brace of stars, two sticklike
bodies entwining below the two famous glowing head-stars, often
invoked by sailors when they witnessed the terrifying St. Elmo’s
Fire upon their boats. The first-century Roman author Pliny the
Elder, who died in the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius at Pompeii,
prophesied the constellation as a protector of seafarers, unless the
two stars were split by the horizon, when shipwreck would ensue.
Shame he wasn’t so good with volcanoes!
Gemini lies between the dimmer eastern constellation of
Cancer and Taurus to the west, and contains two remarkable neb-
ulae: the Eskimo Nebula (so called because of its parka hood of
light resembling traditional Inuit wear) and the Medusa Nebula.
The Geminids are a distinctive annual meteor shower seen on
December 12–14, best viewed from the southern hemisphere.

SEEING STARS 101


This constellation is also home to the blankest area of space we
know, a Cosmic Microwave Background cold spot called the
Eridanus Supervoid. This is reckoned to be up to a billion light
years across and is as inexplicable as it is ominous, though there
is a theory that it may be the signature nothingness born of the
quantum entanglement of separate universes!
In mythology, Eridanus was the river that Phaeton tumbled into
after an erratic stolen joyride on the chariot of Helios the sun god,
scorching the earth to desert whenever he got too close, so it may
represent the River Nile running through the Sahara.

Pleiades
Buzzing above the mass of Taurus like a swarm of fireflies, the Seven
Sisters or Pleiades asterism is to the naked eye a fuzzy ball of stars
that needs a good squint to split into its constituent stars. All cos-
mologically young blue stars, barely 100 million years old, they are
doomed to drift away from each other into the cosmos. Known to
the Australian Aborigines as the Campfire of the Women, they are
huddled together around their fire not far from the cluster of the
Hyades in Taurus, which to the Aborigines was the Campfire of the
Men… just like the gender split at any Sunday afternoon barbecue!

Far left: An
artist’s impression
of Epsilon
Eridani.
Left: A NASA
image of the
Pleiades star
cluster.

128 SEEING STARS


Northern Circumpolar Constellations
Andromeda
Those rare nights when we sit outside on a clear night to gaze
at the skies, we become time machines. The stars and planets
and galaxies, which we see as impenetrable and distant glitter-
balls, are ancient firestorms of light that have traveled light-
years through the darkness of space to illuminate our skies, a
little like the after-sparks of a fireworks display that happened
millions of years ago. Spectacular as they are, we assume that
we are living in a universe concurrent with our gaze. In fact, we
are ripping backwards through the fabric of the universe! The
spiral galaxy of Andromeda is the furthest we can see into time
with the naked eye. It is the most distant object in our vision
and wondrous for that very fact.
Named after the mythological daughter of Cassiopeia, she was
chained to a rock on account of her mother’s careless assertion
that Andromeda was more beautiful than the Nereids (nymphs of
the sea). Poseidon took umbrage to this and chained her to a rock
(near the modern-day port of Jaffa, Israel) to await her fate at the
hands of the terrible sea monster Cetus.

ANDROMEDA
 Abbreviation: And
 Genitive: Andromedae
 Brightest Star: α And
 Right Ascension: 1 hour
 Declination: 40 degrees
 Visible between latitudes:
90 and -40 degrees Right: An artist’s depiction
 Best seen: November of the chained maiden,
Andromeda.
SEEING STARS 129
Less inspiringly known to astronomers as the M31 spiral clus-
ter, Andromeda’s billon-starred mush of light has traveled 2.5
million light years to delight us. That means traveling at light
speed for about 36,000 human lifetimes. Even if we traveled to
woo her beauty first hand, we would have evolved into some
other creature entirely!
The Andromeda galaxy can be seen in her eponymous con-
stellation between the “W” of Cassiopeia and her father Perseus.
Very much a faint smudge of light hidden away in the furthest
reaches of our vision, she appears like an oval jewel nestled in
a maiden’s hair: stars stream back from Alpheratz, the head star
of the constellation, which is itself the cornerstone of the great
square of Pegasus.

Perseus
The champion of Zeus and father to Andromeda, he rescued his
daughter from Medusa (the snake-haired Gorgon). He was the
mythical king who founded the civilization of Mycenae.
This constellation lies in the Milky Way underneath Cassiopeia
and is rich in galaxies and clusters and nebulae. It contains the
California Nebula and also the popular Double Cluster, visible
through binoculars between Perseus and Cassiopeia. It is also
home to the eagerly watched Perseids meteor shower in the north-
ern hemisphere, seen on August 12 and 13 each year.
It has two main stars, the brightest being Algenib, or Mirfak
(the “elbow” star), and also the twitching blink of Algol—from
the Arabic for “the ghoul star” and known colloquially as the
Demon Star, representing the eye of the Medusa. This is an
eclipsing binary system, where the brighter and fainter stars
eclipse each other in turn. It was the 18th-century astronomer
John Goodricke who first suggested that this was the reason
why the star’s light seemed to vary in intensity.

130 SEEING STARS


PERSEUS
 Abbreviation: Per
 Genitive: Persei
 Brightest Star: α Per
 Right Ascension: 3 hours
 Declination: 45 degrees
 Visible between latitudes: 90 and -
35 degrees
 Best seen: December

Top: The Andromeda Galaxy is visible


with the naked eye.
Right: The Perseids meteor shower.
Below: Perseus in the night sky.

SEEING STARS 131


Right: A dramatic
TIME AND TIDE image of a partial solar
There have not always been solar eclipse.
eclipses. Millions of years in the past,
the Moon was too close to the Earth to Below: This satellite
properly occult the Sun; millions of image shows the shadow
years in the future, the Moon will be cast on our planet
too far away and the Sun too big for a during an eclipse.
total solar eclipse to occur.

Eclipses
F rom Earth, the Sun cannot be looked at directly without strong
filters, but one opportunity to observe its corona is during a
total eclipse, when the Moon passes exactly over the Sun to shade
its mass. These occasional conjunctions are rare and occur only a
few times during a lifetime in a given place, though they occur two
or three times annually and are worth traveling to see. These areas
of full eclipse are known as paths of totality. As the Earth, Moon

192 SEEING STARS


and Sun conjoin along one line of vision, the skies darken alarm-
ingly, birds begin a false dawn chorus and the Sun appears to go
out just like a dying match. (In ancient times it was a terrifying
moment to lose the sunlight so suddenly in the middle of the
day.) As the Sun disappears completely behind the moon, only a
fringe of light can be seen, which is the sun's hot coronal layer.
Flashing jewels of light appear on the rim of the dark moon,
known as Baily's Beads, until eventually the Sun begins to swell
again and reappear from the Moon's shadow.Named after the

SEEING STARS 193


230 SEEING STARS: THE CONSTELLATIONS
3: SOMETHING
IN THE AIR

SEEING STARS: THE CONSTELLATIONS 231


Auroras
O ur most awe-inspiring light phenomenon, the aurora is a
truly magical thing to witness. Auroras can be seen in the
night sky in polar regions north and south of about 55 degrees. To
stand agape under these lights will move anyone; it is as though
you are watching the very universe at play. The Northern Lights
(Aurora Borealis) and the Southern Lights (Aurora Australis) most
spectacularly appear as billowing curtains of red and green light,
or sometimes as glowing red, green and white pulses in the atmos-
phere. The Finnish refer to the Northern Lights as a mythical arc-
tic fox sweeping its colored tail through the sky. The Cree people
refer to the aurora as the dance of the spirits, and the Inuit believe
them to be the home of souls that will come closer at the sound
of whistling, enabling them to send messages to the deceased.

WHEN ROME BURNS?


peror Tiberius dispatched
Above: The Northern Lights, a kind of In 37 CE, the Roman em
ia, because he believed
“rainbow of the night sky.” troops to the port city of Ost
es. But the color effect
Opposite: The colors are generated by the city was engulfed in flam
se were so rare so far
emissions from different molecules. was a blazing aurora; the
mistaken for fire.
south that they were often
238 SOMETHING IN THE AIR
So what causes such a beautiful phenomenon? The answer is the
Sun. The Sun is a volatile ball of energy which goes through vio-
lent cycles. The sunspot cycle, for example, emits terrific plasma
storms every eleven years; the cycle corresponds to the most active
cycle of auroras in our own atmosphere. As solar storms emit giant
arcs and jets of plasma through space, this energy is accelerated by
the Earth’s magnetic field to crash into the ionosphere at the polar
regions, reacting with the it to charge particles, release electrons
and emit brilliant pulses of colored light. The natural chaos of the
sun’s solar wind shifts these lights constantly in flapping curtains
and sudden blooms. Auroras emit VHF radio waves, and often a
faint swishing noise has been reported by witnesses, like a comb
through hair, or the sound of distant grass swaying in the wind.
This has yet to be confirmed by scientific measurement and may
just reflect the power of the phenomenon on our imagination.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR 239


Ice Haloes & Moon Dogs
S ometimes when the Sun is low and the high atmosphere is
full of ice crystals, a halo appears around the Sun or Moon
in a 22-degree arc. This is knows as an ice halo, and on each
side of its arc there can form brighter spots of light that are
playfully known as sun dogs, or moon dogs when the moon
creates them. On top of the halo a tangential arc can form, and
beneath there often occurs a light pillar. The ice crystals, which
refract and reflect the light, must all be aligned in the same
direction by wind currents, so this rare phenomenon can only
be observed a few times in any given year, when high atmos-
pheric conditions are perfect. Often a counter-arc can be seen
across the halo, which is known as a parhelic circle.

240 SOMETHING IN THE AIR


THREE SUNS
es,
During England’s War of the Ros
s”— the true
troops observed “three sun
sun dog s.
sun accompanied by two
esent
The “suns” were believed to repr
, includin g the
the Yorkist commanders
future Edward IV. Sho rtly afte r,
at the
Edward won a decisive victory
Battle of Mortimer.

Above: Sun dogs and ice haloes. The cetnral sun is the
real one; the ice halo that surrounds it creates the sun
dogs. Opposite: A close-up of an ice halo.
Left: An image of gegenschein, captured by a NASA
photographer. Gegenschein is so faint that it can rarely be
seen with the naked eye, and only on a dark night in a
dark region of the sky.

Zodiacal Light
& Gegenschein
I f you look long enough after sunset, or just before sunrise, along
the ecliptic line of the zodiac and the Sun’s path, a slight glow
can appear briefly as a faint triangle of blue/white light. This is
known as zodiacal light and is the sun’s reflection off cosmically
distant dust particles and collision debris in space. It is not to be
confused with any atmospheric glows, which tend toward the red
spectrum. Another example of this kind of cosmic reflection is
Gegenschein, which is a weak glow of light in the night sky directly
opposite the sun’s position. Again, this is dust reflection. Its name
is the German for “counter shine.”

SOMETHING IN THE AIR 241


Medium-Level Clouds
B etween heights of about 1.2 and 3.6 miles (2 and 6km) in the
atmosphere, cloud formations occur in three main forms: alto-
stratus, altocumulus and nimbostratus.

Above: Gray altostratus Altostratus clouds are rather dull, often


clouds, signaling rain or snow gray or steely blue masses of indistinct and
to come. uniform cloud. They are formed of medium-
Opposite left: A level ice and water droplets, and often snow.
dramatic sunset created by a
They do allow some sunlight through, giving
bank of altocumulus clouds.
it the appearance of a diminished star, but
Opposite right:
Threatening nimbostratus
sometimes blot it out entirely. Altostratus is
clouds form when the precipi- a moist layer of rising cloud associated with
tation predicted by altostratus oncoming precipitation, as it forms from a
clouds is about to arrive. rising warm-air mass above a cold front.

252 SOMETHING IN THE AIR


Altocumulus is responsible for our most dramatic skies, as the var-
ious formations of medium-level fluffy clouds take on the color of
the sun setting and rising. They form wide sheets of regular splotches
of cloud, as though an artist has applied thick brushstrokes to the
canvas of the sky. There are many varieties, but all display a regular
repetition, and they are sometimes stretched by wind patterns into
remarkable mackerel-striped skies or lenticular formations.

Nimbostratus is a slightly lower middle-level cloud that we see


during long periods of frontal rain systems. Like altostratus, it con-
tains a lot of moisture and sinks toward the ground as a dark, feature-
less layer bearing heavy precipitation. Nimbostratus forms readily
into bands along the frontal lines of weather systems and passes in
dull gray pulses over us, punctuated by lighter spells of more diffuse,
pale, grayish cloud. The clouds form and condense most readily from
altostratus bands into ragged, tumbling rain clouds.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR 253


Airborne: The Natural
Principles of Flight
Buoyancy
Gravity is a universal law, yet some laws are more universal than
others. In air, just as in water, objects that are less dense than the
matter they displace will be forced upward—or, as we would call
it, float. Hence the buoyancy of the airship, filled with helium. Its
frame; its cover; its gondola—and the people it contains: in total,
these will add up to a considerable amount of weight. But, given
the lightness of the lift gas contained in the envelope, the mass of
the structure as a whole is less than that of the amount of air
whose place it takes.

298 FLYING HIGH


So Much Hot Air
An airship flies because it is lighter than air, but it can only be so
because of its lift gas. Yet paradoxically, air itself may be lighter
than air, at least temporarily. When its temperature rises, air
becomes less dense; hence the heat shimmer we see above a sun-
baked highway. Humans have learned to harness this buoyancy in
the hot-air balloon, whose lift gas is simply air—but heated to a
slightly higher temperature than the air in the surrounding sky.
Again, air is not an empty space, but a fluid—and one that is
always on the move. When, for example, a household radiator or
heater warms the air immediately above it, that air becomes less
dense and rises; cooler air then presses in to take its place. As that
air is warmed and ascends in its turn a convection current is creat-
ed, and by slow degrees the prevailing temperature in the whole
room is raised. Convection currents are created outdoors as well,

Opposite: A 1901
postcard showing a
Brazilian airship flying
over Paris.

Right: Hang gliders


soar past mountains in
North Carolina.

Far right: Paper


floating over a radiator, a
result of the convection
current created when the
air over the radiator
becomes warmer than
surrounding air.

FLYING HIGH 299


Above: Octave Chanute with his glider.
Top: Otto Lilienthal and one of his gliders
Right: Onlookers watching Lilienthal.
Opposite: A modern hang-glider.

when the rays of the sun heat up the ground. Air that comes into
contact with this surface is warmed and begins to rise. Cooler air
is drawn in and warmed: again, it pushes upward in its turn in
what becomes a cycle. As we saw in Chapter 3 above, the currents
created by the warming of large areas of sea give rise to the winds
and breezes that blow all over the Earth’s surface. Within the sys-
tem, however, at the “micro” level, convection currents are con-
stantly being formed, strengthening and weakening with the com-
ing and going of the sun.
Only gently at first in the early morning, maybe, but more
strongly as the day goes on and a steady updraft of warm air, known

300 FLYING HIGH


A

3 2

JUST HOT AIR


The above diagram
shows the formation of
thermals, the convective
currents created when
air warmed by the sun as a thermal, begins to flow. These are the cur-
rises upward. Birds use rents that buoy up the buzzard and the condor
these currents to glide for
as they float across the sky—and the human
long distances.
pilots of gliding craft. Over the years, gliding
and hang-gliding enthusiasts have made a study
of the ways in which thermal currents interact
with the natural movement of winds and breezes forced up over ris-
ing ground (mountain ridges, valley walls, etc.) and it has become
possible to get a sense of the complex conditions of which soaring
birds long since learned to take advantage. For all these intricacies,
though, the art of gliding depends on simple science.

FLYING HIGH 301


Above: Kenneth Arnold
and his “flying saucer.”
Right: Two drawings of
UFOs from 1941.

Unidentified . . . But Irrefutable?


Still small, but cumulatively hard to ignore, however, is the num-
ber of observations that are not so readily dismissed. Often they
were recorded by professional pilots, or officers of the law—people
trained to observe carefully, and to question what they saw.
Improbable as it may seem, the military men who fired off thou-
sands of anti-aircraft shells against incoming flying objects at the
“Battle of Los Angeles” in 1942 may have been subject to a mass
hysteria of sorts—though hundreds “saw” the strange craft and
their traces on their radar screens. These were perilous times, after
all, and in a state of stress and tension people become excitable.
The specific notion of the flying saucer seems to originate with
the sighting of disk- or saucer-shaped craft above the forests around
Mount Rainier, Washington, by businessman Kenneth Arnold, in

344 FLYING HIGH


Right: A 1981 memo
from USAF Lt. Col.
Charles Halt on the
Rendlesham Forest UFO
sighting over England.

Far right: Arnold’s


own description and
sketch of his experience.

Top right: A flying


saucer, perhaps a hoax.

1947. He was at the controls of his private plane at the time, and
saw nine shiny disks flying in a line across the sky, spread out over
a distance of approximately 5 miles (8 km). They appeared to flip
over from time to time as they flew, sending out dazzling flashes of
light as they did so. Partial corroboration came from another air-
man who had been flying nearby. That same year came reports that
the US military had actually taken possession of the remains of a
craft that had crashed outside Roswell, New Mexico. The claims that
this was a UFO have only grown more insistent with the years (and
with the repetition of the authorities’ denials).
The official attitude to such sightings has always been dismissive,
but documents obtained under Freedom of Information law make
it clear that the authorities have hedged their bets. They have had
to. The Kentucky Air National Guard had to be scrambled in 1948

FLYING HIGH 345


THE WITCH’S SPELL
ern “Fairy”) is known in
ss Morgan le Fay (“Fay” as in the mod
King Arthur’s nemesis, the evil enchantre legendary shape-shifting
appears to have been on account of her
Italian tradition as Fata Morgana. It temperature inversion.
with a special kind of mirage caused by
abilities that this name became associated ns—and works pretty
to be seen in the Arctic and Arctic regio
It occurs in colder conditions—so is often the cold ice or water
t mirage. This time the air in contact with
much in the opposite way from the deser cts light more. It has the
the (slightly) warmer air above it, refra
surface is chilled and, being denser than ing them into strange
the horizon, stretching them laterally mak
effect of apparently extending objects on ple.
castles of distant ships or icebergs, for exam
and unaccountable forms—making fairy

Strange Rains; Miraculous Mirages


Just as curious in their way—and over hundreds of years too per-
sistent to be dismissed too lightly—are stories of showers in which
it “rains” frogs. Up to a point these claims can be explained away:
young frogs may leave the ponds in which they were spawned in
droves at a certain point in their development, setting off overland
to seek new homes; their sudden appearance—sometimes they
seem practically to carpet the ground—may give the impression
that they rained down from the sky. But obstinate reports that
frogs (and fish) have been seen, quite literally, raining down from
the sky are not to be so easily brushed aside. Scientists have sug-
gested that many may have been scooped up and carried high into
the air by whirling waterspouts and tornadoes before being let
fall. This would explain many incidents, though by no means all.
Mirages are for the most part easily accounted for: in the blazing
heat of an arid desert, air in contact with the scorching ground
undergoes a rise in temperature. The cooler, denser air above has

348 FLYING HIGH


Opposite: A fata
morgana at Cook
Inlet, Alaska ,1976.

Right: One of the


famous mirages of the
Sahara, enemy of the
weary traveler.

Inset: A 16th cen-


tury illustration of a
rain of fish.

a slightly greater refractive index—so it bends the light rays pass-


ing through it a little more. The resulting differential sets up the
familiar shimmering effect we see each summer on highways or
on asphalted lots. In the open expanse of the desert, the effect may
be so pronounced as to give the impression of a wide and limpid
lake of water—especially in the eyes of struggling traveler driven
frantic by fear and dehydration.
Explicable it may be, but anyone who ever witnessed a mirage
knows that it is as miraculous in its way as any of the more exotic
unexplained phenomena the sky produces. The force that lifts a
jumbo jet—480 tons unloaded—and allows it to fly like a bird is
as remarkable as any alien visitor could be. As extraordinary,
though, is the vulnerability of what amounts to another environ-
mental system above the earth—in critical danger now, perhaps,
because of human actions. One thing is certain: with all its many
aspects and the incredible possibilities it offers nature and
humanity, there is a whole lot more to the sky than empty space.

FLYING HIGH 349


Pollution
O ur atmosphere is easily polluted by both manmade and natu-
ral particles. Caught in suspension in the air, or noxious gases
in themselves, pollutants affect our lives daily and call into question
the activities by which we sustain humanity. Pollution can be
defined as any contaminant that adversely affects the stability of an
ecosystem, though we also often use it to describe forms of energy
that affect our quality of life, such as noise and light. Natural pollu-
tion has most commonly occurred in the past via the sulfurous poi-
soning of the skies by volcanoes and eruptive lava flows, as well as
by asteroid strikes like the K-T Extinction asteroid, which so dis-
rupted the Earth’s ecology that the dinosaurs were wiped out. But it
is human pollution that in recent centuries has increasingly affected
the quality of our atmosphere. It is not only a recent phenomenon:
evidence from Greenland ice core samples suggests early metal
smelting in Roman and medieval times had begun to pollute the
skies. Our drive for global energy, our increasing reliance on mined
resources and our mass scales of production peaked during the
Industrial Revolution, and the resultant contaminants in the atmos-
phere affect us directly, from the smog of city traffic to the undeni-
able weather changes now associated with global warming.

Space Junk
The pollution of our Earth ends not in the atmosphere, but in
space! Since Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957 we have sent a further
28,000 satellites into space, with 9000 currently in orbit, only 6%
of which are operational. That’s a big backyard full of junk! There
is so much unintended orbital traffic that collisions occasionally
happen: dropped wrenches from space-walking repairs, flecked
paint, broken heat tiles, as well as disused satellites—all have
joined the natural pieces of dust and debris that get caught in our

358 THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE


Right: Space debris
is an ever-increasing
concern.

Earth’s gravity well. Most of these items of space junk will decay in
orbit and eventually burn up in the atmosphere, but with the
increased satellite traffic, we are seeing more collisions and more
potential cosmic “dandruff” than usual. In 1997 a Tulsa woman
was hit on the shoulder by a scrap of burned cloth that had come
from the fuel tank of the Delta 2 rocket the year before. It is the
only report of someone being hit by falling space junk, though in
1960 a Cuban cow was killed by junk from a rocket launch in
nearby Florida. Space stations such as the abandoned Skylab of
1979 and the Mir Station of 2001 also decay. Skylab was supposed
to be ditched in the Indian Ocean, but most of it crashed down in
Western Australia, where an enterprising young Stan Thornton
retrieved some space junk off his roof, sped to the airport and took
the first plane to the USA, where he had read that the San Francisco
Examiner was offering $10,000 for the first piece of Skylab delivered

THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE 359


to its offices. He easily covered the cost of his
JUNKYARD SPACE flights! NASA scientists have tracked over
Most space pollutants will
decay into burn-ups in our
600,000 pieces of junk currently in orbit,
atmosphere, but this can take though this does not count the millions of
up to 35 years to occur. pieces of microjunk—a particle of which, say
Larger redundant satellites a paint fleck, traveling at 17,000mph, would
can be nudged into graveyard hit a satellite or space walker like a bullet
orbits spinning them out into
and do as much damage. In 2009 the US
the cosmos, though this is a
kind of “out of sight, out of Iridium communications satellite and a
mind” solution. More recent Russian Kosmos satellite collided in orbit
ideas for dealing with this 490 miles (790 km) above Siberia, spraying
cosmic junk have included junk and debris through an 807-mile (1300
laser brooms and aerogel km) orbital band, which includes the orbit
blobs to destroy or trap the
debris. However, a bristling
of such delicate satellites as the Hubble
17,000-mph metal storm Space Telescope. We have satellites in orbit
surrounding us in space from 186 miles (300km) to 21,700 miles
means that it is not quite the (35,000 km), all spinning in counter cir-
peaceful void we imagine! cles among a cloud of increasing debris.

Chemicals
The most common air pollutants we find are nitrogen oxides, car-
bon monoxides, sulfur dioxides, ozone, chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) and radioactive particles. We must also not forget CO2
(carbon dioxide), our most significant greenhouse gas, which has
been the protagonist in the story of recent climate change.
Nitrogen oxides are various compounds of nitrogen and oxygen,
the main toxins of which are nitrogen oxide (NO) and nitrogen
dioxide (NO2), both produced in the combustion of fossil gases
such as coal and natural gas. Carbon monoxides and dioxides,
produced naturally in volcanoes, are also significant pollutants
from the combustion engine, most commonly used in cars.
Carbon monoxide is a lethal, odorless and tasteless gas which can

360 THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE


EMISSION CREDITS
America’s pollution laws aimed to
limit emission levels to a capped
rate but also allow “well-behaved”
companies to trade their emission
credits for profit. No company is
allowed to exceed the capped rate
determined by the government, yet
they have bartering flexibility to
artificially massage their emissions.
Critics say the system is difficult to
audit and a complex means of
allowing some industries to
continue as they were. Others see it
as an enlightened incentive-based
scheme to force companies into
more sustainable technology.

Right: Pollution from a


power station, adding to the
greenhouse-gas problem.

be deadly, depriving the lungs of oxygen and starving the brain. It


is the main cause of suffocation in fires. The effect in the atmos-
phere is to accelerate the production of methane and ozone; it
also degrades easily into CO2 and thus has a greenhouse-gas
effect. Carbon dioxide we have already met!
Sulfur dioxides (SO2) are produced typically in volcanic erup-
tions, as well as exuded from the billowing smoke stacks of
refineries and factories and manufacturing plants. They combine
easily with water vapor to form acid rain. On a happier note, the
USA has managed to reduce its sulfur-dioxide emissions by over
33% over the last 30 years, due to the initiatives of the EPA’s Acid
Rain Program and the 1990 Clean Air Act.

THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE 361


Extinction—Only Natural?
Because all life on Earth relies on a stable, well-oxygenated atmos-
phere, any radical changes in the atmosphere can lead to catastrophic
extinction events. We know this because it has happened at least
twice before, due to natural events. They are called the P-Tr (Permian
Triassic) Extinction and the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) Extinction.
Fossil records show us that 251 million years ago, at the end of
the Permian geological era, there was a “Great Dying” event.
Almost all sea life was extinguished and 70% of land life disap-
peared, and plant life is estimated to have lost half its diversity.
This extinction was not sudden: it lasted over several thousand
years, so theories for its cause are abundant. One thing is for sure,

Left: An artist’s
impression of our
planet bombarded
by asteroids.

Opposite: An
asteroid’s impact
crater known as
Meteor Crater,
near Flagstaff,
Arizona. A meteor
or asteroid impact
is believed to have
caused a mass
extinction event,
and another could
occur at some
point in the future.

386 THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE


the atmosphere was so disrupted that the food chain was devas-
tated. It is thought that the Permian Extinction was kicked off by
massive volcanic activity in the Siberian Traps lava flows, which
released a massive amount of dust, CO2 and methane into the
atmosphere. This event may have been compounded by a phe-
nomenon known as the Methane Clathrate Gun. This is when
methane is released through global warming from the oceans and
permafrost, accelerating global warming and turning the oceans
anoxic (or deoxygenated). The hydrogen sulfides that were
released would have poisoned plant and animal life, already
stressed by significant climatic change. Whatever caused this mas-
sive event, the atmosphere was certainly the agent of change.
GLOBAL DIMMING
the atmosphere is the reduction of solar
One peculiar effect of particulates in has
h—known as global dimming. This
heat reaching the surface of the Eart ence recen tly
1960 to 1990, but evid
been measured as a 4% reduction from tes such as sulfu r
reversal. Particula
suggests there has been a “brightening” culprit in diffu sing
to be the main
dioxides in the atmosphere are thought in
rays back into spac e, and there has also been a measurable decrease
solar ters or
exist, but whether it coun
pan-evaporation rates. The effect does
of global warm ing is still not fully understood—
accelerates the effects
raffic contrails, or areas in heavily
measurements in areas with high air-t
do suggest a cooling effect. It is also
polluted skies after volcanic eruptions
may be responsible for droughts. The
thought to affect the water cycle and
be masking the full impact of global
effect of this phenomenon may actually
may be more severe than first
warming, and future temperature rises
this relationship has yet to be reached.
predicted, but a full understanding of

Solar Activity
The cyclical patterns of our own sun could also affect our climate.
There is some evidence that there is a correlation between sunspot
activity and climatic periods such as the Little Ice Age, which lasted
from about the13th to the 19th century. This cool period seems to
have been characterized by an average 1.8ºF (1ºC) drop in tempera-
ture, with longer, harsher winters and more glaciation. Evidence for
Northern Europe’s cooling is documented in the so-called Frost Fairs
of London, the first of which was in 1607, when the Thames was
completely frozen. Businesses took their stalls onto the ice, where
people crowded for skating, fun and just to move about London
unimpeded. The last documented Frost Fair was in 1814, well into
the Industrial Revolution era, when mean temperatures had begun to
rise again. Many rivers, canals and lakes in the Netherlands also froze,
as seen in the work of such great artists as Brueghel and Avercamp.

394 THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE


Above: Could atmos- The Little Ice Age is thought to have been the
combination of solar forcing, that is, natural
pheric pollution caused
changes in solar radiation reaching the earth, and
by industry or volcanic
activity be a cause ofthe cooling effect of volcanic gases from eruptions
global dimming as wellsuch as the catastrophic Tambora Eruption of
as warming? 1815, which in the Northern Hemisphere led to
1816 being hailed the “year without a summer.”
The solar astronomer Edward Maunder has suggested that the
almost complete absence of sunspots (the Maunder Minimum)
between 1645 and 1715 was partly responsible for a decrease in
solar radiation and the solar forcing of temperature drops. The
amount of cloud cover and solar irradiance has also been linked
with 11-year cycles of sunspots, but the IPCC has cast doubt as
to whether in the long term these natural inputs account for our
current runaway CO2 and temperature rises.

THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE 395

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