Air gets some well-deserved attention
Lynette Olson
Originally published 08:44 a.m., January 19, 2008
Updated 08:44 a.m., January 19, 2008
“An Ocean of Air : Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere,” by Gabrielle Walker, Harcourt, 2007, $25.
Air may be Earth’s most underappreciated resource. Indeed, Earth’s atmosphere makes life possible -- it is essential to the food people eat, warms the surfaces they walk on, provides a constant supply of oxygen, allows radio waves to transmit information around the globe and protects all living things from the effects of solar flares and radiation. Author Gabrielle Walker teaches us about this resource in her new book, An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere.
“Space is almost close enough to touch,” Walker writes. “Only twenty miles above our heads is an appalling, hostile environment that would freeze us, and burn us and boil us away. And yet our enfolding layers of air protect us so completely that we don’t even realize the dangers.”
Walker takes her title from Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian mathematician and colleague of Galileo’s who, marveling at the power and weight of the atmosphere, exclaimed in a letter in 1644, “We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.”
From the book’s opening scene, readers come to understand what a luxury a steady supply of air can be. Walker describes a man in free fall from more than 20 miles above Earth; a pinprick in his jumpsuit would mean instant death as his blood boils. Similar eye-catchers (not all so morbid) are plentiful. The air that fills Carnegie Hall, for example, weighs more than 70,000 pounds. Evangelista Torricelli was the first to measure the weight of the atmosphere. Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier discovered the life-giving oxygen in air, and scientists used information from 19th-century theorist Svante Arrhenius to demonstrate how carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. William Ferrel was a nineteenth-century self-taught American who first grasped the global scale of weather and its drivers: cold flowing away from the poles, and heat flowing from the equator. Walker describes how air moves around Earth and supports aircraft and how solar flares interact with Earth’s atmosphere to create breathtaking auroras. Walker also explores wind mechanics, hurricanes, the ozone, and global warming — the known and the unknown — with enthusiasm and wonder.
Walker’s writing is clear and clean. She brings a new point of view to centuries-old stories of discovery and sheds light on the personalities of the 19th and 20th centuries who have also contributed to the world’s body of knowledge. Witty and full of fascinating information, this is a captivating book.
Ms. Walker writes for a general audience. She concludes her work with “suggestions for further reading,” endnotes, and an index. The chapters blend history and intriguing facts about the people who uncovered the secrets of weather and the atmosphere with hard science, making for a most accessible and fun analysis that is perfect for the amateur science reader.