Seven-tenths: random notes from the deep - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
WE HAD BEEN OUT OF SIGHT OF LAND FOR NEARLY A WEEK, sailing north-nor-east towards Bermuda with the full strength of the Gulf Stream flowing with us, when I realised how dark the ocean was, even under clear, moonlit skies. The usual nocturnal bioluminescence, the phosphorescent shimmer of microscopic organisms such as plankton floating just below the surface, appeared to have faded. Without it, the water beneath us felt more desolate and unwelcoming.
During the day, the ocean, now the dull blue-black of a fresh bruise, was just as empty. A pair of humpback whales, a mother and calf, breached close off our beam as we skirted a reef protecting the harbour of St George, in Bermuda, and a familial pod of dolphins gambolled in our bow-wave for a few hours just west of the Azores, but we sighted nothing else during the month we were at sea. The daily routines of voyaging were punctuated by a disquieting frustration that the ocean was emptier than we imagined it would be.
Halfway across the Atlantic, we found ourselves hove-to for nearly two days in a strong south-easterly gale, a full Force 9 on the Beaufort scale, in an area where Ocean Passages of the World, the staple reference work for professional navigators published by the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, insisted gales from the south-east and east were virtually unheard of. The Azores High, a large, permanent high pressure system centred over the Portuguese-controlled islands nearly a thousand nautical miles west of the Portuguese mainland, had slipped unexpectedly far to the south and the isobars of its north-west quadrant were constricted by a wave of deep low pressure systems moving north-east towards the English Channel. The storm eased just before it forced us to surrender our track towards the Azores port of Horta and make, instead, with rationed food and water, for Coruña, on the north-west coast of Spain, another week's sailing further on.
The increasing instability and intensity of seasonal weather systems, as well as localised fluctuations in ocean temperatures and atmospheric pressure, threaten those who make their living on the sea – and the thousands of amateurs who set out on offshore passages in small yachts (aided by satellite global positioning systems that obviate the need for old-fashioned skills and old-fashioned tools such as a sextant and a chronometer) – with ever more violent, unpredictable weather.
During last year's West Atlantic hurricane season, the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration named twenty-seven tropical storms, among them fifteen hurricanes. Three of the hurricanes were devastating Category Five storms, and at least three of the tropical storms misbehaved in ways that were unsettling to everyone who thought they understood the weather systems in the North Atlantic's sub-tropical latitudes. Tropical storms Epsilon and Zeta sprung up outside the traditional hurricane season, the latter on the second last day of the year, exactly a month after the season's official end. A late season tropical storm, Delta, wandered eastward across the Atlantic to batter the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco – a 2,000 nautical mile detour from the usual track of such depressions north along the eastern seaboard of the United States or across the Florida panhandle. Those who sail in higher latitudes have observed that low-pressure systems there are deepening and the winds are blowing harder.
The elemental behaviour of the sea itself is also changing. The fast-moving Gulf Stream that carries warm water from the Caribbean across the North Atlantic – causing winter temperatures in Reykjavik, Iceland, to be a little higher than in New York, and tempering the worst effects of high latitude depressions that track across Ireland and the British Isles throughout the year – is beginning to slow. The mooted long-term effect of this – Northern Europe might be beset by a ‘big freeze' that could persist for several centuries – will be aggravated if the Arctic's sea ice continues to recede and the slow melt of Greenland's giant glaciers persists or, worse, accelerates.
FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, THE LATE RACHEL CARSON, one of America's first environmental activists, assembled a series of her writings on the nature of the sea in a best-selling book, The Sea Around Us. Its tone was somewhat overripe by today's standard, and its scientific facts have become, inevitably, amusing anachronisms, but the author's confidence that the sheer immensity of the sea might protect it from the worst that humans would inflict on it was, for an American postwar generation steeped in the social idealism of Truman's Fair Deal, and an understandable desire for renewal, compelling. "For the sea as a whole, the alternation of day and night, the passage of the seasons, the procession of the years, are lost in its vastness, obliterated in its own changeless eternity," she wrote. Her confidence was inspired by a more innocent time. Today, we are numb to the stark symptoms of stress and deterioration that are apparent in nearly every ecosystem. We pay only lip service to doing what it takes to alleviate them.
There is, in the florid closing lines of Rachel Carson's book, an unintended glimpse of a grimmer scenario if we do not try harder to turn things around: "... [the sea] encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea – to Oceanus, the ocean river, the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end." ♦