Read Online Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves by Bob Berman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Bob Berman
Tags: General, science, Essay/s, Physics, Geophysics, Optics & Light, Science / Essays, Science / General, Science / Physics / General, Science / Physics / Geophysics, Science / Physics / Optics & Light
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depression, I thought. With the lone dust devil snaking away, the silence of the harsh, sunlit desert was overwhelming.
I stood, mesmerized by the isolation. I felt quarantined from the human race.
Anyone who has been to a desert knows its hypnotic appeal. In 2006 I had gone to the Sahara to meet the moon’s shadow, but that total solar eclipse wound up as merely the initial enticement for me; the desert’s magic only grew. And much earlier, as a twenty-two-year-old wandering the world with a backpack, I spent a couple of weeks in the great vast desert of southeastern Iran, between Kerman and Zahedan, where the nightly skies are as inky black and star-filled as I imagine they are on the far side of the moon.3 I had also loved the Thar Desert, with its herds of wild camels and friendly people, in the Rajasthan wastelands of western India. Every desert is unique. This one, the Atacama, is special in several ways.
For starters, it’s the driest of them all. In some sections no measurable rain has fallen for the past five years. There is thus not the slightest trace of even scrub vegetation. The cold, rich South Pacific, with its famous Humboldt Current, laps at the desert’s beaches, where penguin colonies nest in its protected bays, while the forbidding peaks of the Andes abruptly define its eastern edge. These mountains are the culprits that manufacture the aridity. The prevailing easterly winds are forced to rise, cool, and dump their moisture on southern Bolivia and northern Argentina. At night, nearly continuous lightning over the Andes hovers above the unseen border between the two countries. When the air descends from the Andes it is bone dry.
Lack of rainfall and vegetation are the calling cards of most deserts, but they also hold one other feature in common: the classic stage set of blue sky and fierce sun. With no trees to cast shadows, the Atacama offers no relief.
Standing amid a 360-degree panorama of stark, sandy, sunlit isolation, I realized I’d overlooked the most central “action figure” of all, the one whose natural motion rules everything else. The sun.
The author appears lost in the desert. On all the world’s ergs, sand moves in a precise, mathematical way.
For most of us, it is sometimes factored into our plans: Should we cancel our beach trip if it’s cloudy? But it’s relatively rare for the sun to modify our behavior in modern times. We mostly ignore it. Even science nerds are only vaguely aware of its various cycles and quirks.
But here in the desert there is nothing else. The sun calls all the shots. And if you’re stuck without a means of exit, it ultimately decides whether you live or die.
Its most basic animation is the day-night rhythm. This remains steady throughout our lives but is much less uniform over the lifetime of our world. When the first dinosaurs walked through the Meadowlands of New Jersey—then part of the supercontinent Pangaea—the year had four hundred days.
Not impressed? Then look back further, to when life first appeared. Earth spun much faster then. The environment was truly alien, unrecognizable as the precursor to today’s world. The air had no oxygen. The sun was 30 percent dimmer and daily crossed from horizon to horizon in five hours. It visibly moved. Shadows perceptibly shifted, as they do in time-lapse nature photography.
As the sun spins once a month, its surface pulses up and down like that of a subwoofer. (Matt Francis)
The moon’s tidal tug creates an oceanic bulge beneath it and a second bulge on the exact opposite side of Earth. These bulges travel around as our planet spins, exerting a bit of torque as countless tons of seawater smash into coastlines to deliver the “High tide!” news to bathers and gulls. Continuously lengthening our days by slowing our spin, the moon’s tides make the sun move ever more sluggishly across the sky.
We’re reminded of this every year or two when scientists announce the insertion of a “leap
I stood, mesmerized by the isolation. I felt quarantined from the human race.
Anyone who has been to a desert knows its hypnotic appeal. In 2006 I had gone to the Sahara to meet the moon’s shadow, but that total solar eclipse wound up as merely the initial enticement for me; the desert’s magic only grew. And much earlier, as a twenty-two-year-old wandering the world with a backpack, I spent a couple of weeks in the great vast desert of southeastern Iran, between Kerman and Zahedan, where the nightly skies are as inky black and star-filled as I imagine they are on the far side of the moon.3 I had also loved the Thar Desert, with its herds of wild camels and friendly people, in the Rajasthan wastelands of western India. Every desert is unique. This one, the Atacama, is special in several ways.
For starters, it’s the driest of them all. In some sections no measurable rain has fallen for the past five years. There is thus not the slightest trace of even scrub vegetation. The cold, rich South Pacific, with its famous Humboldt Current, laps at the desert’s beaches, where penguin colonies nest in its protected bays, while the forbidding peaks of the Andes abruptly define its eastern edge. These mountains are the culprits that manufacture the aridity. The prevailing easterly winds are forced to rise, cool, and dump their moisture on southern Bolivia and northern Argentina. At night, nearly continuous lightning over the Andes hovers above the unseen border between the two countries. When the air descends from the Andes it is bone dry.
Lack of rainfall and vegetation are the calling cards of most deserts, but they also hold one other feature in common: the classic stage set of blue sky and fierce sun. With no trees to cast shadows, the Atacama offers no relief.
Standing amid a 360-degree panorama of stark, sandy, sunlit isolation, I realized I’d overlooked the most central “action figure” of all, the one whose natural motion rules everything else. The sun.
The author appears lost in the desert. On all the world’s ergs, sand moves in a precise, mathematical way.
For most of us, it is sometimes factored into our plans: Should we cancel our beach trip if it’s cloudy? But it’s relatively rare for the sun to modify our behavior in modern times. We mostly ignore it. Even science nerds are only vaguely aware of its various cycles and quirks.
But here in the desert there is nothing else. The sun calls all the shots. And if you’re stuck without a means of exit, it ultimately decides whether you live or die.
Its most basic animation is the day-night rhythm. This remains steady throughout our lives but is much less uniform over the lifetime of our world. When the first dinosaurs walked through the Meadowlands of New Jersey—then part of the supercontinent Pangaea—the year had four hundred days.
Not impressed? Then look back further, to when life first appeared. Earth spun much faster then. The environment was truly alien, unrecognizable as the precursor to today’s world. The air had no oxygen. The sun was 30 percent dimmer and daily crossed from horizon to horizon in five hours. It visibly moved. Shadows perceptibly shifted, as they do in time-lapse nature photography.
As the sun spins once a month, its surface pulses up and down like that of a subwoofer. (Matt Francis)
The moon’s tidal tug creates an oceanic bulge beneath it and a second bulge on the exact opposite side of Earth. These bulges travel around as our planet spins, exerting a bit of torque as countless tons of seawater smash into coastlines to deliver the “High tide!” news to bathers and gulls. Continuously lengthening our days by slowing our spin, the moon’s tides make the sun move ever more sluggishly across the sky.
We’re reminded of this every year or two when scientists announce the insertion of a “leap
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