Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves (34 page)

5. Pyroclasts are rock fragments fashioned in a volcanic explosion. The term Peléan comes from the famous Mount Pelée on Martinique, where the term pyroclastic flow was first scientifically defined after the great 1902 eruption.

1. Here’s a cool Jeopardy! “answer”: “Istanbul is figuratively called the place where East meets West. But that is literally true only here.” Question: “What are the geographic poles?” This is where east and west merge and simply vanish as separate entities.

2. The speed of sound has a caveat. It changes its velocity depending on temperature. Not pressure or altitude, just temperature. For example, throughout this book the speed of sound is given as 768 miles per hour, but this is the case only at room temperature, or 20 degrees Celsius, or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Sound moves significantly more slowly, at only 741 miles per hour, at the freezing point, 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It zooms 770 miles per hour at 72 degrees Fahrenheit, 773 miles per hour at 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and 776 miles per hour when it’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

3. Although most animals are “blind” to Earth’s magnetic field, behavioral studies have shown that some can indeed sense it. These include sea turtles, stingrays and manta rays, homing pigeons, migratory birds, honeybees, salmon, sharks, and tuna. Researchers have discovered that each of these creatures’ nervous systems contains magnetite deposits. These small, naturally occurring magnetlike crystals align themselves with magnetic fields and act as microscopic compass needles. Such crystals are undoubtedly the key biologic component that allows some animals to sense Earth’s magnetic field and navigate thereby.

4. Is it just me? Or is the term Cretaceous Superchron unbelievably cool-sounding? I’ve started to use it at every opportunity, even when it’s not appropriate. People then ask me what it means, providing a reason to say it yet again.

The Man Who Only Loved Sand

1. Dust devils form when hot air just above the surface quickly rises through a small region of cooler air just above it. In near-calm conditions, any horizontal motion begins the process of rotation. The fast-rising hot air pocket gets stretched vertically, shifting its mass closer to the axis of rotation, which intensifies the spin, following the law of conservation of angular momentum—just as a whirling ice-skater pulls in his arms to increase the spin. The rising hot air also creates a partial vacuum near the ground, pulling in other nearby hot air, which rapidly whooshes horizontally inward to the base of the whirlwind, adding to the spin. Thus the vortex is intensified and self-sustaining.

2. Later I learned that typical dust devil winds blow at forty-five miles per hour. Giant dust devils reach sixty miles per hour. The all-time record was seventy-five miles per hour. Looking back, I think that yes, I could have stepped into one without too much risk. However, I’m sure my attorney, if I had one, would insist that I unequivocally state that I am not suggesting you try it.

3. Well? How do the stars appear when viewed from an excellent, unpolluted earthly site as compared to the view from space itself or from the moon? I asked the man on earth who is arguably in the best position to know: Commander Andy Thomas, a longtime NASA astronaut who has logged months in space. He grew up in the Australian outback and knows what dark skies are, on earth and off it. He confirmed the science literature that says our atmosphere only dims stars by a barely noticeable one-third of a magnitude. In other words, there’s a far bigger difference in star count when one moves from dark suburbs to even darker suburbs than there is when one blasts off into space and stargazes above our atmosphere. Air is very transparent to light’s visual wavelengths.

4. Leap seconds are not fun for everyone. There is currently a raging debate over whether to do away with them once and for all and to change our clock-keeping system so that we no longer stay in sync with our planet’s spin. Early in 2012, an international panel was so divided that they’ve shelved the issue until 2016, when it will be debated anew.

5. As for the other stages of twilight, nautical twilight persists until the sun is twelve degrees down. That’s when the horizon vanishes; when a mariner cannot distinguish between sea and sky. Astronomical twilight continues still longer, until the sun has fallen eighteen degrees below the horizon, allowing the faintest stars to emerge. Its conclusion heralds the arrival of full darkness. The onset and duration of all three stages of twilight are not expressed in units of time but rather in terms of the Sun’s distance below the horizon, because their lengths vary. Depending on the time of year and the latitude of the observer, twilight can expire in less than an hour or linger throughout the night. Twilight is always shortest in the tropics, where one hour of total twilight is all you get. From the latitude of New York, one and a half hours is about average, while from northern Europe, there simply is no night at all between May and August.

6. Singing sand is a real phenomenon, even if its cause remains a mystery. Obviously, motion is always necessary to create sound, but what exactly is the cause of singing sand, and what are the requisite preconditions? This latter question has been answered, because singing or booming only occurs when the sand grains are round, between 0.1 and 0.5 millimeters in diameter, at a specific humidity, and contain silicon dioxide (as sand usually does). The tone is commonly around the musical note of A, similar to a mosquito’s drone, often with a deep undertone between 60 Hz and 105 Hz. It can be extremely loud. And the phenomenon has been observed in dozens of deserts around the world.

1. Want to know how fast Earth whirls you in your hometown? It’s easy with any scientific calculator. First punch in your home’s latitude. (Don’t know it? Just Google it. Brooklyn is 40° north; Seattle is 48° north.) Next, hit the COSINE key and you’ll see a number between zero and one. In the case of Brooklyn, it’s 0.766. Multiply this by 1,038 miles per hour, and you’re done. Result: people in Coney Island go 795 miles per hour, just over the speed of sound, even when they’re not riding the famous Cyclone roller coaster.

2. The green flash occurs when the last tiny spot of setting sun changes from orange to green, just for a second or two. You might see it once in about every sixteen or seventeen sunsets, if my experience is any guide to its frequency. I’ve seen it fifteen times, although I’ve looked for it about 250 times. It happens because the sun’s image is actually composed of multiple colors that slightly overlap. When all the other “suns” have set, the topmost tip of the final one would be blue, except there isn’t any blue light left, because it’s been scattered away by the thick air at the horizon. So the actual topmost sun is green. But it’s only seen when the air is very calm and homogeneous in temperature, as it sometimes is over the ocean.

3. If you approach a circular, counterclockwise-spinning storm from the outside, as incoming air does, the wind’s deflection is toward the right. But if you’re trapped inside the storm, as I was not too long ago, then the winds blow from right to left.

4. Going sixty-nine miles north from Quito produces a difference of a mere 0.2 miles per hour in Earth’s rotation speed. But if you travel that same sixty-nine miles north from Point Barrow, Alaska, you come to a place where Earth spins a whopping seventeen miles per hour slower. Hence, ironically, despite all the tourist fuss paid to the Coriolis force at the equator, it is so negligible there that rotating storms like hurricanes can never form.

5. You’d think the rotating Earth would make a Foucault pendulum complete a 360-degree pivot after one period of Earth’s rotation, which is twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes. But, as it happens, this is only true for a pendulum at the North Pole or South Pole. Anywhere else the pivot takes longer because the pendulum’s direction precesses. This is a difficult math and physics conundrum ultimately attributable mostly to the Coriolis force, which initially baffled nineteenth-century physicists. Even Einstein found it puzzling enough to write about.

1. You don’t always have to specify whether you’re using Fahrenheit or Celsius during the Alaska winter. The two scales meet at negative forty degrees. During 2012 in Fairbanks the temperature hovered between minus forty and minus fifty degrees the entire month of January. Perhaps surprisingly, one can very much feel the difference between the two. While minus forty is bitter to the point of being surreal, it’s actually dangerous to inhale air at minus fifty degrees because it can freeze lung tissue.

2. Snowflakes have not been extensively analyzed for the presence of germs. The issue was studied in France in 2008, when researchers found that 85 percent of flakes had formed around a living bacterium. Presumably this is true everywhere, but no one can say for sure whether any one country’s snowfalls are more sanitary than another’s.

3. In some coastal Alaskan towns, the melt problem is not underground but rather on the surface. Because of vanishing sea ice during the summer, ocean waves now crash into buildings instead of what used to be permanent buffers of ice. Their replacement in the summer by open water is creating community nightmares. The village of Kivalina, in northwestern Alaska, is one example. Its population of three hundred people faces relocation, with a price tag estimated at $54 million.

April’s Hidden Mysteries

1. This of course is why we put food into refrigerators. By merely dropping the temperature to thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, we put an enormous brake on the speed of myriad biological processes, including those needed by reproducing bacteria. Pull the plug and let the temperature jump a paltry twenty degrees, and the milk quickly sours, allowing the biology pageant to unfold anew.

2. Writers nowadays are cautioned against using the word awesome because of its clichéd omnipresence since the 1990s. At a grocery recently, the clerk asked if I had the exact change; when I fished it out, he said, “Awesome.”

“No,” I replied. “The Grand Canyon is awesome. Exact change is not awesome.” But the unfolding of spring? Absolutely: resurrect that adjective.

3. The hundredth monkey was a popular concept in the 1970s. The story is that a researcher observing monkeys on a tropical island saw one washing its food before eating it, to remove the sand. He noted that very soon after, other monkeys were doing the same—which was behavior never before seen in this type of simian. A sort of evolutionary action was apparently occurring.

Now comes the eerie part. Within a single year, researchers suddenly started seeing the same behavior among this species of monkey in other parts of the world. The conclusion was astounding: when some critically large number of animals begin thinking or acting in a particular way, the phenomenon reaches a sort of tipping point, and the idea pops into the minds of all those creatures simultaneously, no matter where in the world they may be.

It’s the old ESP thing, never laid to rest by science. And while appropriately New Age in flavor for the time, it didn’t seem totally outrageous. Flocks of birds and schools of fish seemingly make simultaneous turns, as if mentally connected.

Ken Keyes adopted the idea in his popular book, The Hundredth Monkey. Keyes suggested that if enough people participate in the peace and environmental movements, they will suddenly “take off” and become the established behavior of the entire human race.

A wonderfully utopian notion. But meanwhile what came to light was that the original story was fictitious. Turned out there never was a researcher who noticed increasing numbers of monkeys washing fruit. Zoologists noted that monkeys have always periodically washed fruit.

4. Actually, a dial tone consists of two notes. One is indeed a musical A, at 440 cycles per second. The other, a quieter undertone, hums at 350 cycles per second, which is an F. If you place a vibration-sensing guitar tuner against a phone, it will alternate between announcing it’s detected an A and an F.

5. If you’re a stickler for precision, the wavelength of aurora light is usually 557.7 nanometers while that of a firefly glow is between 561 and 570 nm. The green-yellow of both appear virtually identical, but the firefly is very slightly yellower.

The Gang That Deciphered the Wind

1. In some sourcebooks, Australia’s Barrow Island is given the prize for having the strongest-ever wind gust—253 miles per hour. It was recorded during tropical cyclone Olivia on April 10, 1996. It surpassed the longtime previous record of 231 miles per hour, set on Mount Washington on April 12, 1934. However, the Mount Washington record was for a normal day, not a cyclone occurrence, and in any case the New Hampshire mountain has much higher ongoing mean wind speeds. Thus it probably deserves to retain its “world’s windiest” title.

2. This was a horrible crash. The experienced pilot was trying to give his passengers a scenic view of Japan’s sacred mountain, and he had no warning that the winds were so terribly turbulent that day. The aircraft disintegrated and crashed, killing all 113 passengers and eleven crew members, including seventy-five Americans who worked for or were family members of people who worked for the Thermo King corporation of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The accident left sixty-three children orphaned. This—and some frightening experiences I went through during my two thousand hours as a pilot—makes me leery of mountain flying whenever the wind is higher than about thirty miles per hour. Over and around Mount Washington it’s often three times that.

3. Here is heliocentrism again, centuries before Copernicus and Galileo.

4. There really is no magic number that pinpoints where our atmosphere ends, because at no point does the air terminate abruptly. Higher than fifty-two miles above the earth, however, so few atoms exist that sunlight is no longer measurably refracted. We see no detectable glow above that point, although some curious atmospheric phenomena still occur, such as the burning up of meteors (at between sixty and eighty miles) and the glow of the aurora (at between sixty and 120 miles). Even above twenty-three miles, the air is too thin to support any kind of specialized aircraft wings. Another thing to consider is that the sky at forty-nine miles is no longer dark cobalt blue but black.