An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere (Paperback)

by Gabrielle Walker (Author) "NEARLY FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in a patchwork of individual fiefdoms that we now call Italy, a revolution of ideas was struggling to take place..." (more)
Key Phrases: mercurius calcinatus, magnesia alba, electrical layer, Van Allen, New York, Wiley Post (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Most of the time we hardly notice that we're moving through air. But when a storm system whips it into a whirling mass that grows into a tornado or a hurricane, then the air around us makes headlines. Science consultant Walker (Snowball Earth) presents a lively history of scientists' and adventurers' exploration of this important and complex contributor to life on Earth, from Galileo's early attempts to show that it has weight to the explorations by 20th-century scientists Oliver Heaviside and Edward Appleton of the ionosphere, which acts as a giant mirror bouncing radio waves from one side of the globe to another. Walker provides readers with easy-to-follow discussions of the science behind the discovery that carbon dioxide levels are rising exponentially; the theoretician who left her computer for Antarctica and discovered a huge ozone hole created by chlorofluorocarbons; why hurricanes form only in the tropics and why global warming may lead to more violent storms. She goes far afield at times, spending too much time on the Van Allen belts, for instance, but readers will find this informative book to be a breath of fresh air. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Although Gabrielle Walker, author of Snowball Earth (2003), holds a Cambridge doctorate in chemistry, her ear for storytelling is perfect for popular science. One critic praises her lyrical style; others praise her use of detail, anecdote, and science that wouldn't be out of place in Meteorology 101. Critics inevitably compare Walker to Dava Sobel (Longitude; Galileo's Daughter; The Planets, *** Jan/Feb 2006), one of the genre's most popular writers. Walker has honed her skills as a contributing editor of Scientific American, and her breezy tone fits her subject perfectly. Even though her choice to start from square one may frustrate readers with some previous knowledge in the area, Walker has penned an engaging, readable book-nothing too heavy, and worth the reader's every breath.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reprint edition (August 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015603414X
• ISBN-13: 978-0156034142
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #171,946 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #58 in

  Books > Science > Earth Sciences > Atmospheric Sciences

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Absolutely Fascinating Adventure, Not To Be Missed, July 30, 2007

By	Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty (Port Orford, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere (Hardcover)

I will say this right at the outset: This is one of the best books about a scientific topic, written for a popular audience, that I have ever read (and, believe me, I've read a lot of them). If there is such a thing as a genuine "page-turner" in the field of popular science, "An Ocean of Air" certainly qualifies to be in such a category. I can understand why Gabrielle Walker is advertised as an award-winning science writer. If I offered an award for fine writing, especially about a subject as complex as the earth's atmosphere, she would top my list of potential recipients. In my considered opinion (and thankfully!), it just goes to prove that being an "academic" and possessing a Ph.D. (which she has) does not condemn one to write books forever as one writes a doctoral dissertation (which tend to be very stilted and hopelessly boring).

Creative-writing instructors have always told me that the first sentence and paragraph of a book are most important. They are the "hook" that grabs the reader and propels him or her forward onto page two, then page three, then page four, and so on, until the reader reaches the last page, excited but exhausted, forced to exhale a lung's-worth of air, declaring "what a wild ride!" Walker's book provided that experience for me, and I am not exaggerating.

The story opens twenty miles above New Mexico with Joe Kittinger "hanging in the sky." It is the 16th of August in 1960. (I had just graduated from college.) Then, "For eleven minutes he remained there, poised in an open gondola that twisted slowly beneath a vast helium balloon." But, "Far below, where Earth's surface curved away to the horizon, a glowing blue halo stood out against the blackness of space." Then, on the next page we are informed, Kittinger "took a single breath of pure oxygen from within his tightly sealed helmet . . . And then he jumped."

Now, we're talking twenty miles up in the air here! The highest I've ever been is around eight miles up, courtesy of a small private jet taking me to Colorado in 2005 for a philosophy conference. I was nervous during that hours-long journey because I have a real problem with heights. So, I was immediately "hooked," as they say, by Walker's opening paragraphs. I could visualize exactly what was taking place and how Kittinger must have felt. Finally the author tells us: "Captain Joseph W. Kittinger Jr. of the U.S. Air Force is the man who fell to Earth and lived. Nobody has ever managed to emulate his feat."

The author's point in telling this little anecdote is to illustrate for us something important about the "ocean" of air above us and around us. As Walker says: ". . .[T]he message from Kittinger's flight, and from every one of the pioneers who have sought to understand our atmosphere" is, "We don't just live 'in' the air. We live 'because' of it." This anecdote, by the way, is told in the Prologue to the book. The reader hasn't even begun Chapter One yet. But Walker has, indeed, provided the "hook" that will force any reader who loves adventure stories to continue on through the next seven chapters where, of course, we will encounter many other "pioneers" in this narrative about the ocean of air and its mysteries.

Many of these characters will be familiar to most knowledgeable readers: Galileo Galilei, Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier, Christopher Columbus, James Van Allen, Blaise Pascal, and Guglielmo Marconi. Many will be unfamiliar to most readers, as a few were to me: Evangelista Torricelli, Joseph Black, Svante Arrhenius, William Ferrel, Oliver Heaviside, and Gilbert Plass. Even Wiley Post comes into the story, that daring and courageous pilot, an early aviation pioneer, who was killed (along with famous American humorist Will Rogers) in a 1935 airplane crash in Alaska. As the reader can see, the list of those involved in this fascinating chronicle about our ocean of air range from philosophers and scientists to mathematicians and world explorers, with an aviator or two thrown in for good measure.

Walker's book, to be sure, is mainly about the ocean of air above us and around us which permits us to live and thrive; but it certainly is about more than just that. She discusses topics like climate change, the effects of chlorofluorocarbons on the atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels and their repercussions, and other subjects one would expect in a book such as this one. For me, however, the important information that the author provides is about "how" we have come to think about our ocean of air "through" the insights and experiments of the historical figures who were themselves enraptured with the phenomenon. In other words, I was mostly captured by the "history" of the intellectual thought behind our evolving understanding of the atmosphere wherein we reside.

This book ends with an appropriate flourish in the Epilogue, an anecdote as compelling as the one in the Prologue. It is October 2003. This is when "a series of explosions rocked the outer surface of the sun. A massive flare flash fried Earth with x-rays equivalent to five thousands suns." However, none of us on this planet felt a thing. And now comes the place where the reader exhales and declares "What a ride!" Walker concludes this little anecdote and her book with these parting words: "The most massive solar flare since records began and one of the biggest radioactive maelstroms in history together met a far more formidable foe. They each arrived, and then, one by one they simply bounced off . . . thin air." Thin air? Ah, my! What a way to finish a most interesting adventure.

"An Ocean of Air" is a superb piece of writing, an exciting and very readable exploration into something we ordinary people simply take for granted. The author also provides some suggestions for further reading, extensive endnotes, and a helpful index of topics. Believe me, this book is not to be missed and I give it my highest recommendation.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How We Came to Understand the Air Around Us, July 27, 2007

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere (Hardcover)

If we have a bottle that has no liquid in it, or a box that has had all objects removed from it, we will say that the bottle or the box is empty. The idea that there is nothing there but nothingness is one that goes far back, and it is only common sense: you can't see or feel anything there, so there is nothing there. Science, for all its common-sense methods, might be seen as an attack on common sense; the Earth is not flat, for instance, and the Sun does not go around it (You can just see it! It's just common sense!) And that bottle and box are not empty, but full of air. That the air is something of infinite complexity (rather than being some manifestation of nothingness) was a revelation that was centuries in coming, but the way it happened is delightfully told in _An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere_ (Harcourt) by Gabrielle Walker. Chapters here detail the attack of science upon different aspects of the air, like its molecular composition, the drive of the winds, the protective nature of the ozone layer, jet streams, and the effects of humans upon it. There is one example after another of how science has harnessed observation, speculation, experiment, and eventual theories to come to an understanding that, as Walker says, "We don't just live _in_ the air. We live _because_ of it." And this is not just because we need it to breathe.

Walker starts with Galileo and his associate Torricelli, who had the heretical idea that vacuums existed (the church said they didn't). Galileo's calculations from clever experiments showed with good accuracy that air weighed one four-hundredth as much as water. This does not sound like much, but Walker points out that the air inside Carnegie Hall weighs seventy thousand pounds. But if air is not nothing and is made of something, what is it made of? For us animals, the important component for our breathing is oxygen, which was discovered by the combined efforts of Joseph Priestley in England and Antoine Lavoisier in France. The forgotten Scottish genius Joseph Black in 1754 was the first to isolate carbon dioxide, but he performed a huge number of experiments in different realms. He hardly published anything about them, writes Walker: "He didn't want to be the first, nor did he want to be famous; he simply wanted to _know_." The Irishman John Tyndall was a scientific showman; "He choreographed his lectures as for a Broadway show," packing houses so that the masses might share in scientific insight. Around 1860 he showed how important carbon dioxide was in soaking up warmth from the Sun, the beginning of our understanding of the Greenhouse Effect. Lieutenant Matthew Maury was no scientific genius, but he thought he was. He compiled tables and charts of air movement and air pressure around the world, but his wild explanations for them included thundering justifications from the Old Testament. It took a real genius, the West Virginian William Ferrel, to make sense of Maury's raw data, mathematically deriving the models of trade winds and westerlies that would have to arise in a turning globe with an atmosphere. Thomas Midgley was a jovial, beaming enthusiast, who loved a new engineering puzzle, and was praised in his time for his vastly influential inventions. The poor man died in blissful ignorance that "he would be inadvertently responsible for more damage to Earth's atmosphere than any other single organism that has ever lived." It was bad enough that Midgley invented leaded gasoline; he also invented Freon, which was supposed to be safe and inert, but decades later was shown to be causing holes in the ozone layer, a part of the ocean of air which protects us from ultraviolet rays.

The centuries of scientific advance have meant that we do have a pretty good understanding of the atmosphere, but as in the case of the ozone layer, our technologies have made changes in the air that other technologies are just now, perhaps too belatedly, uncovering. Walker's book is not specifically about the science of global warming, but it gives a good explanation of how gradually scientists became aware of the threat. The assumptions that we do not create enough carbon dioxide to cause a problem, that it does not accumulate in the atmosphere because it is absorbed in the oceans, or that it does not cause extra warmth have all been shown wrong. She has provided a structure for understanding the problem of global warming which is a scary issue, but Walker's book is not alarmist. It is rather a celebration of the unusual personalities and often tangled paths by which we have come to scientific understanding of the most vital part of our environment.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A weight on your shoulders, October 15, 2007

By	Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere (Hardcover)

Apart from the unoriginal title and misleading subtitle [any fourth-grader knows why the wind blows], this introduction to the history of atmosphere has much to recommend it. Walker is able to take us through the search for what comprises the air we breathe. She resurrects some important figures in this quest, showing why we should know of them. There are also familiar characters, not the least of which is Galileo, whose study of the air took his remaining years during house arrest by The Church. Although the challenge to cover so many characters and their efforts to put substance to something we consider almost ephemeral is daunting, the author covers the ground with spritely prose. The book is a good starting point for those unfamiliar with the air that sustains us.

It was a revelation of great magnitude to discover air can be weighed. Passing your hand through it doesn't seem to meet much resistance. Balloons and birds pass through it effortlessly, it seems. But the realisation that air was "there" was the first step in a long journey in understand what exactly was "there" to understand. Walker, although opening the account with Galileo's trial and confinement, reminds us that "air" was considered by some ancients, especially Aristotle, to be one of the four "Elements", along with earth, fire and water. Air, because it exhibits pressure, must have measureable "weight". Another Renaissance Italian, Alessandro Torecelli, resolving a dispute about that suggestion, invented the quicksilver [mercury] barometer still in use today - coining the phrase "ocean of air" as a result. In dealing with the pressure derived from its mass, Walker panders to her US readers by noting that Carnegie Hall in New York City holds over 32 thousand kilogrammes of air.

What naturally follows leads Walker to such scientific heavyweights as Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Black and even Gugliemo Marconi. Marconi? Why is the man credited with the invention of the wireless mixed in with gas investigators? Although Marconi wasn't certain how his signals could cover such vast distances, it was later learned that signals bounced from high altitudes. Whatever views we may have of weather events, Walker demonstrates, the upper atmosphere is in constant turmoil, with electrical and chemical changes occurring at intense rates. At each step in narrating the discoveries, she provides a descriptive segment on the life and thinking of the researchers. Her description of Oliver Heaviside will repel a few, but at this distance others will find him of interest.

Her focus is mostly on the science concerned with what comprises the atmosphere and its activities. Even so, it's disappointing that no mention is made of the earliest forecasters such as Robert Fitzroy, Darwin's captain on the HMS Beagle. Offsetting this lack, Walker brings to light a figure unaccountably forgotten. Early in the 19th Century, Virginian William Ferrel, who should have been doing his farm chores, instead studied mathematics and meteorology to decipher how the winds work. His calculations led to a new assessment of how air masses move due to the Earth's rotation. Today, the region of the atmosphere producing the winds and weather we experience daily is deemed the "Ferrel Cell".

Unlike some science writers, indeed, unlike some of her earlier books, Walker keeps herself out of this account - at least until the "Epilogue". The writing is vibrant and captures your attention. Occasionally, close scrutiny reveals some errors - "tropical" air cells do not originate at the Pole, nor was Columbus the "first European to step into a new world" - but these are minor glitches. The science story is well told and enthusiastically. Walker has done a great deal of digging into background material and guides us through the results almost effortlessly. This book would make an excellent gift to a young person looking for a career pursuit. But shop carefully as there are more thorough accounts than this one, no less well written. Much about "the ocean of air" has been explained, but even more remains. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Ontario]