Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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]

With all the talk about the effects of global warming on our atmosphere, we finally have a book that explains what the atmosphere actually is and what each layer (and there are lots of them!) does to protect us. As entertaining-- and fascinating-- as it is informative, this "natural history of air" is a must read for anyone who wants to join or simply understand the debate. Plus, Dr. Walker writes like a dream. She is the college (or high school) science teacher we all wish we had.

'Nice that someone with a Cambridge doctorate can relate the history of atmospheric science anecdotally, as a sequence of more or less exciting stories, in a style that can connect with anyone at high-school age who's curious about how it works.

Walker discusses early conjectures about the weight of our air, the first inkling that it's made up of different gases, the wind patterns that blew Columbus across the ocean and the jets above a certain level that propel planes, what the Northern lights are, how telegraph and radio waves travel, the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, etc. Much complication and controversy about our gradually enlarging grasp of the layers that make for life is absent, but that's only as it should be for curious beginners. This book may well entice many to reach beyond.

Walker also tells of some early missteps by James Lovelock - of special interest to one who arrived late at his Gaia account, long after learning of it via the osmosis of our current, near-universal environmental awareness. And it's as unsurprising to see with what ease he retracted these early gaffes in view of the facts that came to bite him with refutation.

My only misgiving about this book, and it's major, is about the lack of illustrations. I counted three, where another two dozen would have enriched the learning -- especially since this book's pitched at the introductory crowd. `Popular Mechanics' magazine and Leonardo DaVinci before that showed how science gains through illustrations; conversely, that explanations about physics are hobbled in their absence. Take this: "The magnetic field that surrounds our planet looks like an apple cut in half: Its lines of force emerge from the South Pole, bend over the equator, and disappear back into the North Pole ...form[ing] an almost impenetrable magnetic barrier... However, the lines emerging most steeply from the South Pole do not connect with their counterparts in the North. Instead, both poles have a smattering of field lines that point directly up into space." (p 215) It takes some doing to visualize all of this, whereas a single picture would do it quickly and unmistakably. Pictures get around verbal gymnastics and enliven science's nuts and bolts with direct representations of forces, complex machinery, experimental equipment, etc. (Walker's editors also failed her on this in Snowball Earth: The Story of a Maverick Scientist and His Theory of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life As We Know It, which doesn't have a single image.) Her next books would be greatly enriched, and she'd enlarge her readership considerably, once her publishers get her together with a good illustrator.)

Our thin atmosphere is vital, literally, and it's encouraging to see Walker suggest that it's silly to think of "escaping" our planet: earth is home, just as we belong in time. That dream is really a nightmare except in the most distant and desperate future. What remains for us is to tend to it - and what better first step than to grasp some of its complexity?
***½

Air is a substance that is an absolute must for survival of multi celled animals, yet most of us know little about it. Certainly we know that is has oxygen and hydrogen in it, but I doubt most people have even a vague idea of why the winds blow, how air exerts pressure or how much air actually weighs.

The author has broken the book into two main sections. The first deals with the major discoveries about air and the men who discovered each of them. She goes into detail about how the experiments worked (or didn't) and what each was trying to prove. Along the way, she demonstrates nicely that science is not about a single discovery, but about building on what those before you have done.

The second section is more dedicated to what air does. She looks at how winds blow, and why they do so along with why and how air protects us from space and the radioactive particles that are bombarding us on a continual basis. Again, weaving the stories of the men and what they found gives and interesting voyage through time as we learn more about the atmosphere.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone, but particularly to those who have any interest in the atmosphere. It is extremely well written and can be easily understood by people with little or no physics experience. Great read that I completely enjoyed!

Other reviewers have said everything that I would say; I only want to voice agreement. A fascinating book, and especially good because she doesn't avoid explaining why something happens, but finds a great analogy to make it understandable to the non-chemist, non-physicist, non-etc. Well written, with enough details about the people involved to make it all "come alive". My big question: Why did we understand the threat of the hole in the ozone layer as a society so clearly? -- Compare the action that was taken, and how fast, with our struggles and procrastination on dealing with green-house gases.

This book's title does not do it justice. There is so much more discussed here for the general reader than a friendly description of the earth's atmosphere. Each captivating chapter, and there are seven of them, does present a clear discussion of a different aspect of the atmosphere, e.g., the composition of air, the nature of winds, the ozone layer, the ionosphere, etc. But what makes this book particularly engaging is the fact that the author has included the all-important human element. In each topical chapter, she discusses the lives of the key individuals who, through their cleverness and their abilities to tease out from nature the necessary information, were able to make their fascinating discoveries - often leading to wonderful applications/inventions. A few useful diagrams nicely complement the text. The writing style is clear, very friendly, highly accessible, very engaging and often quite gripping. It can be enjoyed by anyone, but science buffs will likely relish it the most.

This is a wonderful book that combines the history of discoveries about the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere with fascinating biographies of the discoverers. A clear, helpful explanation of the atmosphere and an excellent base for understanding climate science. I could not put it down, and although I am sophisticated layman in my understanding of atmospheric science, my understanding exploded geometrically upon reading this volume.

Have you ever wondered about the air that surrounds us? What is it that makes it such an adaptable substance? How does our atmosphere help life on Earth survive? Who were the men that gave us a better understanding of the air around us?


In An Ocean of Air, author Gabrielle Walker attempt to answer these questions and more. She reasons that the Earth is at the bottom of an ocean of air. She peels away the layers composing our atmosphere, and uses stories of the men who experimented on air to show us how it works. From Galileo's experiments done during his confinement to his villa at Arcetri (in Florence), after his running afoul of the Inquisition, through to the modern day rush to discover space An Ocean of Air provides the reader with glimpses of science's progression of discoveries to some of the mysteries posed by the air we breathe.


Gabrielle Walker has written a fantastic resource for anyone who is interested in science. Her explorations of the past experiments done on (in) our atmosphere are engaging, informative, and not at all dry. She brings her passion for the subject matter out in the open during the course of the book.


Some of the subject matter in the book, I was already familiar with. Galileo's air experiments, while not as well known as his beliefs that the earth rotated around the sun - heretical ideas back during his lifetime, are still taught in physics classes. I did find some nee to me scientists while reading An Ocean of Air. I particularly found Marconi's "wireless" device and its impact on the shipping field, and the resulting discovery by Oliver Heaviside of the electrical layer in the atmosphere (called the Heaviside layer) which made Marconi's device work fascinating to read about. The book is presented in a well laid out manner, its facts are not to in depth nor or they simplistic making this a great book for anyone with an interest in the atmospheric sciences.