Home Waters by David George Bowers

Author:David George Bowers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472990693
Publisher: Adlard Coles
Published: 2023-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

On the following day, the wind changed direction by 90 degrees and Langmuir noticed that the windrows responded quickly to this, soon lining themselves up with the new wind direction ‘although the waves continued to move in the old direction’.

I find these observations delightful because they were made, not by someone who had a professional interest in this but by someone who was observant, curious and had the intelligence to realise there was something to explain here. Studying the ocean can be frustrating. Because you are seeing nature in the raw, it is not possible to separate out what you want to see from all the other things going on, as can be done in a well-designed laboratory experiment or in a computer simulation. Sometimes, measurements have to be made laboriously and for a long time if you want to see how things change with the seasons or longer periods. Results in oceanography are often ground out slowly and oceanographers are left behind, in publication rates, by colleagues who can complete a laboratory experiment in a day. It is only right that there should be compensations for these difficulties. The big compensation, for me, is that nature is continually providing a show for you to interpret. New things can be discovered on a sea crossing or on a stroll along the beach. And that opportunity is open to everybody.

Even though it had nothing to do with his job at the General Electric Company in New York State, Langmuir continued to take an active interest in windrows. He noticed that they formed on a lake near his home and observed them closely, using natural and artificial floats (light bulbs were a favourite) to see how the water was moving. In the autumn, he noticed that falling leaves settling on the surface of the lake moved towards the foam lines, where they collected; some of the leaves then moved vertically down, disappearing from view. This observation confirmed his opinion that the streaks were formed by surface currents converging from the sides; the water then sinks downwards, leaving floating material to collect on the surface. The sinking water spreads out at depth and returns to the surface along lines midway between the foam lines, where it then moves along the surface back to the streaks. This circulating motion is superimposed on the general movement of the surface water driven by the wind, so that a parcel of water has a corkscrew motion as it both circulates and travels along the windrows.

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