A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Wegener developed the theory that the world’s continents had once existed as a single land mass he called Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before splitting apart and floating off to their present positions. He set the idea out in a book called Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, or The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which was published in German in 1912 and – despite the outbreak of the First World War in the meantime – in English three years later. Because of the war, Wegener’s theory didn’t attract much notice at first, but by 1920, when he produced a revised and expanded edition, it quickly became a subject of discussion.

Alfred Wegener - Theory of Pangaea

Everyone agreed that continents moved – but up and down, not sideways. The process of vertical movement, known as isostasy, was a foundation of geological belief for generations, though no-one had any really good theories as to how or why it happened. One idea, which remained in textbooks well into my own schooldays, was the ‘baked apple’ theory propounded by the Austrian Eduard Suess just before the turn of the century. This suggested that as the molten Earth had cooled, it had become wrinkled in the manner of a baked apple, creating ocean basins and mountain ranges. Never mind that James Hutton had shown long before that any such static arrangement would eventually result in a featureless spheroid as erosion levelled the bumps and filled in the divots. There was also the problem, demonstrated by Rutherford and Soddy early in the century, that earthly elements hold huge reserves of heat – much too much to allow for the sort of cooling and shrinking Suess suggested. And anyway, if Suess’s theory were correct, then mountains should be evenly distributed across the face of the Earth, which patently they were not, and of more or less the same ages; yet by the early 1900s it was already evident that some ranges, like the Urals and Appalachians, were hundreds of millions of years older than others, like the Alps and Rockies. Clearly the time was ripe for a new theory. Unfortunately, Alfred Wegener was not the man geologists wished to provide it.

Baked Apple theory of features creation on earth - pre-pangaea beleifs

In the Second World War, a Princeton University mineralogist named Harry Hess was put in charge of an attack transport ship, the USS Cape Johnson. Aboard this vessel was a fancy new depth sounder called a fathometer9, which was designed to facilitate inshore manoeuvres during beach landings, but Hess realized that it could equally well be used for scientific purposes and never switched it off, even when far out at sea, even in the heat of battle. What he found was entirely unexpected. If the ocean floors were ancient, as everyone assumed, they should be thickly blanketed with sediments, like the mud on the bottom of a river or lake. But Hess’s readings showed that the ocean floor offered anything but the gooey smoothness of ancient silts. It was scored everywhere with canyons, trenches and crevasses and dotted with volcanic seamounts that he called guyots after an earlier Princeton geologist10 named Arnold Guyot. All this was a puzzle, but Hess had a war to take part in, and put such thoughts to the back of his mind. After the war, Hess returned to Princeton and the preoccupations of teaching, but the mysteries of the sea floor continued to occupy a space in his thoughts. Meanwhile, throughout the 1950s oceanographers were undertaking more and more sophisticated surveys of the ocean floors. In so doing, they found an even bigger surprise: the mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was – mostly – under water. It traced a continuous path along the world’s seabe...

Harry Hess - discovery of landforms on ocean floor

In the Second World War, a Princeton University mineralogist named Harry Hess was put in charge of an attack transport ship, the USS Cape Johnson. Aboard this vessel was a fancy new depth sounder called a fathometer9, which was designed to facilitate inshore manoeuvres during beach landings, but Hess realized that it could equally well be used for scientific purposes and never switched it off, even when far out at sea, even in the heat of battle. What he found was entirely unexpected. If the ocean floors were ancient, as everyone assumed, they should be thickly blanketed with sediments, like the mud on the bottom of a river or lake. But Hess’s readings showed that the ocean floor offered anything but the gooey smoothness of ancient silts. It was scored everywhere with canyons, trenches and crevasses and dotted with volcanic seamounts that he called guyots after an earlier Princeton geologist10 named Arnold Guyot. All this was a puzzle, but Hess had a war to take part in, and put such thoughts to the back of his mind. After the war, Hess returned to Princeton and the preoccupations of teaching, but the mysteries of the sea floor continued to occupy a space in his thoughts. Meanwhile, throughout the 1950s oceanographers were undertaking more and more sophisticated surveys of the ocean floors. In so doing, they found an even bigger surprise: the mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was – mostly – under water. It traced a continuous path along the world’s seabe...

Harry Hess theory - missing sediments from oceans -logest mountain range on earth - process of sea floor Spreading - why ocean floor younger then continent's floor

two researchers, working independently, were making some startling findings by drawing on a curious fact of Earth history that had been discovered several decades earlier. In 1906, a French physicist named Bernard Brunhes had found that the planet’s magnetic field reverses itself from time to time, and that the record of these reversals is permanently fixed in certain rocks at the time of their birth. Specifically, tiny grains of iron ore within the rocks point to wherever the magnetic poles happen to be at the time of their formation, then stay pointing in that direction as the rocks cool and harden. In effect, they ‘remember’ where the magnetic poles were at the time of their creation. For years this was little more than a curiosity, but in the 1950s Patrick Blackett of the University of London and S. K. Runcorn of the University of Newcastle studied the ancient magnetic patterns frozen in British rocks and were startled, to say the very least, to find them indicating that at some time in the distant past Britain had spun on its axis and travelled some distance to the north, as if it had somehow come loose from its moorings. Moreover, they also discovered that if you placed a map of Europe’s magnetic patterns alongside an American one from the same period, they fit together as neatly as two halves of a torn letter. It was uncanny. Their findings were ignored, too.

Discovery of reversl of earth's magnetic field

People knew for a long time that there was something odd about the earth beneath Manson, Iowa. In 1912, a man drilling a well for the town water supply reported bringing up a lot of strangely deformed rock1 – ‘crystalline clast breccia with a melt matrix’ and ‘overturned ejecta flap’, as it was later described in an official report. The water was odd, too. It was almost as soft as rainwater. Naturally occurring soft water had never been found in Iowa before. Though Manson’s strange rocks and silken waters were matters of curiosity, forty-one years would pass before a team from the University of Iowa got around to making a trip to the community, then as now a town of about two thousand people in the northwest part of the state. In 1953, after sinking a series of experimental bores, university geologists agreed that the site was indeed anomalous and attributed the deformed rocks to some ancient, unspecified volcanic action. This was in keeping with the wisdom of the day, but it was also about as wrong as a geological conclusion can get. The trauma to Manson’s geology had come not from within the Earth, but from at least one hundred million miles beyond. Some time in the very ancient past, when Manson stood on the edge of a shallow sea, a rock about a mile and a half across, weighing 10 billion tons and travelling at perhaps two hundred times the speed of sound, ripped through the atmosphere and punched into the Earth with a violence and suddenness that we can scarcely imagin...

Hidden crater of Mason city (in Iowa, US)

G. K. Gilbert of Columbia University4, modelled the effects of impacts by flinging marbles into pans of oatmeal. (For reasons I cannot supply, Gilbert conducted these experiments not in a laboratory at Columbia but in a hotel room5.) Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon’s craters were indeed formed by impacts – in itself quite a radical notion for the time – but that the Earth’s were not.

GK Gilbert - person to identify moon's crater as meteor's impact

Most scientists refused to go even that far. To them, the Moon’s craters were evidence of ancient volcanoes and nothing more. The few craters that remained evident on the Earth (most had been eroded away) were generally attributed to other causes or treated as fluky rarities. By the time Shoemaker came along, a common view was that Meteor Crater had been formed by an underground steam explosion.

Earlier reasons beleived to be behind moon's and earth' s craters

When asteroids were first detected in the 1800s – the very first was discovered on the first day of the century by a Sicilian named Giuseppi Piazzi – they were thought to be planets, and the first two were named Ceres and Pallas. It took some inspired deductions by the astronomer William Herschel to work out that they were nowhere near planet-sized but much smaller. He called them asteroids – Latin for ‘starlike7’ – which was slightly unfortunate as they are not like stars at all. Sometimes now they are more accurately called planetoids.

Story of Asteroid's discovery and naming

In the early 1970s, Walter Alvarez was doing fieldwork in a comely defile known as the Bottaccione Gorge, near the Umbrian hill town of Gubbio, when he grew curious about a thin band of reddish clay that divided two ancient layers of limestone – one from the Cretaceous period, the other from the Tertiary. This is a point known to geology as the KT boundaryf1 and it marks the time, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and roughly half the world’s other species of animals abruptly vanish from the fossil record. Alvarez wondered what it was about a thin lamina of clay, barely 6 millimetres thick, that could account for such a dramatic moment in the Earth’s history. At the time, the conventional wisdom about the dinosaur extinction was the same as it had been in Charles Lyell’s day a century earlier – namely, that the dinosaurs had died out over millions of years. But the thinness of the clay layer clearly suggested that in Umbria, if nowhere else, something rather more abrupt had happened. Unfortunately, in the 1970s no tests existed for determining how long such a deposit might have taken to accumulate. In the normal course of things, Alvarez almost certainly would have had to leave the problem at that; but luckily he had an impeccable connection to someone outside his discipline who could help – his father, Luis. Luis Alvarez was an eminent nuclear physicist; he had won the Nobel Prize for physics the previous decade. He had always been mildly scornful of his son’s atta...

Theory of Dinosaur Extinction by asteriod

By chance, in 1990 one of the searchers, Alan Hildebrand of the University of Arizona, met a reporter from the Houston Chronicle who happened to know about a large, unexplained ring formation, 193 kilometres wide and 48 kilometres deep, under Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula at Chicxulub, near the city of Progreso, about 950 kilometres due south of New Orleans. The formation had been found by Pemex, the Mexican oil company, in 195224 – the year, coincidentally, that Gene Shoemaker first visited Meteor Crater in Arizona – but the company’s geologists had concluded that it was volcanic, in line with the thinking of the day. Hildebrand travelled to the site and decided fairly swiftly that they had their crater. By early 1991 it had been established to nearly everyone’s satisfaction that Chicxulub was the impact site.

Crater of Chicxulub- Possible site of asteroid impact that extinct dinosaurs

Conveniently, a natural test of the theory arose soon after when the Shoemakers and Levy discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, which they soon realized was headed for Jupiter. For the first time, humans would be able to witness a cosmic collision – and witness it very well, thanks to the new Hubble Space Telescope. Most astronomers, according to Curtis Peebles, expected little, particularly as the comet was not a coherent sphere but a string of twenty-one fragments. ‘My sense’, wrote one, ‘is that Jupiter will swallow these comets up without so much as a burp26.’ One week before the impact, Nature ran an article, ‘The Big Fizzle Is Coming’, predicting that the impact would constitute nothing more than a meteor shower. The impacts began on 16 July 1994, went on for a week and were bigger by far than anyone – with the possible exception of Gene Shoemaker – expected. One fragment, known as Nucleus G, struck with the force of about six million megatonnes27 – seventy-five times all the nuclear weaponry in existence. Nucleus G was only about the size of a small mountain, but it created wounds in the Jovian surface the size of Earth. It was the final blow for critics of the Alvarez theory.

Shoemaker Levy comit hits Jupiter - Event supporting dinosaur extinction theory

An asteroid or comet travelling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path – people, houses, factories, cars – would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out 1,000 cubic kilometres of rock, earth and superheated gases. Every living thing within 250 kilometres that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outwards at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light – the brightest ever seen by human eyes – followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling one entire field of view and travelling at thousands of kilometres an...

A possible series of events when bug asteroid may hit the earth

in 1906, an Irish geologist named R. D. Oldham, while examining some seismograph readings from an earthquake in Guatemala, noticed that certain shock waves had penetrated to a point deep within the Earth and then bounced off at an angle, as if they had encountered some kind of barrier. From this he deduced that the Earth has a core.

RD Oldham - Discovery of earth's Outer core

Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovičić was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary between the crust and the layer immediately below, the mantle; this zone has been known ever since as the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho for short.

Andrija Mohorovicic - discovery of earth's mantle

Not until 1936 did a Danish scientist named Inge Lehmann, studying seismographs of earthquakes in New Zealand, discover that there were two cores – an inner one, which we now believe to be solid, and an outer one (the one that Oldham had detected), which is thought to be liquid and the seat of magnetism.

Inge Lehnann - discovery Of earth's inner and outer core

The Richter scale has always been widely misunderstood by non-scientists, though it is perhaps a little less so now than in its early days when visitors to Richter’s office often asked to see his celebrated scale, thinking it was some kind of machine. The scale is, of course, more an idea than a thing, an arbitrary measure of the Earth’s tremblings based on surface measurements. It rises exponentially6, so that a 7.3 quake is ten times more powerful than a 6.3 earthquake and 100 times more powerful than a 5.3 earthquake. Theoretically, at least, there is no upper limit for an earthquake – nor, come to that, a lower limit. The scale is a simple measure of force, but says nothing about damage. A magnitude 7 quake happening deep in the mantle – say, 650 kilometres down – might cause no surface damage at all, while a significantly smaller one happening just 6 or 7 kilometres under the surface could wreak widespread devastation. Much, too, depends on the nature of the subsoil, the quake’s duration, the frequency and severity of aftershocks, and the physical setting of the affected area. All this means that the most fearsome quakes are not necessarily the most forceful, though force obviously counts for a lot.

Charles Richter - Concept of Richter scale

For pure, focused devastation, however, probably the most intense earthquake in recorded history was one that struck – and essentially shook to pieces – Lisbon, Portugal, on All Saints Day (1 November), 1755. Just before ten in the morning, the city was hit by a sudden sideways lurch now estimated at magnitude 9.0 and shaken ferociously for seven full minutes. When at last the motion ceased, survivors enjoyed just three minutes of calm before a second shock came, only slightly less severe than the first. A third and final shock followed. The convulsive force was so great that the water rushed out of the city’s harbour and returned in a wave over 15 metres high, adding to the destruction. At the end of it all, sixty thousand people were dead7 and virtually every building for miles reduced to rubble. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, for comparison, measured an estimated 7.8 on the Richter scale and lasted less than thirty seconds.

Most intense earthquake in recorded history

By the 1960s scientists had grown sufficiently frustrated by how little they understood of the Earth’s interior that they decided to try to do something about it. Specifically, they got the idea to drill through the ocean floor (the continental crust was too thick) to the Moho discontinuity and to extract a piece of the Earth’s mantle for examination at leisure. The thinking was that if they could understand the nature of the rocks inside the Earth, they might begin to understand how they interacted, and thus possibly be able to predict earthquakes and other unwelcome events. The project became known, all but inevitably, as the Mohole11, and it was pretty well disastrous. The hope was to lower a drill through over 4,000 metres of Pacific Ocean water off the coast of Mexico and drill some 5,000 metres through relatively thin crustal rock. Drilling from a ship in open waters is, in the words of one oceanographer, ‘like trying to drill a hole in the sidewalks of New York from atop the Empire State Building using a strand of spaghetti’12. Every attempt ended in failure. The deepest they penetrated was only about 180 metres. The Mohole became known as the No Hole. In 1966, exasperated with ever-rising costs and no results, Congress killed the project. Four years later, Soviet scientists decided to try their luck on dry land. They chose a spot on Russia’s Kola Peninsula, near the Finnish border, and set to work with the hope of drilling to a depth of 15 kilometres. The work prov...

Attempts of drilling deep in earth - Kola hole by Russians - Failed attempt of Mohole in Pacific ocean by Americans

Even though the hole was modest, nearly everything about what it revealed surprised the researchers. Seismic wave studies had led the scientists to predict, and pretty confidently, that they would encounter sedimentary rock to a depth of 4,700 metres, followed by granite for the next 2,300 metres and basalt from there on down. In the event, the sedimentary layer was 50 per cent deeper than expected and the basaltic layer was never found at all. Moreover, the world down there was far warmer than anyone had expected, with a temperature at 10,000 metres of 180 degrees Celsius, nearly twice the forecast level. Most surprising of all was that the rock at depth was saturated with water – something that had not been thought possible.

Results of studying Kola hole

We know a little bit about the mantle from what are known as kimberlite pipes14, where diamonds are formed. What happens is that deep in the Earth there is an explosion that fires, in effect, a cannonball of magma to the surface at supersonic speeds. It is a totally random event. A kimberlite pipe could explode in your back garden as you read this. Because they come up from such depths – up to 200 kilometres down – kimberlite pipes bring up all kinds of things not normally found on or near the surface: a rock called peridotite, crystals of olivine and – just occasionally, in about one pipe in a hundred – diamonds. Lots of carbon comes up with kimberlite ejecta, but most is vaporized or turns to graphite. Only occasionally does a hunk of it shoot up at just the right speed and cool down with the necessary swiftness to become a diamond. It was such a pipe that made South Africa the most productive diamond-mining country in the world, but there may be others even bigger that we don’t know about. Geologists know that somewhere in the vicinity of northeastern Indiana there is evidence of a pipe or group of pipes that may be truly colossal. Diamonds up to 20 carats or more have been found at scattered sites throughout the region. But no-one has ever found the source. As John McPhee notes, it may be buried under glacially deposited soil, like the Manson crater in Iowa, or under the Great Lakes.

Kimberlite pipe - source of African diamonds

Even the one part of it we can see, the crust, is a matter of some fairly strident debate. Nearly all geology texts tell you that continental crust is 5 to 10 kilometres thick under the oceans, about 40 kilometres thick under the continents and 65–95 kilometres thick under big mountain chains, but there are many puzzling variabilities within these generalizations. The crust beneath the Sierra Nevada Mountains, for instance, is only about 30–40 kilometres thick, and no one knows why. By all the laws of geophysics16 the Sierra Nevadas should be sinking, as if into quicksand. (Some people think they may be.)

Surprising uneven thickness of earth's crust

Without assistance, the deepestfn1 anyone has gone and lived to talk about it afterwards is 72 metres – a feat performed by an Italian named Umberto Pelizzari, who in 1992 dived to that depth, lingered for a nanosecond and then shot back to the surface.

Umberto Pelizarri - Man free dived deepest in water (72 m)

Nearly everyone, including the authors of some popular books on oceanography, assumes that the human body would crumple under the immense pressures of the deep ocean. In fact, this appears not to be the case. Because we are made largely of water ourselves5, and water is ‘virtually incompressible’, in the words of Frances Ashcroft of Oxford University, ‘the body remains at the same pressure as the surrounding water, and is not crushed at depth.’ It is the gases inside your body, particularly in the lungs, that cause the trouble. These do compress, though at what point the compression becomes fatal is not known. Until quite recently it was thought that anyone diving to 100 metres or so would die painfully as his or her lungs imploded or chest wall collapsed, but the free divers have repeatedly proved otherwise. It appears, according to Ashcroft, that ‘humans may be more like whales and dolphins than had been expected6.’

Human body in deep water pressure

(Incidentally, the original diving helmet, designed in 1823 by an Englishman named Charles Deane, was intended not for diving but for fire fighting. It was called a ‘smoke helmet’, but, being made of metal, it was hot and cumbersome; as Deane soon discovered, fire-fighters had no particular eagerness to enter burning structures in any form of attire, but most especially not in something that heated up like a kettle and made them clumsy into the bargain. In an attempt to save his investment, Deane tried it under water and found it was ideal for salvage work.)

Story of invention of diving helmet by Charles Deane

The real terror of the deep, however, is the bends – not so much because they are unpleasant, though of course they are, as because they are so much more likely. The air we breathe is 80 per cent nitrogen. Put the human body under pressure, and that nitrogen is transformed into tiny bubbles that migrate into the blood and tissues. If the pressure is changed too rapidly – as with a too-quick ascent by a diver – the bubbles trapped within the body will begin to fizz in exactly the manner of a freshly opened bottle of champagne, clogging tiny blood vessels, depriving cells of oxygen and causing pain so excruciating that sufferers are prone to bend double in agony – hence ‘the bends’.

The bends (Decompression sickness) due to deep diving - bubbling of nitrogen in human body

Apart from avoiding high-pressure environments altogether, only two strategies are reliably successful against the bends. The first is to suffer only a very short exposure to the changes in pressure. That is why the free divers I mentioned earlier can descend to depths of 150 metres without ill effect. They don’t stay down long enough for the nitrogen in their system to dissolve into their tissues. The other solution is to ascend by careful stages. This allows the little bubbles of nitrogen to dissipate harmlessly.

Ways of overcoming bends during deep diving

Venus is only 25 million miles closer to the Sun than we are. The Sun’s warmth reaches it just two minutes before it touches us24. In size and composition, Venus is very like the Earth, but the small difference in orbital distance made all the difference to how it turned out. It appears that during the early years of the solar system Venus was only slightly warmer than the Earth and probably had oceans25. But those few degrees of extra warmth meant that Venus could not hold onto its surface water, with disastrous consequences for its climate. As its water evaporated, the hydrogen atoms escaped into space and the oxygen atoms combined with carbon to form a dense atmosphere of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Venus became stifling. Although people of my age will recall a time when astronomers hoped that Venus might harbour life beneath its padded clouds, possibly even a kind of tropical verdure, we now know that it is much too fierce an environment for any kind of life that we can reasonably conceive of. Its surface temperature is a roasting 470 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt lead, and the atmospheric pressure at the surface is ninety times that of Earth26, more than any human body could withstand. We lack the technology to make suits or even spaceships that would allow us to visit. Our knowledge of Venus’s surface is based on distant radar imagery and some startled squawks from an unmanned Soviet probe that was dropped hopefully into the clouds in 1972 and f...

Why Venus couldn't sustain life

The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 4 centimetres a year27. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won’t keep us steady and we will have to come up with some other solution,

Rate of receding of Moon from Earth

about 4.4 billion years ago a Mars-sized object slammed into Earth, blowing out enough material to create the Moon from the debris.

How and when earth's moon was created

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

Francium - rarest element on earth

What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous. It is the party animal of the atomic world, latching on to many other atoms (including itself) and holding tight, forming molecular conga lines of hearty robustness – the very trick of nature necessary to build proteins and DNA. As Paul Davies has written: ‘If it wasn’t for carbon, life as we know it would be impossible31. Probably any sort of life would be impossible.’ Yet carbon is not all that plentiful even in us who so vitally depend on it. Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon32.fn3

Importance of carbon - proportion of carbon in human body

thermometers for a long time proved more difficult to make than you might expect. An accurate reading was dependent on getting a very even bore in a glass tube, and that wasn’t easy to do. The first person to solve the problem was Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a Dutch maker of instruments, who produced an accurate thermometer in 1717. However, for reasons unknown he calibrated the instrument in a way that put freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees. From the outset this numeric eccentricity bothered some people and in 1742 Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, came up with a competing scale. In proof of the proposition that inventors seldom get matters entirely right, Celsius made boiling point zero and freezing point 10021 on his scale, but that was soon reversed.

Invention of Fahrenheit and Celsius scales - problem with thermometers

The person most frequently identified as the father of modern meteorology was an English pharmacist named Luke Howard, who came to prominence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Howard is chiefly remembered now for giving cloud types their names in 180322. Although he was an active and respected member of the Linnaean Society and employed Linnaean principles in his new scheme, Howard chose the rather more obscure Askesian Society as the forum in which to announce his new scheme of classification. (The Askesian Society, you may just recall from an earlier chapter, was the body whose members were unusually devoted to the pleasures of nitrous oxide, so we can only hope they treated Howard’s presentation with the sober attention it deserved. It is a point on which Howard scholars are curiously silent.) Howard divided clouds into three groups: stratus for the layered clouds, cumulus for the fluffy ones (the word means heaped in Latin) and cirrus (meaning curled) for the high, thin feathery formations that generally presage colder weather. To these he subsequently added a fourth term, nimbus (from the Latin for cloud), for a rain cloud. The beauty of Howard’s system was that the basic components could be freely recombined to describe every shape and size of passing cloud – stratocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulonimbus, and so on. It was an immediate hit, and not just in England. Goethe was so taken with the system that he dedicated four poems to Howard.

Luke Howard - Father of mordern Meteorology - Elementary classification of clouds into 4 basic shapes

the first, much thinner edition of that atlas, produced in 1896, divided clouds into ten basic types, of which the plumpest and most cushiony-looking was number nine, cumulonimbus.fn1 That seems to have been the source of the expression ‘to be on cloud nine24’.

Source of phrase "To be on 9th cloud"

The seas do one other great favour for us. They soak up tremendous volumes of carbon and provide a means for it to be safely locked away. One of the oddities of our solar system is that the Sun burns about 25 per cent more brightly now than when the solar system was young. This should have resulted in a much warmer Earth. Indeed, as the English geologist Aubrey Manning has put it, ‘This colossal change should have had an absolutely catastrophic effect on the Earth and yet it appears that our world has hardly been affected.’ So what keeps the planet stable and cool? Life does. Trillions upon trillions of tiny marine organisms that most of us have never heard of – foraminiferans and coccoliths and calcareous algae – capture atmospheric carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, when it falls as rain and use it (in combination with other things) to make their tiny shells. By locking the carbon up in their shells, they keep it from being re-evaporated into the atmosphere where it would build up dangerously as a greenhouse gas. Eventually all the tiny foraminiferans and coccoliths and so on die and fall to the bottom of the sea, where they are compressed into limestone. It is remarkable, when you behold an extraordinary natural feature like the White Cliffs of Dover in England, to reflect that it is made up almost entirely of tiny deceased marine organisms, but even more remarkable when you realize how much carbon they cumulatively sequester. A six-inch cube of Dover chalk will con...

Role of oceans in absorbing carbon

Most liquids when chilled contract by about 10 per cent. Water does too, but only down to a point. Once it is within whispering distance of freezing, it begins – perversely, beguilingly, extremely improbably – to expand. By the time it is solid, it is almost a tenth more voluminous than it was before4. Because it expands, ice floats on water – ‘an utterly bizarre property5’, according to John Gribbin. If it lacked this splendid waywardness, ice would sink, and lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up. Without surface ice to hold heat in, the water’s warmth would radiate away, leaving it even chillier and creating yet more ice. Soon even the oceans would freeze and almost certainly stay that way for a very long time, probably for ever – hardly the conditions to nurture life. Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics.

Inmportance of expansion of water at low temperature

A typical litre of sea water will contain only about 2.5 teaspoons of common salt9 – the kind we sprinkle on food – but much larger amounts of other elements, compounds and other dissolved solids, which are collectively known as salts. The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water – we sweat and cry sea water10, as Margulis and Sagan have put it – but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input. Take a lot of salt into your body and your metabolism very quickly goes into crisis. From every cell, water molecules rush off like so many volunteer firemen to try to dilute and carry off the sudden intake of salt. This leaves the cells dangerously short of the water they need to carry out their normal functions. They become, in a word, dehydrated. In extreme situations, dehydration will lead to seizures, unconsciousness and brain damage. Meanwhile, the overworked blood cells carry the salt to the kidneys, which eventually become overwhelmed and shut down. Without functioning kidneys you die. That is why we don’t drink sea water.

Why sea water not potable - risk of excessive salt intake

A typical litre of sea water will contain only about 2.5 teaspoons of common salt9 – the kind we sprinkle on food – but much larger amounts of other elements, compounds and other dissolved solids, which are collectively known as salts. The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water – we sweat and cry sea water10, as Margulis and Sagan have put it – but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input. Take a lot of salt into your body and your metabolism very quickly goes into crisis. From every cell, water molecules rush off like so many volunteer firemen to try to dilute and carry off the sudden intake of salt. This leaves the cells dangerously short of the water they need to carry out their normal functions. They become, in a word, dehydrated. In extreme situations, dehydration will lead to seizures, unconsciousness and brain damage. Meanwhile, the overworked blood cells carry the salt to the kidneys, which eventually become overwhelmed and shut down. Without functioning kidneys you die. That is why we don’t drink sea water.

Why sea water not potable - risk of excessive salt intake in human body

The first really organized investigation of the seas didn’t come until 1872, when a joint expedition set up by the British Museum, the Royal Society and the British government set forth from Portsmouth on a former warship called HMS Challenger. For three and a half years they sailed the world, sampling waters, netting fish and hauling a dredge through sediments. It was evidently dreary work. Out of a complement of 240 scientists and crew, one in four jumped ship and eight more died or went mad – ‘driven to distraction by the mind-numbing routine of years of dredging18’, in the words of the historian Samantha Weinberg. But they sailed across almost 70,000 nautical miles of sea19, collected over 4,700 new species of marine organisms, gathered enough information to create a fifty-volume report (which took nineteen years to put together), and gave the world the name of a new scientific discipline: oceanography.

Beginning Of oceanography

When underwater researchers realized that the Navy had no intention of pursuing a promised exploration programme, there was a pained outcry. Partly to placate its critics, the Navy provided funding for a more advanced submersible, to be operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of Massachusetts. Called Alvin, in somewhat contracted honour of the oceanographer Allyn C. Vine, it would be a fully manoeuvrable mini-submarine, though it wouldn’t go anywhere near as deep as Trieste. There was just one problem26: the designers couldn’t find anyone willing to build it. According to William J. Broad in The Universe Below: ‘No big company like General Dynamics, which made submarines for the Navy, wanted to take on a project disparaged by both the Bureau of Ships and Admiral Rickover, the gods of naval patronage.’ Eventually, not to say improbably, Alvin was constructed by General Mills, the food company, at a factory where it made the machines to produce breakfast cereals. As for what else was down there, people really had very little idea. Well into the 1950s, the best maps available to oceanographers were overwhelmingly based on a little detail from scattered surveys going back to 1929 grafted onto, essentially, an ocean of guesswork. The US Navy had excellent charts with which to guide submarines through canyons and around guyots, but it didn’t wish such information to fall into Soviet hands, so it kept its knowledge classified. Academics therefore had to make do with ...

Alvin - story of submarine made specifically for deep sea research

in 1977, one of the most important and startling biological discoveries of the twentieth century. In that year Alvin found teeming colonies of large organisms living on and around deep-sea vents off the Galápagos Islands – tube worms over 3 metres long, clams 30 centimetres wide, shrimps and mussels in profusion29, wriggling spaghetti worms. They all owed their existence to vast colonies of bacteria that were deriving their energy and sustenance from hydrogen sulphides – compounds profoundly toxic to surface creatures – that were pouring steadily from the vents. It was a world independent of sunlight, oxygen or anything else normally associated with life. This was a living system based not on photosynthesis but on chemosynthesis, an arrangement that biologists would have dismissed as preposterous had anyone been imaginative enough to suggest it. Huge amounts of heat and energy are released by these vents. Two dozen of them together will produce as much energy as a large power station and the range of temperatures around them is enormous. The temperature at the point of outflow can be as much as 400 degrees Celsius, while a couple of metres away the water may be only two or three degrees above freezing. A type of worm called alvinellids were found living right on the margins, with the water temperature 78 degrees Celsius warmer at their heads than at their tails. Before this it had been thought that no complex organisms could survive in water warmer than about 54 degrees Ce...

Life in deep ocean -without oxygen and sunlight - in very hot water

Since 1946, the United States had been ferrying 55-gallon drums of radioactive gunk out to the Fallarone Islands, some 50 kilometres off the California coast near San Francisco, where it simply threw them overboard. It was all quite extraordinarily sloppy. Most of the drums were exactly the sort you see rusting behind petrol stations or standing outside factories, with no protective linings of any type. When they failed to sink, which was usually, navy gunners riddled them with bullets to let water in34 (and, of course, plutonium, uranium and strontium out). Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites – almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone. But the United States was by no means alone. Among the other enthusiastic dumpers were Russia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and nearly all the nations of Europe.

Exmple of dumping radioactive waste in seas

the great blue whale, a creature of such leviathan proportions that (to quote David Attenborough) its ‘tongue weighs as much as an elephant, its heart is the size of a car and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them’. It is the most gargantuan beast the Earth has yet produced, bigger even than the most cumbrous dinosaurs. Yet the lives of blue whales are largely a mystery to us. Much of the time we have no idea where they are – where they go to breed, for instance, or what routes they follow to get there. What little we know of them comes almost entirely from eavesdropping on their songs, but even these are a mystery. Blue whales will sometimes break off a song, then pick it up again at exactly the same spot six months later35. Sometimes they strike up with a new song, which no member can have heard before but which each already knows. How they do this and why are not remotely understood. And these are animals that must routinely come to the surface to breathe.

Blue whales - Songs sung by whales

Consider our knowledge of the fabled giant squid36. Though nothing on the scale of the blue whale, it is a decidedly substantial animal, with eyes the size of soccer balls and trailing tentacles that can reach lengths of 18 metres. It weighs nearly a tonne and is Earth’s largest invertebrate. If you dumped one in a small swimming pool, there wouldn’t be much room for anything else. Yet no scientist – no person, as far as we know – has ever seen a giant squid alive. Zoologists have devoted careers to trying to capture, or just glimpse, living giant squid and have always failed. They are known mostly from being washed up on beaches – particularly, for unknown reasons, the beaches of the South Island of New Zealand. They must exist in large numbers because they form a central part of the sperm whale’s diet, and sperm whales take a lot of feeding.

Mysterious Giant Squid

Crab-eater seals are not a species of animal that most of us have heard of, but they may actually be the second most numerous large species of animal on Earth, after humans. As many as 15 million of them may live on the pack ice around Antarctica.

Crab eating sels - 2nd largest animal species on earth after humans

The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales’ stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes.

Whales and squid parts usage in perfumes

In 1953 Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, took two flasks – one containing a little water to represent a primeval ocean, the other holding a mixture of methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide gases to represent the Earth’s early atmosphere – connected them with rubber tubes and introduced some electrical sparks as a stand-in for lightning. After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids1, fatty acids, sugars and other organic compounds. ‘If God didn’t do it this way,’ observed Miller’s delighted supervisor, the Nobel laureate Harold Urey, ‘He missed a good bet.’ Press reports of the time made it sound as if about all that was needed now was for somebody to give the flasks a good shake and life would crawl out. As time has shown, it wasn’t nearly so simple. Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953 – and much further away from thinking we can. Scientists are now pretty certain that the early atmosphere was nothing like as primed for development as Miller and Urey’s gaseous stew, but rather was a much less reactive blend of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Repeating Miller’s experiments with these more challenging inputs has so far produced only one fairly primitive amino acid2. At all events, creating amino acids is not really the problem. The problem is proteins.

Early attempt of producing life in lab

Proteins are what you get when you string amino acids together, and we need a lot of them. No-one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body3, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids (which I am obliged by long tradition to refer to here as ‘the building blocks of life’) in a particular order, in much the same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word. The problem is that words in the amino-acid alphabet are often exceedingly long. To spell ‘collagen’, the name of a common type of protein, you need to arrange eight letters in the right order. To make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence. But – and here’s an obvious but crucial point – you don’t make it. It makes itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihoods come in. The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.

Life's raw material - Proteins - complexity and unlikeliness of natural creation of proteins

To be of use, a protein must not only assemble amino acids in the right sequence, it must then engage in a kind of chemical origami and fold itself into a very specific shape. Even having achieved this structural complexity, a protein is no good to you if it can’t reproduce itself, and proteins can’t. For this you need DNA. DNA is a whiz at replicating – it can make a copy of itself in seconds6 – but can do virtually nothing else. So we have a paradoxical situation. Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow.

Life's raw material - DNA - Protein multiplier