Waters of the World: the story of the scientists who unravelled the mysteries of our seas, glaciers, and atmosphere — and made the planet whole

WATERS OF THE WORLD

SARAH DRY has been studying the history of meteorology and climate for more than ten years. Her previous books include a biography of Marie Curie (2004) and The Newton Papers (2013). Born and raised in Philadelphia, she worked in environmental journalism, academic publishing, and biotechnology before moving to London in 2001 to study the history of science. She lives in Oxford with her family, and is on the board of the Science Museum.

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in loving memory of Shirley Dry (1918–2014)

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for Rob and Jacob

CONTENTS

1 Introduction

2 Hot Ice

3 See-Through Clouds

4 Number of the Monsoon

5 Hot Towers

6 Fast Water

7 Old Ice

8 Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliographic Essay

1

INTRODUCTION

History can be cruel. Today, John Tyndall’s grave in a quiet Surrey cemetery lies unremarked and his books largely unread. During his lifetime, he was a famous and famously controversial scientist who argued that nothing more and nothing less than molecules in motion could explain the deepest mysteries, from human consciousness to the origins of the universe. A gifted communicator, his lectures were standing room only. His books, merging physics and adventure, sold abundantly. He dined with the good and the great, among them Thomas Carlyle and Lord Tennyson.

Despite all this fame, the man whose passionate intensity fanned the fires of Victorian science is today almost forgotten. While the flame of his memory has flickered low, it has not been extinguished. In fact, in the past ten years Tyndall has begun to emerge from more than a century of near-obscurity. Thanks to work he completed in his laboratory in the late 1850s and early 1860s, on what he called the absorption of heat by water vapor and what we today call the greenhouse effect, Tyndall has gained newfound recognition as a so-called father of climate science. A handful of articles have appeared describing his discovery. A climate change research center at the University of East Anglia has been named after him, a major academic project is underway to edit his prodigious correspondence, and the first new biography of him to appear in more than sixty-five years has just been published. ¹

Tyndall has only recently resurfaced because the science of which he is being hailed as a progenitor is (somewhat paradoxically) itself so new. Little more than sixty years ago, climate was usually thought of as something that remained stable over time. Climatology was primarily a geographical science. Different places were understood to have different climates, and the job of the climatologist was to study not how those climates changed but what rendered certain regions distinctive. Their tools were descriptive and taxonomical rather than physical or mathematical. Climate science as a science of change rather than continuity (and distinguished from its older form, climatology, by the change of name) only emerged in the postwar period. When it did, it was the product of a blending of several distinct scientific disciplines. The journal Climatic Change was founded in 1977 with an editorial that made it clear that this was a science that existed almost defiantly between disciplines. Meteorology, anthropology, medicine, agricultural science, economics, and ecology were all encouraged to participate, though in fact the new interdisciplinary science centered around the physical sciences of the earth: oceanography, atmospheric physics, and glaciology, in addition to meteorology, with the important addition of the nascent field of computer science. ² Before this interdisciplinary synthesis, the notion of climate change was an oxymoron.

The modern field of climate science, then, provides us with a challenge. How to tell the history of a new and self-consciously interdisciplinary discipline? Tyndall’s increasing visibility as a father of global warming—alongside that of other progenitors such as Svante Arrhenius, Guy Callendar, and Charles Keeling—reveals a growing self-awareness on the part of climate scientists that history can be a tool to render this discipline more coherent. In these prehistories of climate science, success rather than failure is emphasized and crucial discovery milestones occur with reassuring regularity, like signposts on a journey to a known destination. Ideas tend to beget ideas, free of the complications of politics, economics, or nationalism. Histories told by scientists tend to be rose-tinted, but given the interdisciplinary origins of climate science, there is a perhaps even greater temptation than usual to pick and choose the moments, and in particular the discoveries, which make the most sense of the past, which generate a pleasingly direct line from the past to the present. Tyndall’s modest re-emergence is part of a larger attempt by climate scientists to tell a singular history of a heterogeneous science.

The desire to draw straight lines through history is understandable, but these lines are almost inevitably misleading. John Tyndall was not the father of global warming in any meaningful sense. Though he helped confirm the special ability of water vapor and carbon dioxide to absorb heat as it radiated from the earth’s surface, he never imagined that human beings might alter the climate on a planetary or even a regional scale. He was unconcerned about the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning coal. Nor did his research prompt his contemporaries to make their own research into human effects on climate. Nor, indeed, was Tyndall strictly speaking the first person to publish on the topic. An American woman named Eunice Foote beat him to it by three years. A milestone approach to telling the history of climate science misrepresents the complexity of its deeper history. Sometimes the result is to overemphasize the influence of a particular figure. More often, people and ideas that do not seem congruent with current scientific thinking drop out of this kind of history. The result is an impoverished understanding of the past as well as the present.

Tyndall did indeed help lay the groundwork for our contemporary understanding of the planet, and he more than merits a revival in the popular and scientific imagination, but he achieved his influence in more complex and contentious ways than the story of a singular discovery of greenhouse warming captures. What Tyndall achieved was to help change what it meant to study the earth. He did so in a passionately physical way—putting his body in danger and relying on his manic tendencies to enable him to focus on a problem to the exclusion of all else.

He used his physical energy to pioneer new ways to witness and to understand (the two always went together) the wonder of nature: its continuity. No substance better exemplified this continuity for Tyndall than water, a material he studied in all its manifestations with commitment verging on evangelical passion. Every occurrence in Nature is preceded by other occurrences which are its causes, and succeeded by others which are its effects, he began his bestselling book on The Forms of Water. The human mind is not satisfied with observing and studying any natural occurrence alone, but takes pleasure in connecting every natural fact with what has gone before it, and with what is to come after it. Tyndall invited his reader to join him in tracing a river to its source, to follow it beyond its many tributaries and up into the atmosphere itself, from which it had fallen as rain. To produce that rain, Tyndall continued, water vapor must have been evaporated, via the action of heat, from the ocean into the atmosphere. This landed him at the ultimate source of all movement on earth. Is there any fire in nature which produces the clouds of our atmosphere? Tyndall asked rhetorically, before answering triumphantly that by tracing backward, without any break in the chain of occurrences, our river from its end to its real beginnings, we come at length to the sun. ³

And here, with the sun’s heat, we arrive at the deeper value in studying water. Constantly transmuted by the energy of the sun, water provides the mechanism by which energy flows through the landscape. In his insistence on continuity, made gloriously manifest in the substance of water, John Tyndall offered his own, Victorian version of interdisciplinarity—a way of thinking across scales of time and place as well as linking what were, even in the nineteenth century, the increasingly divided spheres of the arts and sciences. As such, he provides a window onto what it meant to study the earth and what we have come to call its climate long before a science of such matters existed, much less anyone had imagined we might perturb the global climate. Tyndall is a gateway into another way of understanding the history of climate science. His passionate engagement with water as a medium for studying what he called the continuity of nature inspired this book. But rather than revealing the wonder of nature alone, I hope to introduce a wonder of the human sort.

In this book, water traces not the flow of energy but the flow of human activity and thought, from the work of Tyndall and his contemporaries to those scientists who helped shape the earth sciences in the twentieth century. This brings the science alive and it also helps solve the conundrum of how to tell a history of climate science that is faithful to its multidisciplinary nature. Climate science clearly has implications that extend far beyond the boundaries of science itself. So, too, the history of how we’ve come to understand the planet should matter not just to climate scientists but to all of us. In the life and work of scientists from the past lies the opportunity to understand the origins of our own way of seeing the world.

We are currently engaged in a global effort to understand simultaneously how our planet works and how we have affected and continue to affect it. Some of the tools we use to do so currently go by the name of climate science. This book proposes to tell the stories of a few key individuals in the history of the sciences of water in order to illuminate the broader history of human understandings of the planet over the past 150 years. In doing so, I hope to reveal not only continuities but discontinuities between the present and the past. We are inheritors of both more and less than we know.

* * *

It is now quite easy to see how human beings have made their mark on even the most remote places on Earth. Floating islands of plastic blight the remote ocean. Trash litters distant Alaskan coasts. The invisible rising presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is everywhere. Ice sheets are, as the Danish ice-core scientist Willi Dansgaard memorably called them, the ultimate frozen annals, recording enormous spans of time in their compressed layers of ice, trapping past atmospheres, dust storms, and volcanic eruptions. These icy archives are just one of the records from the past that we have learned how to read. Lake and ocean sediment, underground stalactites, and tree rings also preserve the history of the earth, and of human presence on it. They tell stories of increasing human impact, as well as older histories that predate us.

These records are important and have much to tell us about the past, and, because they help us generate the climate records against which our models can be checked, they enable us to try to peer into the future as best we can. As important as these material records are, there are other records of the past that are equally important in helping us understand our climate today but which remain largely inaccessible and underutilized despite the urgent need to understand climate as comprehensively as possible. These are not the physical traces of past climate but the imaginative traces of past understandings of climate. Our imaginations have shaped our understanding of the planet, and our scientific imaginations have shaped our understanding in particularly crucial ways. In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama writes that even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product. ⁴ We can tell this is true because our attitudes toward landscape change over time. Mountains, once considered horrific, have come to be seen as paradigmatically beautiful. The first settlers in the Americas experienced the landscape as an empty and desolate wilderness, both spiritually and materially vacuous. Today we might call such a landscape magnificent and full of life. Each of us responds to the landscape around us according to the cultural habits we’ve acquired without noticing. We each have our own taste, a preference for coastline or valley, cityscape or farmland, but these individual differences play out across a backdrop of shared attitudes that change only gradually over time (though they may vary quite dramatically across different cultures).

I would add to Schama’s elegant formulation that it is especially those landscapes that seem to be most free of our culture that show its influence. The imaginative understanding of wild spaces that in the West are perceived as lacking human interference have much to teach us. Prime among these are places such as the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the depths of the ocean, and the icy heart of a two-mile-thick ice sheet. Scientific culture works like any other culture to break down and materially change the substrate upon which it lands. This can be seen as a positive outcome: the discovery of order in a place of apparent chaos. It is also possible to see not clarity but distortion at the interface between science and the natural world. We see what we want to see, in other words. More strongly still, we might say that in the act of observing, we change the thing being observed. A glacier is affected only slightly by the presence of people upon it, but their study of glacier motion, their passion for knowing the way the glacier moves in terms of inches per unit of time, obscures and elides countless other ways of knowing the glacier—as an object of beauty, of terror, of passage (as it was to the locals), of uselessness, of unpredictable destruction (in the form of crevasses, avalanches, and dams bursting). By suggesting that truth can be found in the science of glacier motion, for example, Tyndall and his contemporaries also contributed to the idea that some truths about glaciers—for example, how quickly they move—are truer than others. It is a poignant irony that Tyndall himself was such a passionate advocate for the emotional truths to be found atop glaciers, since he played such a central role in transforming them into sources of merely physical truths.

There are many ways of going about the task of uncovering the imaginative assumptions that we make about remote places. Historians of these cultural attitudes rely upon a variety of texts to draw them out. Literature is a good source for finding reflections, echoes, and elaborations of such cultural themes. So are painting, photography, and drama, arts that both reflect and enhance the assumptions of the culture from which they emerge. Scientific writings were also once good sources for charting the shifts in how people have felt about the natural world. Until the late nineteenth century, most scientists wrote books for everyone to read; by rereading those books now, we can see what kind of public knowledge there was at the time and, by working a bit harder in the archives, we can try to get a sense of who read these books and what they thought of them.

More recently, most scientists stopped writing for a general public. Instead of writing articles in popular magazines, they began to publish technical articles for their scientific peers in expensive and hard-to-access scientific journals. Where scientists might once have shared a long narrative about the process of gaining new insights—say the expedition to study the motion of glaciers, or a voyage to South America—those stories have been largely removed from modern scientific papers, reduced to the terse terms of the Methods section. That is, at least, what happens in public. In private, stories of suffering and triumph in the field circulate still, at conferences, via email, and over cups of tea and pints of beer. The desire to share experiences, to brag, and to caution is not going to fade away anytime soon. The difference is that it is harder for the public to eavesdrop on them.

In an attempt to redress this loss of access into the experience of science, what follows are stories of scientists doing science. They are not stories of made-up things, or purely imagined or projected understandings of the earth. They are the stories that reveal hard-earned skills in observation, measurement, calculation, and description, and the careful construction and skillful deployment of instruments that are made useful through a combination of discipline, training, and social convention.

* * *

The transformation of a scattered array of fact, theory, observation, and experiment into something that can be called global knowledge is an example of the necessary sleight of hand that animates all science whereby certain bits of understanding—a key experiment, a set of measurements that underlie a mathematical abstraction—are taken to justify insights into the behavior of nature everywhere. But it is especially important in the case of the planet, which is, after all, a singular unit, the only one of its kind, which we have come to think of as self-evidently whole. It is one job of this book to show that the self-evidence of that wholeness is a very hard-won result, the outcome of the work of many scientists working at many different locations at many different times.

If much gets put into global knowledge, it is equally important to remember how much gets left out. Just because we are all on this planet together does not mean that each voice can speak equally loudly. That is obvious in the realm of politics, but it is less obvious when it comes to telling the histories of science, where the story of creating global knowledge is often taken for granted as a story of unmitigated progress. This narrative of progress is, to a greater or lesser extent, the melody by which all histories of science tend to get sung. Science is understood, fundamentally, as a progressive human endeavor. And in some senses it is. But in other senses, it is equally a process of elision, excision, and exclusion.

Big ideas are often invisible, so influential that we can no longer imagine looking at the world in any other way. We think we are simply seeing things the way they are. The idea of the earth as a global system of interconnected parts is a case in point. It is so basic that even those who still question the reality of anthropogenic climate change share it. The idea that there is a global climate is rarely a topic of debate (though when you start to think about this, it is hard to say what—or, more to the point, where—such a climate might be). The debate has hinged instead on whether the global temperature is rising or falling, or, as the rise becomes increasingly hard to deny, what the future will look like. The idea that there is a climate system, a set of natural features that are interrelated and function at the global scale—well, that has come to seem obvious.

What is the history of this obvious fact? Many point to the famous Blue Marble images taken aboard the 1972 Apollo 17 NASA mission, images that gave us our first glimpse of the planet as a whole. Seeing Earth like this, the story goes, was a revelation. We grasped, finally and instantly, the fragility, the uniqueness, and the interconnectedness of everything on the planet. The vision of the dazzling Earth rising above the barren surface of the moon did give a big boost to the burgeoning environmental movement. But we were already primed to see Earth that way. The space race was more a product of the previous successes of a global vision of the planet than it was a producer of it. Long before Sputnik and the Apollo missions, scientists had helped craft a vision of Earth as a globally connected object out of countless investigations into the physical complexity of our planet. ⁵

Gaining a better grip on the breadth of knowledge that constitutes climate science today is essential for understanding what we know and what we don’t know. The tendency to judge climate science by its predictive abilities has serious consequences for how we make decisions, as citizens and nations, in the face of uncertainty about the future. Our contemporary expectation that climate science can and should make predictions about the future indicates the long shadow of that old pattern science, astronomy, still extending over us today. But within what is too often monolithically referred to as climate science, there are many different methods for generating knowledge. These methods are sometimes called subdisciplines. For the story of global climate knowledge, they include geology, climatology, meteorology, atmospheric physics, glaciology, and computer science. In order to understand how our knowledge of the planet has come to feel global, we need to understand how these disciplines within the larger body of science have come to seem interrelated. The history of our knowledge of the planet is necessarily the history of the disciplines (and all their associated practices, pedagogies, instruments, techniques, and social structures) that have generated that knowledge. To create a singular global climate, in other words, it was necessary to forge a unified climate discipline out of many parts in just the same way that it was necessary to find ways to bring what had previously been disparate pieces of knowledge—of this place, say, or this type of object—together.

To understand the nature of climate science (understood broadly) requires going back to the particulars out of which it has been generated. This means places and people. My previous two books are biographies (one about Marie Curie, the other about Isaac Newton’s manuscripts), and my instincts are biographical. So that is what I have chosen to do here. People, not water, are the true subjects of this book. These people are scientists. The oldest of them was born in 1819. The youngest was born in 1923. I watch the planet with their eyes, take a journey through the past with them as companions and investigators, as explainers and exclaimers. This investigation of watery things is, then, very much a grounded one, planted firmly in the personal experiences of a remarkable group of thinkers.

I begin in the 1850s with the first attempts to measure changes in climate and weather simultaneously and at a global scale—the beginning of both modern weather forecasting and climate science. It is here that I also trace pioneering studies into the importance of the atmosphere in regulating the climate—at a time when no one dreamed that human beings might affect the temperature of the earth as a whole. Yet this was also the time when the new science of thermodynamics seemed set to crack open untold mysteries not only of the earth but of the entire universe. New equations could explain the behavior of molecules statistically. It remained to be seen whether these equations could also explain the movement of molecules in the real world of glaciers, clouds, and water vapor.

In the 1850s, it was glaciers that threw up the biggest challenge of all to scientists hoping to explain their motions, and, by extension, the past and future of the earth’s climate. Although the ice ages are now a taken-for-granted fact, they once seemed both real and inexplicable, a puzzle of mind-boggling extremes to be solved on a global scale. John Tyndall sought answers to these deep questions of time, movement, and decay surrounded by the deadly, searing beauty of Alpine mountain glaciers and, on his return to London, in the confines of his basement laboratory. His findings on how heat acts on ice and water vapor reveal an obsession with energy, with dissipation, and with the past and future of the planet.

In 1856, Charles Piazzi Smyth, a Scottish astronomer and scientific traveler, tried initially to subtract, or to erase, the presence of water vapor from his astronomical researches atop a high volcanic peak in Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands. Later, he hoped that the study of water vapor with a powerful and highly portable new instrument could help make weather prediction safer, more respectable, and possibly even successful. He failed in that endeavor, and tarnished his reputation with a passionate defense of the idea that the British measurement system had been divinely inscribed in the Egyptian pyramids. Finding himself outside the scientific establishment, he sought solace in a peculiar blending of religious and scientific witness, a photographic cloud atlas he attempted to assemble alone, in his final years as an isolated, embittered, but always reverential scientific pilgrim.

Both Tyndall and Piazzi Smyth strained to contribute to a predictive science that could account precisely for the actions of water—of the movement of glaciers, of the action of water vapor, of the formation of clouds and the falling of rain—and both welcomed the feeling of mystery and wonder that accompanied their investigations even as they attempted to describe the world dispassionately. These men experienced the inherent contradiction of these two positions with a passionate, even visceral intensity. Their stories capture the torment this Victorian generation experienced as they attempted to reconcile science’s potential to reveal the hidden structures beneath the wild confusions of the earth’s environment with the loss that might accompany such revelation. Would the gain in understanding compensate for the forfeit of mystery? In many ways, Tyndall and Piazzi Smyth were members of the last generation of scientists for whom such an existential struggle had an acceptable public face. They published books that invited general readers to feel their fear, wonder, and awe as they encountered sublime phenomena such as cloud forms and majestic glaciers. And then they tried to reduce these phenomena to numbers, equations, and theories that could not merely explain but also predict the most intimate details of what had previously been, almost by definition, ineffable.

The story of Gilbert Walker, a preternaturally talented English mathematician, provides a transition between the nineteenth century, when individuals could still express scientific ideas in books for the general public, and the twentieth century, when dry scientific papers replaced the dramatic travel narratives written by men like Piazzi Smyth and Tyndall. When Walker became director of meteorological observatories in India, many believed that the key to unlocking the secrets of the monsoon rainfall, upon which millions depended (and still depend) to sustain their crops, lay in the cycles of spots on the sun. Walker’s statistical inquiries, made possible by the access to weather data gathered via imperial networks and by the hard work of local calculators employed by the British government, destroyed the cherished hopes of the sunspot theorists. In place of the congruent, or coherent, harmonies of sun and Earth, Walker offered a statistical discovery of amazing scope. His calculations indicated a connection (actually a tele-connection) between the monsoons in India and pressure and temperature halfway around the world. Walker named the phenomena of linked meteorological phenomena world weather, and, more specifically, the one affecting India he called the Southern Oscillation. Unlike Tyndall, who was committed to demonstrating the links between physical phenomena, Walker’s scientific insights were purely statistical. He could not explain how pressure in the west Pacific affected rainfall in the Indian Ocean; he could only say that it did. (In fact, it was another forty years before the physical links that drove the Southern Oscillation could be explained.)

A golden age of physical oceanography and meteorology was initiated by a bolus of funding and urgent practical need for information about air and water during World War II. It continued in the Cold War for decades thereafter. This was a time of big pictures built on remarkably simple models, characterized both by new kinds of international cooperation and by the tensions of realpolitik. Henry Stommel was a young man in 1948 when he published a paper explaining why every ocean basin in the world has a fast-running current on its western side. His fruitful thinking led the way for a new generation of oceanographers who showed that the ocean was moving in a much more complex and energetic way—on a multiplicity of time and spatial scales—than previous generations had imagined. In so doing, Stommel set the stage for an ocean characterized largely by its turbulence rather than its stability and a new way of doing experiments in the ocean that required large-scale and long-term cooperation, something Stommel himself intensely disliked. At roughly the same time, Joanne Simpson investigated how the relatively small-scale dynamics of clouds could drive atmospheric—and oceanic—circulation on planetary scales. She also sought new ways to do science—using instrumented aircraft and canny cooperation with government agencies to experiment on clouds, and even hurricanes, by seeding them. This work on weather and climate modification took place against a backdrop of anxiety about the threat of attack from the Soviet Union. These water stories show how a connected Earth can be a vision of war just as much as of peace.

Individual scientists were both pawns and hustlers in this worldwide game of scientific chess. When the Danish physicist and meteorologist Willi Dansgaard realized that the new mass spectrometer he had access to could be used to sort water molecules by weight, he was following his own private intuition. But to follow his insight to its fullest conclusion, he had to convince the largest and most powerful national and international scientific (and sometimes military) agencies to give him access to technologies he would never otherwise be able to afford. The story of ice cores and the history of past temperatures (or palaeothermometry) is a story of individual cleverness, tenacity, and diplomacy played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. Dansgaard’s contribution helped change our understanding of past climate and laid the foundation for the first glimmerings of what would become our contemporary awareness of global climate change. But, as I show, the assumption that one part of the planet—in this case, the northern Greenland ice sheet—could umproblematically speak on behalf of the whole turned out to be, in important particulars, inaccurate. The idea of global changes captured in ancient ice turned out to be more important than the facts recorded in those cores.

For all the triumphs these scientists enjoyed, their stories are also threaded with loss. The loss is often personal—one scientist cannot make human relationships work, another suffers a crippling nervous breakdown—but it is also existential. Global knowledge of the kind these scientists create has often been prompted by questions about changing conditions on the earth. New knowledge also prompts new questions about our relationship with what we know, how we know it, and how we should feel about that knowledge. The role of mystery, ignorance, and wonder in the pursuit of science and the implementation of its findings remains as important as ever, though we have lost the Victorians’ readiness to acknowledge this fact. In its attention to the role of sentiment, awe, and longing, this book is as much a history of emotion as it is a history of science.

While we are today preoccupied with our own anxiety about the effects of human-induced climate change,