IMMISCIBLE EVIDENCE – Wonders of the Air/Water Interface

Two elements: air and water. At first glance, they seem about as different as they could be. They’re entirely different states of matter, after all. Even so, consider the surprising number of similarities:

     • They’re both classical elements—those believed by ancient Greek, Indian and 
        other cultures to constitute all matter in the universe.

PHOTO: CK-12.org

     • Neither has a fixed shape.
     • Both flow.
     • Both are subject to gravity.* 
     • Each is rendered visible just by the stuff 
        it carries, and by certain kinds of light.
     • Both are vital for life.
     • Each infuses the other.** 
     • Both suffocate denizens of the other.
     • Both refract light.***
     • Both acquire new properties when heat-
        ed or cooled—including changing state.****
     • Each, unless contained, spreads to fill whatever space gravity compels it to.
     • Both are harmed by abuse from the only creature capable of destroying them.   
          The fascination comes down 
          to part science, part magic.

So…if water and air are so similar, why is the interface between them—think the surfaces of lakes, streams or oceans, of raindrops, of the glass of water on my desk—so complex, so fascinating?

A decent answer would require volumes. But, at least to this inexpert witness to wonder, it comes down to part science, part magic. 

ILLUSTRATION: ConceptVis.app

THE SCIENCE
The first and perhaps most obvious impact of this air/water junction is their interaction’s generation of weather and climate. You know, evaporation, conden-
sation, precipitation…and repeat. But there’s more 
than that going on.

Turns out the water cycle melds with a carbon cycle, which finds carbon dioxide at the water surface—defined as a one- to two-nanometer membrane—transforming into bicarbonate and carbonate ions. †

GRAPHIC: Journal of Physical Chemistry

Atmospheric scientists have also found that these ion-to-ion interactions become "stickier" near the air-water interface, resulting in proteins unfolding, aggregating, or assembling into significantly different structures. ††

The compendium of scientific findings continues with a list of mind-boggling processes like peptide synthesis, phosphorylation, oligomerization, colloid mobilization, protein unfolding or aggregation †††…I’ll spare you the rest.

     To unlock the mystical properties...it took 
     a ten-year-old with a cane fishing pole.

ILLUSTRATION: Norman Rockwell

THE MAGIC
It took lots of science and technology to discover those arcane properties. To unlock the mystical properties of the air-water interface, though, it 
took a ten-year-old with a cane fishing pole.

I’d throw an angleworm deep into the lake, this hidden, alien world, connected by a thin filament held between my fingers. Then I’d wait. If there was life down there in that cold, dark, liquid place, it eventually sent me a message through the fiber. 
If I was lucky I’d get to meet the sender. ‡

That cryptic contact seemed to me no less otherworldly than receiving a faint message from deep space.

PHOTO: Warner Brothers

     What other substance can…bathe an 
     infant’s head and carve the Grand Canyon?

ICEBERG IN MY COFFEE
As this insight might suggest, when it comes to air and water, I’m partial to water. For one thing, I spent nine months submerged in it just before I was a kid. 

For another, air seems almost too easy to take for granted—except, I suppose, when one’s flying…or suffocating. I mean which wakes you up faster, a cool breeze or a splash of cold H2O? 

I love the capricious relationship water has with other elements. With light, it can bend it like a prism, absorb it like a sponge or reflect it like a mirror. Percolating into soil, water provides the nectar of life for nearly 300,000 species of plants. 

ILLUSTRATION: FreePic

What other substance can both render a Winslow Homer masterpiece and torture a suspected terrorist? Transform itself into the exquisite intricacy of a snowflake and the Titanic mass of an iceberg? Bathe an infant’s head…and carve the Grand Canyon?

PHOTO: FreePic

While I realize the Law of Conservation of Matter holds for all the elements, I’m especially captivated by how it applies to water. For example, the possibility that a molecule of water melted from that iceberg that sank the Titanic might reside, for now, in the coffee I’m sipping.

THICK WATER
As with most of my musings here, digging up answers about the seam between water and air also uncovers more questions:

     • Is a splash caused by something falling into the water the obverse of that 
       caused by something like a fish jumping out? 
     • If water can vanish into thin air, could one say that air—also absorbable by 
       its counterpart vanishes into thick water?
     • Why does water as a mist cool us, while as humidity it makes us feel hotter?
     • When we refer to the surface of a lake, isn’t it just as true to call it the sur-
       face of the air above the lake?
     • Is the only difference between swimming and flying the speed at which you 
       can do it? 

IMAGE: Medium.com

When you let loose your child-like sense of wonder, what do you notice about air, water and their interaction? I and the couple of thousand people who stop by here every day would love to hear your thoughts! Just click on the “comments” link below.

* Because air has mass, it is attracted by Earth's gravity, which gives it weight and creates atmospheric pressure. Gravity keeps the atmosphere from drifting into space and pulls air towards the ground, making it denser at lower altitudes. 
Google AI Overview

** Air absorbs water vapor (humidity) from liquid water (evaporation), with warmer air holding much more, while water absorbs gases like oxygen from the air (dissolving), a process enhanced by surface area and turbulence, both crucial for the water cycle and aquatic life  –  Google AI

*** Air bends (refracts) light just as water does, though generally to a much lesser degree. Both media bend light due to changes in speed caused by density differences, a process called refraction. Air bends light significantly when there are sharp density changes, such as that of hot air above pavement (the cause of mirages). 

**** Air freezes solid, but only at –362 degrees Fahrenheit at standard atmospheric pressure. This, of course, is not possible in our planet’s natural conditions, but it’s commonly seen in scientific and industrial labs. – Google AI

† Jin Qian, Staff Scientist, Chemical Sciences Division, Berkeley Lab.

†† "The Promise and Intrigue of Where Water Meets Air" – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 
June 5, 2014

††† “Colloid mobilization and transport in groundwater”
Joseph N. Ryan and Menachen Elimelech – ScienceDirect.com

‡ Over the past few years, the wonder of communicating with fish has tarnished considerably as I’ve realized that those “cryptic” tugs and jumps, which since childhood have felt like fun, are no such thing for the fish. I now believe I have no right to enjoy the pain and terror of another of God’s creatures.

WHEN IT BLOWS IT SUCKS – The Winds of a Lifetime

Funny I should be working on a post about wind just as Harvey, one the US’s most destructive hurricanes on record slams into the Texas Gulf Coast. I’m in awe of storms like this; some slightly warped part of me wishes I could experience such awesome power first-hand—without, of course, suffering the consequences.

Come to think of it, I have indeed experienced some pretty amazing winds in my lifetime—some even topping Harvey’s 130-mile-per-hour best.

                                          ~/ - /~        ~/ - /~        ~/ - /~

To encourage my readers and the kids in their lives to appreciate the wonder of wind, I often suggest this little exercise: find a draft-free room, light a candle and place it in a corner. Then sit down on the floor five or six yards away and blow toward the candle.

You’ll wait a second or two as your breath, like a wave, rolls toward the flame and, if your aim’s any good, makes it flicker. It just shows how much like a liquid this magical, invisible, life-fueling substance we call air acts, ebbing, flowing, swirling, pouring into voids.

But that’s just a parlor trick. What about the real-life impact winds have on us?

STANDING ON PRESIDENTS
I once led a group of ten- and eleven-year-old boys on a climbing adventure in New Hampshire’s beautiful White Mountains. The goal: to summit a few of the “Presidentials,” a range of 5,000-plus-foot peaks named for U.S. presidents.

The culmination was scaling the legendary Mt. Washington. Now, at 6,288 feet, this upstart’s no Rainier or McKinley. But it does have its own claims to fame, including its prodigious winds.

Signs at the trailheads warn those unaware that climbers die on these slopes all the time, even in summer. That, in the course of the four or five hours it takes to get to the top, conditions can easily change from light, 85-degree summer breezes to a 40-degree November gale.

PHOTO: Erin Paul Donovan

In fact, when we reached the summit we could see that the only thing keeping some of the buildings from being blown away during the worst storms were the steel cables holding them down like a load on a flat-bed truck. This unassuming peak held the record, until 2010, for the highest straight-line wind velocity ever observed on earth: 231miles per hour.

The day my campers and I climbed Mt. Washington the winds only kicked up to about 50 miles per hour. But it was enough to require considerable effort—and a bit of inclination—to make any headway. It was enough to show those kids how powerful a force wind can be, as both ally and adversary.

PHOTO: Jose Azel / Getty Images

    The roof of the next-door apartment building, 
    complete with compressors and vent stacks, 
    lay across my lawn.

NOT IN KANSAS ANY MORE
The sultry afternoon of June 14, 1981, a tornado churned from southwest to northeast across the Twin Cities Metro, generating winds approaching 200 miles per hour. I’d been repairing a window frame on the second floor of my South Minneapolis home when I first noticed the warning signs: an eerie calm and dark, greenish skies. And then the rain and hail.

It was when I saw debris starting to swirl and heard that storied freight-train rumble that I knew. I grabbed my dog, a candle and matches, and the portable radio and headed for the basement. On the way down, I remember distinctly the feeling in my ears, like being inside a vacuum.

PHOTO: Ernie Melby

It was all over in about two minutes. Thank God, my house appeared to be intact, but when I stepped outside it was a different story. My garage listed to one side, most of its shingles sucked off. The flat, tar-and-gravel roof of the next-door apartment building, complete with compressors and vent stacks, lay across my lawn. Trees and power lines were down. And one corner of the old, solid stone church on the corner lay in ruins.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve had a fascination with tornadoes. And now I could say I’d been in one. Ironically, I have yet to actually see one.

    Even my trusty “water-resistant” Timex watch 
    proved no match for the pervasiveness of the 
    incredible blast.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY
My buddies and I had just begun what was supposed to be a simple, relaxing overnight paddle trip down the beautiful upper St. Croix River. Unfortunately, we got a late start, so by the time we’d loaded the canoes and pushed off the last glow of daylight was all but gone.

Feeling our way down the river in the dark, we bumped and scraped our way through a series of class-one rapids and began searching the shore with flashlights for a decent campsite. Fortunately, we spotted what looked like the ideal place on
a small, sandy island.

As we pitched camp and started working on dinner, the southwest sky flickered with lightning. Big deal, I thought; what are the chances it will come our way?

Well, come our way it did. We’d finished our late meal and were enjoying an after-dinner drink around the fire when it hit. The only shelter we had was our tents, which worked fine on the torrential rain, but were no match for the wind.

ILLUSTRATION: Encyclopaedia Britannica

In what meteorologists call a downburst,* our little islet was suddenly stomped
on by 50- to 60-mile-per-hour winds, which ripped out our tent stakes, bent the aluminum poles and drove water through both fly and tent. We had to yell to be heard over the wail of those winds and explosions of thunder.

Even worse, the monster stalled right over us, battering us for a good ten minutes—plenty of time to contemplate the very real danger of the trees all around us, anchored only in the loose sand, falling and crushing us, or suddenly conducting 100 million volts of electricity into us through their roots.

When it was over, the only things left supporting the saturated nylon were our cowering, shivering bodies. We might as well have just sat out in the open; everything we had was soaked. Even my trusty “water-resistant” Timex watch proved no match for the pervasiveness of that incredible blast.

        The wind had not only stirred up those 
        challenging waves; it also fanned the 
        cooling process.

TO THE CORE  
Wind can do its dirty work in more ways than just with brute force. I was canoeing with seven friends across Tuscarora Lake in northern Minnesota’s incredible Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It was a cool fall morning and the wind had started to whip up some pretty big waves for a lake of this size.

But we were mostly seasoned canoeing veterans; if we followed best practices for these conditions, it was nothing we couldn’t handle. I guess the key word there is “followed,” because within ten minutes, instead of sticking together, we found our three canoes well beyond shouting distance of each other.

Long story short, a couple of paddlers lost their focus. In a few seconds their canoe got caught broadside to a wave and turned turtle. Fortunately, our second canoe noticed their predicament and went to the rescue.

We managed to haul the shivering canoeists and their partially baled out craft to a nearby campsite, but by this time Win, a wiry guy with no insulating fat on his frame, was showing signs of hypothermia.

In this case, the wind had not only stirred up those challenging waves; it also fanned the cooling process, sucking the warmth out of Win’s body faster than it could produce it. Fortunately, by keeping him awake, sandwiching him between two warm bodies inside a sleeping bag, and feeding him hot liquids, we were able to avert tragedy.

(Ironically, later that afternoon, we were harnessing that same treacherous wind in makeshift sails to propel us effortlessly across another lake.)

So, what are the most memorable scrapes you’ve had with wind? Tornadoes? Hurricanes? Sailing fiascos? Anyone ever flown through the eye of a hurricane?

“The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then 
sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.”  
TRUMAN CAPOTE

* In 1999, a sharp line of storms swept across the BWCAW, unleashing a broad, nearly continuous band of downbursts—called a derecho—flattening millions of trees like the sweep of an immense, malevolent hand. It wiped out some 40 percent all the mature trees in the million-acre protected area.

THE SHAPE OF WIND – Currents of Life and Wonder

The other day, as I was driving to my new studio, I stopped at an intersection I've traversed a hundred times. As I waited for the light to turn I noticed—as is my compulsion—something I'd never seen in the same way before.

     I noticed…the way the fluid undulations of 
     foliage lent shape and sequence to the wind.

There were the same trees, the same shrubs and tall grasses that were there last week and last year. No strangers to me their forms and textures. I'd watched them unfurl and wither, get trimmed back now and then by whoever cares about such things, and faithfully adorn each season in its accustomed colors.

But what I noticed most that day was their motion, the way the fluid undulations of foliage animated each plant’s existence and at the same time lent shape and sequence to the wind.

PHOTO: Russ Seidel

Wind is one of those wonders of Nature you don't have to directly see, hear, smell or even feel to know it's there. You can be locked inside the best insulated of buildings and, with just a glance out the window, you still know when it’s there. Like a river's invisible current swaying a half-submerged branch, breeze can reveal itself merely by what it does to other things.

Perhaps the river analogy is good one, for that rolling motion of green, the way the flowing air alternately pushed and plucked at those living forms, made it look like the whole thicket could have been underwater.

         Like the wind, your presence here is 
         invisible unless you do something.

ELUSIVE PRESENCE
Do you feel, as I do, that we can see ourselves in Nature? In the wind’s tousling of foliage, would you be the wind or the foliage?

How do you sense small wonders you can’t really see? Couldn’t we apply this notion of indirect sensing to ourselves and our relationships—perhaps better knowing our own qualities by the effects they have on others?

And speaking of elusive presence, I try very hard to put up content here on One Man’s Wonder that will interest and inspire you, encourage you to see the world afresh. Yet only something like one percent of you ever leave any trace of your presence here.

C’mon folks, let me know my musings are having the desired effect (or not). Leave a comment. Share this on Facebook or Twitter. Let other anonymous readers know you're all part of a sizable movement to reclaim awareness, curiosity and wonder in this sped-up, dumbed-down, us-versus-them world.

Remember, like the wind, your presence here is invisible unless you do something. Let us feel your wind!

HOW TO BE IN THE MOMENT – 101 Tips

TIP #30

Blow toward a candle from across the room.

Air's like this magical, invisible liquid. It ebbs and flows, pours in to fill voids, lifts huge things...like roofs and airplane wings.

Like a wave, your breath rolls across the void. Will there be enough 
left of it to make lap that tongue of flame?

HOW TO BE IN THE MOMENT – 101 Little Tips

 TIP #89

In the Thick of Thin Air

Stand five or six feet away from a sink heaped in fresh soap suds; blow toward the bubbles; watch and listen.

"The air surrounding Earth weighs more than 5,600 trillion (5,600,000,000,000,000) tons!"

   BigSiteofAmazingFacts.com