We don’t just live in the air; we live because of it. It’s the most miraculous substance on earth, responsible for our food, our weather, our water, and our ability to hear. In this exuberant book, gifted science writer Gabrielle Walker peels back the layers of our atmosphere with the stories of the people who uncovered its secrets:
• A flamboyant Renaissance Italian discovers how heavy our air really is: The air filling Carnegie Hall, for example, weighs seventy thousand pounds.
• A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds a set of winds that constantly blow five miles above our heads.
• An impoverished American farmer figures out why hurricanes move in a circle by carving equations with his pitchfork on a barn door.
• A well-meaning inventor nearly destroys the ozone layer.
• A reclusive mathematical genius predicts, thirty years before he’s proved right, that the sky contains a layer of floating metal fed by the glowing tails of shooting stars.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
GABRIELLE WALKER has a PhD in chemistry from Cambridge University and has taught at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. She is a consultant to New Scientist, contributes frequently to BBC Radio, and writes for many newspapers and magazines. She is also the author of four books, including An Ocean of Air and Antarctica. She lives in London.
Front cover:
Tag 3: “A sense of wonder . . . animates Ms. Walker’s high-spirited narrative and speeds it along like a fresh-blowing westerly.”—The New York Times
Back cover:
“This is science writing at its best: clear, witty, relevant, unbelievably interesting, and just plain great."-- Mary Roach, author of Stiff
We don’t just live in the air; we live because of it. It’s the most miraculous substance on earth, responsible for our food, our weather, our water, and our ability to hear. Gabrielle Walker peels back the layers of our atmosphere with the stories of the people who uncovered its secrets:
• A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds a set of winds that constantly blow five miles above our heads.
• An impoverished American farmer figures out why hurricanes move in a circle by carving equations with his pitchfork on a barn door.
• A well-meaning inventor nearly destroys the ozone layer.
"Walker has a PhD in chemistry, but she writes like a poet. With a few deft strokes, she brings wacky characters to life . . . Walker's book should absorb and delight anyone who breathes."--Los Angeles Times
"[Walker] shows a storyteller's knack for making long-settled questions seem again intriguing and mysterious. As a result, the book imparts a new appreciation of an element so pervasive as to be invisible."--American Scientist
GABRIELLE WALKER earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cambridge. She is the coauthor, with Sir David King, of The Hot Topic: What We Can Do About Global Warming. She lives in London.
In 1960, Captain Joseph Kittinger fell to earth from the edge of space and lived. He stepped from the basket of a gigantic helium balloon into an appalling, hostile environment which, without the protection of a pressure suit, would have simultaneously frozen his body and boiled away his blood. It is the air that Kittinger fell through that makes our lives on earth possible.
Air is about more than just breathing. Air transforms miraculously into solid food, and without it every creature on earth would starve; it wraps our planet in a blanket of warmth; radio signals bounce off a floating mirror of metal in the air to travel round the world; and the outer layer of our atmosphere soaks up flares from the sun more violent than all the world's nuclear warheads put together. In this exuberant work, Gabrielle Walker peels back the layers of our atmosphere with stories of the people who uncovered its secrets:
A flamboyant Renaissance Italian discovers how heavy our air really is: The air filling Carnegie Hall, for example, weighs seventy thousand pounds.
A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds invisible winds [or giant rivers of air?] that blow with the force of a hurricane five miles above our heads.
An impoverished American farmer figures out why storms move in a circle by carving equations with his pitchfork on a barn door.
A well-meaning but ill-fated inventor creates wonder chemicals that nearly destroy the ozone layer (he also came up with the idea to put lead in gasoline [he did the lead first]).
A reclusive mathematical genius with a predilection for painting his toenails cherry red figures out the technology that would come to the rescue of the Titanic.
An Ocean of Air is a triumphant celebration of the fragile complexity of Earth's atmosphere and a completely engaging work of popular science."
For anyone who has ever wished somebody would sit down and, once and for all, explain global warming to him or her, this book is the proverbial ray of energy-efficient, biorenewable, ecologically sustainable light. Name a current concern or future solution—from rising sea levels to shrinking ice shelves, biofuels to greenhouse gases, the Kyoto Protocol to industrial innovation—and the authors clearly and precisely articulate the often confusing, if not conflicting, positions and statistics currently in play. Walker is an acclaimed scientist and journalist, and Sir David King is the UK’s chief science advisor, and together they comprise one of the foremost authoritarian teams analyzing the global warming phenomenon. Equitably and explicitly unraveling the overwhelmingly diverse aspects of the climate-control conundrum, the authors deftly dispel the hype and earnestly dispense hope. Theirs is an impartial, and yet impassioned, examination of the science, technology, and politics of global warming, and their lucid, cohesive treatise is destined to become the go-to guide to the climate-control crisis. --Carol Haggas
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