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 Dave Thurlow, Host |
Weather becomes more noticable where warm and cold air meet, at the boundry between the two air masses, at the edge. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from New Hampshire's Mount Washington Observatory for The Weather Notebook. The concept of edges in the environment was explored by author Sebastian Junger in our discussion with him about "The Perfect Storm", his book about sword fishing on the Grand Banks out in the stormy North Atlantic. In that environment, as well as others, edges are where the action is.
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Sebastian: "The edge is where things happen. I mean you have warm air and cold air clashing and you have weather. The same thing with the Gulf Stream hitting the Labrador current, you've got these tremendous banks of fog that roll in and just envelope the Grand Banks."
So at the edge between warm and cold air masses you get atmospheric action. And, at the edge between warm and cold ocean currents you get biological action. In other words, the Grand Banks have a lot of fog, a lot of storms, and a lot of fish.
Sebastian: "The big fish will live in warm water of the gulf stream and then dart across into the cold water to feed on the plankton that really thrives in cold water. So, the whole food chain tends to collect along the boundaries between the temperature breaks in the ocean. Then, of course, the swordfishing boats, collect along the temperature breaks because that's where the fish are and everything is sort of located on these edges, where these two worlds collide and you know, I never thought about it before, but you could say the same of human history. I mean you can go to human history and see where cultures clash that's, of course there's wars there, but there's also a fertile area of exchange of ideas and things like that. It's exactly the same thing."
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To read a review or to purchase The Perfect Stormclick here.