Atlantic (49 page)
Authors: Simon Winchester
It later emerged that the researchers who first informed the press and who helped with the BBC film, though based at the University of London, were funded by a large Chicago-based reinsurance company, Aon Benfield, which would doubtless welcome a public made skittish by the publication of reports of ever more bizarre threats—M
EGA
-W
AVE TO
E
NGULF
M
ANHATTAN!
—to world serenity. The seismological community generally has poured scorn on the reports, has said that the mathematical models used were outdated and wrong, that the chances of such a landslide in La Palma were vanishingly remote, and that tsunamis have little history of traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, though admittedly for reasons unfathomed. The researchers retired to lick their wounds; the BBC issued something of a retraction; and most recently the European Space Agency said it would conduct a survey of the Cumbre Vieja volcano to ascertain its stability and presumably try to reassure the world that New York is not about to be drowned, certainly not imminently, and probably never.
The volcanoes of the Atlantic are also generally more benign than those elsewhere. To be sure, there are vicious examples, most of them in the Caribbean. On Martinique, there is most notoriously Mont Pelée, which erupted on Ascension Day in 1902, and killed almost all the twenty-eight thousand inhabitants of the town below with its rolling clouds of red-hot ash and superheated air. A prisoner in an almost airless cell survived, and joined the Barnum & Bailey circus. Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote
The Violins of Saint-Jacques
, a novel imagining that the celebration ball going on when the volcano erupted was swept in its entirety into the sea, such that the orchestra, still playing gamely, can be heard to this day by fishermen sailing by overhead.
Some others are more discommoding than catastrophic—the very geologically similar complex of the Soufrière Hills on the British colonial possession of Montserrat, for example, erupted in 1995, killing many fewer people but ruining the island capital of Plymouth and forcing its abandonment. Dust from the eruption in 2010 of Eyjafjoll in southern Iceland severely disrupted air transport all across Europe. And back in 1961, the entire population of the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha—another British possession, with some 250 inhabitants—had to be evacuated to England after their volcano erupted, directly threatening the little settlement of Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas.
Fewer than three hundred people—seven families, all interrelated—live on the mid-oceanic volcanic island of
Tristan da Cunha
, 1,800 miles west of the South African coast. Generally the British possession is isolated and alone, the islanders always fretting that their volcano might erupt again, as it did in 1961.
When this eruption began all the Tristanians, elderly women and babes-in-arms among them, took off in longboats to Nightingale Island, twenty miles away, and sheltered off the beach awaiting rescue—the Atlantic Ocean seemingly offering them safer asylum than the solid land on which their ancestors had chosen to settle. But two years later, once the mountain had settled itself down again, most of the islanders elected to return. They live there still, proudly offering themselves to passing ships as
the most isolated inhabited island in the world.
The volcano may growl and steam, the sulfurous gases may produce widespread illness, the islanders’ isolation may bring all the disadvantages of inbreeding, and the economic trials of the inhabitants may be endless and legion, but in this otherwise unvisited nook of the Atlantic, mankind clings on with limpet-like tenacity, as if to try to remind the ocean just who claims mastery.
• • •
Some of the islanders on Tristan, and the technicians at the weather station three hundred miles farther south, on yet another British colonial sibling, Gough Island, might have noticed something else rather unusual in recent years.
The prevailing winds in both places—but most especially on Gough Island—are from the west. In Gough they are usually very strong: the island, which lies at just about 40 degrees, 31 minutes south, is very much in the Roaring Forties, and the westerlies here do indeed roar, without cease.
Or at least they used to. During the last thirty years or so the climate in these latitudes has somewhat altered. The westerlies do not blow so strongly or so often, and are now not so perpetual as they still seem to be just a few score miles to the south. It is as though the Southern Ocean Super-Gyre, the climatic forcing agent that is ultimately responsible for the high wind belts around the Antarctic, and which sailors know as the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and the Shrieking Sixties, has recently shifted southward, toward the pole. The reason for this, climatologists insist, is the human-induced depletion of ozone in the atmosphere above the western Antarctic: it seems that the winds might have slipped down toward the ozone hole, as it were, to fill the gap the ozone has left behind, confirming the age-old principle of
nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum.
The effect of this southward shift of the Atlantic winds has been most unexpected: it has caused warm and salty water to dribble out into the Atlantic Ocean from the Indian Ocean, through some hitherto unknown deep-sea phenomenon known as the Agulhas Leakage. This warm and saline seawater seemingly enters the North Brazil Current—an exceptionally complicated northbound current that flows along the coast of Brazil toward the Caribbean. It is believed that this water could then enter the birth waters of the Gulf Stream and change its strength, temperature, salinity, and direction even more than it is being changed today.
Thus is a further complication—and one almost certainly initiated by mankind, if the filling-the-ozone-gap theory is correct—being added to the mix that is the Atlantic Ocean. The weather patterns around the sea will change still further—though for good or ill, no one has any current idea. All that is certain is this: with new and fiercer hurricanes forming off Cape Verde, with volcanoes erupting in Montserrat, with the sea level of Rotterdam rising and the ice in East Greenland melting, with black smokers and white smokers generating more heat and dull red light and so nurturing the clouds of thermophilic bacteria near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, with Surtsey building itself up yet again, with Eyjafjoll erupting dustily, with Iceland still splitting apart and the cables running across the Grand Banks in danger of being broken once more, with
Prochlorococcus
expanding its range and burping out yet more oxygen into the air, and with, as now, Indian Ocean water leaking across into and warming and making more salty the seas near Gough Island, Brazil, and the Caribbean—with one or all of these things now happening, and with much wondering over whether humanity is able to accommodate them or whether they signal the beginning of the end of man’s relationship with this most vitally important of seas—it is clear that some exceedingly strange things are happening in today’s Atlantic Ocean, and no one is quite sure why.
All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits . . .
The tiny beacon they call the
lighthouse at the end of the world
will one day meet up with another of its kind that presently stands ten thousand miles away on the far side of the globe. And when that happens, lighthouse striking lighthouse with the slowest and gentlest of collisions, the Atlantic Ocean as we know it will cease to be.
The final moment of the Atlantic’s existence will come in about 170 million years. It will be brought about by an episode of highly improbable-looking tectonic gymnastics, in which the tip of South America snakes itself down and around the entire continent of Antarctica, then heads back up northward and collides with the tip of the Malay Peninsula somewhere in the region of Singapore.
A great deal of mathematical modeling had to be done to reach this vision of the world’s future appearance. Much of the calculating has been worked up by a Texas-based group that specializes in paleogeography and tectonic futurism, headed by Christopher Scotese. Another group based in England, known informally as The Future Is Wild, and with more obviously commercial ambitions, is hoping to find in Hollywood and the publishing industry a market for its carefully modeled visions of the planet’s geological and biological future. Both groups have devised scenarios for the coming couple of hundred millions of years: both agree that the supercontinent whose breakup gave rise to the Atlantic—Pangaea—will one day re-create itself,
92
and they have agreed to name it Pangaea Ultima. Precisely how the continents that currently exist get to this point is a matter for scholarly argument, but there is agreement that in the end the world will have one continent, it will be surrounded by one sea, and all of the oceans that currently exist, the Atlantic included, will have long since been consigned to history.
However, at least at this moment the very opposite seems to be happening. The Atlantic, far from heading toward history, is getting much bigger and wider. The lines of volcanoes and rifts along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge are continuing to spew new mantle material to the surface, and the convection currents below are continuing to shift apart the seabeds on either side of the ridge, like conveyor belts moving in opposite directions: the Americas are being moved ever farther west, and Africa and Eurasia slide ponderously to the east. This is a process that all geologists believe will continue for maybe another five million years, perhaps much longer. It is after this that the mathematical models start to diverge.
One group predicts what it calls
extroversion,
a process whereby the continents appear to peel open like blooming flowers, only then to shift back upon themselves and eventually coalesce into one. In this scenario, the Atlantic continues to open ever wider; the Pacific is slowly squeezed closed as the two American continents pivot around Siberia toward a collision with East Asia; and Africa, India, and Antarctica move as one around and up toward South Asia’s various peninsulas and islands; until Pangaea Ultima is finally made, and for the time being the world halts in its tracks, with its gigantic new landmass surrounded by an even more gigantic, newly shaped sea.
The other group of modelers are the supporters of
introversion,
and in this scheme, which is somewhat more complicated, the Atlantic, after a period of expansion, would suddenly begin to shrink because subduction zones would form along the eastern seaboards of both North and South America. Lines of volcanoes would start to erupt off New York City, Halifax, and Rio de Janeiro—though both places, and all other centers of human habitation, would by this time have long since ceased to exist—and the ocean floor would start to vanish beneath the American continent. Europe and Africa would at the same time continue to collide, eventually squeezing the Mediterranean to nothing; Baja California would slide northward; Antarctica would head north. In some two hundred million years from now North America would collide with Africa, and South America would slide itself around the tip of southern Africa, heading northeastward until the moment when it collided with Southeast Asia.
It is this scenario that involves, at least in theory, the tantalizing prospect of the collision of two lighthouses.
• • •
The tip of South America, where the Andes plunges into the two oceans that the mountains separate, is a place of vivid and lonely beauty, and of lives lived under the impress of endless strong and stirringly cold westerly gales. Cape Horn—a low brown island less distinguished in appearance than its history suggests—dominates the perception of the region, but there are also the snow-trimmed peaks of Tierra del Fuego, the dusty plains of Patagonia, the windswept estancias where sheep huddle against hedges and where bushes of
calafate
tremble in the storms; the corrugated iron-roofed
frigorificos,
where farmers and their gauchos would bring their lambs for slaughter and shipment, the bleached bones of long-dead whales lying along the shores of the Strait of Magellan, the bleached spars of long-lost clipper ships lying in the bays to which they ran, fatefully, on failing to double the Horn—these are what makes the southern extension of the Andes so frightful, and alluring.
Lying twenty miles off the mainland’s eastern tip there is an island—Isla de Los Estados, the locals call it, the Spanish translation for Staten Island, since this elongate jumble of sharp peaks and deep valleys and stunted beech trees and sphagnum bogs and the ruins of old prison camps was first discovered and named by the Dutch, for the states general that directed the expedition. This is the
other
Staten Island; and while the one settled by the Dutch in New York is now a successful sprawling suburb with half a million people, Staten Island in South America has no one permanently living there at all. It is desolate, forbidding, quite inhospitable to man. A succession of lighthouses built there were abandoned because of the gales; even a sturdy military prison erected there in 1899 lasted only three years before being damaged by storms, provoking riots and escapes. Nowadays it has been declared a wildlife refuge for its colonies of Magellanic penguins, and a small detachment of Argentine sailors is sent there on forty-five-day rotations: they roundly dislike it, with its foul weather and inhospitable terrain.
Jules Verne had a peculiar lifelong fascination with Isla de los Estados, though he never visited. He wrote his final novel—
Lighthouse at the End of the World
—about a rollicking piece of gangsterish behavior on the island, and it centered on the dousing of the light and the luring onto the island’s rocks of passing merchantmen. A century later a Parisian navigation enthusiast named André Bronner, in a delightful flash of Gallic madness, rebuilt the last of these lights, which had fallen down after being abandoned. He said later that he realized how important this single dim flicker of a light had been to all the great clippers and steamships making their way around the Horn in darkness; he developed a blinding obsession with the romance of this tiny gleam in the wilds of nowhere and managed to raise money from rich Parisian friends to build a replacement.
It took Bronner and seven similarly deranged colleagues two long midsummer months to build the new light. He took pâté and cognac and cases of decent burgundies to sustain the party, and employed a composer to write a
symphony at the end of the world,
which was played on the wild March day in 1998 when the light was handed over to the Argentine navy. The sailors who man the base now attend to the light, a modest affair that is powered by solar panels, requires little maintenance, and like most of the Staten Island lights that preceded it, is as a warning to Cape Horners all but useless. The predecessors were too small, and for some curious reason were all built behind obscuring mountain ranges. Bronner’s new version has been rendered of limited value by the advent of GPS navigation, which keeps even the most delicate vessels on secure passage for a transit of the Cape.
So far as this story of the Atlantic’s life span is concerned, the symbolic importance of the Staten Island light goes well beyond its usefulness. For the headland on which it is built—the island’s northeasternmost cliff, just below Mount Richardson and Pickersgill Point, which stand as testament to the early British explorers of the region—is likely to be the first part of the Americas to collide with Asia, once the world is done with its predicted orgy of moving.
Two hundred fifty million years
from now the continents will have coalesced into another Pangaea, and the only internal body of water will be the stagnant relic of the Indian Ocean, the Capricorn Sea. The Atlantic Ocean, 440 million years after its birth, will have vanished clear away.
If the mathematical models are correct, in a little less than two hundred million years, the site of the light at Mount Richardson will be slowly edging toward the place where a light now stands at the most southerly point of the Malay Peninsula. This is Raffles Lighthouse, built in 1854, and lighting both the entrance to Singapore harbor and the Strait of Malacca. But when Raffles meets Richardson, when Singapore meets Staten Island, then, and finally, the long and slowly squeezed waters of the Atlantic Ocean will have been compelled to go elsewhere. The maps that Christopher Scotese creates show a small inland sea bordered by India, Arabia, East Africa, Argentina, and Sumatra; but this is hardly a sea, will in all likelihood not last, and has the melancholy distinction only of holding the last captive molecules of what was once the oldest and—in terms of the civilizations around it—the grandest ocean on the planet.
The Atlantic Ocean was born 190 million years ago; and given the mechanics and the timing of its likely death, it will survive as an ocean for maybe another 180 million years. Its total life span will thus be getting on for 400 million years—years almost entirely given over to gigantic geological dramas, to climatic phenomena on a scale barely possible to imagine, to the evolution and extinction of thousands of kinds of animals, birds, fish, plants, and single-celled beings, and of all stages in between.
For maybe 200,000 of those 400 million years, humankind existed and flourished on the shores of the ocean. He and she and their kin first populated the east of the sea, then swept around and across the landmasses on the far side of the world before appearing on the west side of the same ocean some thousands of years later. Humans were powerfully afraid of the ocean for centuries, assumed it represented the edge of the known world and was populated by terrifying monsters. They ventured into it timidly and retreated from it swiftly—and then finally they crossed it, from east to west, in the eleventh century of modern recorded time, and in doing so found that far from being the edge of all the world, the Atlantic was now a bridge to an entirely new one.
It took four more centuries to find it properly. But once the existence of that new world had become a clear and undeniable certainty, once it was accepted that the water just crossed was indeed a newly known ocean, then this body of water, three thousand miles wide in the north, four thousand in the south, and rather less than two thousand at the ocean’s waist between Africa and Brazil, became the central stage for all manner of humanity’s most stupendous endeavors and amazements.
The ocean became, in a sense, the cradle of modern Western civilization—the inland sea of the civilized Western world, the home of a new pan-Atlantic civilization itself. All manner of discoveries, inventions, realizations, ideas, the mosaic of morsels by which humankind advanced, were made in and around or by way of some indirect connection with the sea. Parliamentary democracy. A homeland for world Jewry. Long-distance radio communication. The Vinland Map. The suppression of slavery. The realization of continental drift and plate tectonics. The Atlantic Charter. The British Empire. The knarr, the curragh, the galleon, the ironclad, and the battleship. The discovery of longitude. Codfish. Erskine Childers. Winslow Homer. The convoy system. St. Helena. Puerto Madryn. Debussy. Monet. Rachel Carson. Eriksson, Columbus, Vespucci. The Hanseatic League. Ernest Shackleton. The Black Ball Line. The submarine telegraph cable. The Wright brothers, Alcock and Brown, Lindbergh. Beryl Markham. The submarine. Ellis Island. Hurricanes. Atlantic Creek. Icebergs.
Titanic. Lusitania. Torrey Canyon.
The Eddystone Light.
Bathybius. Prochlorococcus.
Shipping containers. NATO. The polders. The Greenland ice cap. The United Kingdom. Brazil, Argentina, Canada. The United States of America.
All these, and a thousand things and people and beasts and events and occurrences and people, go to make up today’s Atlantic. They act as a reminder of the immense complexity of an ocean that has been central and pivotal to the human story. They are all now part of a new continuum of study that has come to be known in recent years as Atlantic History, a discipline now widely taught, and taken so seriously that there is now a history of itself,
a history of a history,
so critical has the idea of an Atlantic identity become to both the contemporary and the future world.