Elliot Rappaport > Quotes

“Taxonomically the bora and mistral are katabatic (downhill) winds, found anywhere that cold mountain air can make a steep escape to ground. Wind names in the Mediterranean derive largely from geography. Llevantade has roots in the Spanish verb llevar (to rise) and is one in a family of winds that originate from the east. Poniente means west in Spanish and denotes fair breezes that blow in off the Atlantic, funneling through the Strait of Gibraltar. The sirocco is drawn up from Africa, a gritty inhalation that grows wet and foggy on a diet of evaporated water as it makes its way north. Microparticles of airborne sand form nuclei for condensation, bringing tiny bits of the Sahara down with the rain onto Europe. The sirocco is called the arifi (thirsty) in Libya, and the jugo (south) in Croatia. I posit that we are experiencing the Mediterranean’s unnamed breeze, the nonwind. “Ah, yes,” she replies. “El sin viento.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“A month later reports from NOAA and NASA begin to waffle. Maybe not this year after all, they say. The trade winds reappear—fitfully at first and then a warm steady breath of restored momentum. The various climate indicators dip back into neutral territory, and warnings are called off. The scientists take all this in stride, it being part of their profession to understand that there is in fact no such thing as a classic harbinger. It is simply necessary to realign one’s conclusions with the latest data at hand. There is, I learn, already a name for the sort of ENSO head-fake we have just been subjected to. Scientists call it “La Nada.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“Scientists estimate that the oceans have collectively been absorbing the equivalent of one or two atomic bombs per second of extra energy from the warming Earth over the last seventy years.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“Since ocean currents are the main mover of heat between latitudes, the location of land will have a lot to do with where it’s warm and where it isn’t.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“Despite all that we hear about them, they are pretty scarce. CO2 exists today in concentrations of about 420 parts per million (that’s 0.042 percent) and was made mostly by volcanoes until humans began burning carbon fuels several centuries ago.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“The surface of the Mediterranean is lower than the Atlantic by as much as twenty centimeters, a declivity created by prevailing winds and the rapid evaporation of this warm salty lake between Europe and Africa. The effect is most noticeable at the Strait of Gibraltar, where surface currents run steadily eastward in a flow that peaks at each high tide, like the slow pulsing of blood in some great aorta. Combined with the vendaval, this is today making our navigational goal feel a bit like digging a tunnel with a spoon.

A light wind develops from the north, at first a gentle exhalation and before long enough to ruffle the sea surface and raise the occasional crest of foam. We shut down our engine and set sail, exulting in the sudden silence.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“In the cool of evening people gather on deck to watch stars emerge from the twilight—at first single pinpricks and then a swarm, uncountable. The sky tilts steadily night by night, revealing new parts of itself as our changed latitude tips old constellations below the horizon and hoists new ones aloft. Soon there is a thrilling first glimpse of the Southern Cross, its iconic quadrangle pointing toward the antipodes, just below the shadow of Corvus the crow. The North Star sinks lower, steadfast pivot of the heavens until a day at the equator when it will dip to the horizon and vanish. In the northern hemisphere, Polaris will always make an angle with the horizon equal to your latitude—a cosmic geometry first revealed to me in magic diagrams by an astronomy professor, rocketing across the blackboard in a cloud of chalk dust.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“edges by continental shorelines, the only place the warmer water has to go is up. This is called thermosteric rise and explains about 30 percent of the change in sea levels that warming has induced. The rest is down to simple melting, as glacier ice turns liquid and runs into the sea.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“At the least, knowledge adds a dimension of clarity to the miserable days spent amid conditions you can do nothing about.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“Some indigenous methods of voyaging reverse the Western concept of motion, using instead a system in which the navigator departs in their canoe, watching land disappear astern until eventually—over a span of time that might involve hours, days, or weeks—another island appears ahead, pulling slowly into view to replace what has been left. Through the interim it is the sailor who inhabits the center of a fixed frame, one where the routines of the day—the ship’s chores, navigational tasks, and social interactions—form a fulcrum around which the rest of the world revolves. This is to me an affecting and not entirely unfamiliar notion.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“These islands and the seventy or so other Tuamotus host about 15,000 inhabitants now, who in addition to some French speak their own discrete branch of the Polynesian language, Pa‘umotu. There are pearl farms, resorts, and local communities sustained by the traditional resources of reef and garden, all pressed between the lagoon’s green lens and the open ocean. I have yet to visit very many of these places, but in this aspect they recall to me the words of the author Mark Vanhoenacker—a pilot who writes elegantly of unwalked landscapes sensed instead by overflight. It is a notion he credits to the Alaskans, who may cross broad reaches of their trackless state from above, borne aloft in tiny planes to their own personal corners of the wilderness. I feel this way about the Tuamotus, which for now are like the rings of Saturn passing in the window of my spaceship—unexplored but captivating, if not entirely inviting in their presence.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“Earth warms its atmosphere from below like a skillet cooking a pancake, reemitting heat that the planet has absorbed from sunlight. Wind is a product of the basic inequalities in this process, entrenched deficits that the forces of nature are working ceaselessly”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“We’re enjoying one of these warm periods at present—the Holocene epoch—which began around ten thousand years ago, roughly even with the emergence of agriculture and long-term human settlements.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“Today, the old baselines are changing so quickly as to not be baselines at all—each year a record for warming or nearly so, the annual minima of ice in steady retreat, and the seasonal boundaries of weather events utterly disrupted. Chicago freezes. Siberia bakes. The arc of climate crumbles at both ends into uncertainty.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“In imagining the Polynesians and their adventurous leaps across the Pacific, I consider the more recent voyages that have brought our own ship back and forth across these same waters—a modern steel vessel a hundred times more robust, connected by satellite and surrounded by a sense of the known. My scientist friends tell me of all the ways that the ocean and climate have changed since people first put to sea, but for a sailor on an open deck these transformations remain largely an abstraction. The flashing cursor and keyboard aside, it is hard here not to feel some connection with all the others who have crossed this ocean previously. Pacific voyagers, captains of discovery, the traders and mapmakers—surely all marveled at the same endless show of light and clouds. No doubt many were at times as cold and wet as us, and just as baffled by the unexpected.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“In his research, Kevin Wood was interested to know whether the travails of these driven souls could—as many thought—be connected climatically to Europe’s “Little Ice Age,” a period of particularly cold winters that went on intermittently for several centuries beginning in around AD 1400. One can blame the Little Ice Age for the failure of Norse colonies in Greenland and Napoleon’s defeat in Russia.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“They explained the records that were held by the ice, the chemical isotopes, trapped gases, and dust particles that would permit a time-stamped window into past climates—benchmarks for the broadening recognition that a man-made increase in global temperature was underway.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“For the scientists of GISP-2, year-to-year levels of gases and aerosols were measurable in the ice, either as solutes in the water itself or trapped as gas bubbles in each layer of core. The resolution was clear enough to identify fallout from postwar nuclear tests and the Chernobyl reactor accident in 1986. It was a heroically tedious task, much of it conducted on scene by people clad in freezer suits and polar gear to fight hypothermia. The reward was a timeline of atmospheric data more than a thousand centuries long, with a previously unseen level of detail.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“The Portuguese explorers, astronauts of another time, used these winds and some educated guesswork to push European dominion out of the Mediterranean and into the world beyond. For the mahrineros of Lisbon, it was simple work on most days to sail south to places like Madeira and the Canary Islands, the first non-European stepping-stones of Iberian conquest.

Getting home was harder, until someone took a gamble and found that if a sailor put his back to the land and sailed off far enough to the northwest, he might eventually make his way up into westerly winds and back to Portugal before the food ran out. Known to sailors as the volta do mar (return from the sea), this discovery—rather like the splitting of the atom five centuries later—would have irreversible consequences for all that came afterwards. Christopher Columbus used an expanded version of the volta to get his fleet from Spain to America and home again, but credit for a bolder leap goes to Bartolomeu Dias, who tested the concept on a global scale.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“It’s hot and sunny now on deck at midday, enough to drive you into the shade if you’ve got a choice. The trade winds have returned, steady from just south of east, and the ship slides along as if on a rail. There are dry starry nights, the evenings electric, with horizons the color of watermelon rind. Orion, recumbent, loops overhead in a great arc. We cross the equator near 132 degrees west longitude, just after midnight on December 17. North along our meridian the next bit of land is British Columbia. South is Antarctica. The latitude display on our GPS reads, briefly and thrillingly, 00° 00.000’.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

“Captains count money, fill out forms, and bear the onus of awaiting the unexpected.”
― Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships