Wind and hurricanes are due to forests, not temperatures

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Why is the wind blowing? Because the trees are swaying! Many preschoolers adhere to this geophysical model. Adults laugh at this and explain elementary truths to children. But it turns out that these truths are not so straightforward. And the "preschool" version is not so absurd. Geophysicist Anastasia Makarieva proposed a new theory to explain why the wind blows, hurricanes form and rivers flow.

Green vacuum cleaner

We meet as spies - in a cafe. We agree on passwords and identification marks by phone:

- I will have a huge bouquet in my hands, - Nastya sighs sadly, - you recognize me.

The day before, in the Baltschug Kempinski Hotel, in an atmosphere of breathtaking glamor, ten young girls were presented with the UNESCO-L'Oréal Prizes as the best young scientists in Russia. Anastasia Makarieva, Ph. D. in physics and mathematics, senior researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences is one of them.

- Do you have oatmeal porridge? - Nastya tortures the waitress.

A huge bouquet from L'Oréal, in turn, torments her: Nastya is helpless in front of him, and he feels it - brazenly climbs into the face and pricks with playful decorative needles. The bouquet completely reveals the completely unglamorous nature of Nastya. A simple blue sweater, jeans and a helplessly gullible look: they don't talk about such people - they are beautiful. The fact that Nastya is good-looking is rather a sign of something else. Her face looks like that vessel in which, according to Zabolotsky, fire flickers.

But about the fire later. And now on the agenda are bouquet and porridge. In addition to flowers, the award implies receiving 350 thousand rubles. I wonder if this is a lot or a little for a researcher?

- I have a base salary of 12,500 rubles. This is generally normal, because three years ago he was 8 thousand. I receive a little more from grants. In total, about 20 thousand. Of course, I am pleased to receive these 350 thousand.

- And how is it now in science in general with regard to welfare?

- Yes, well-being leaves much to be desired, - Nastya looks away. She is clearly embarrassed. - But you can still live. That is, you will reach the middle class if you spin, well, like looking for contracts with foreign partners. This grant system just ruined science, you know? A person who does business, he does not know how to write applications for grants. It is also necessary to indicate there what you will do. How do I know what will happen in the end? We have now completed a lot of work, we believe that this is a discovery. But we could not write in the application that we will make a discovery. Science has died. All over the world, not only here. People who know how to write grants come to it. And those who do not know how, do not get anything. This humiliation of a specialist simply destroys him physiologically - he, roughly speaking, becomes covered with acne and gets sick. Grants have purged science enthusiasts.

Finally they bring the porridge. But Nastya is no longer up to her. You need to fight the bouquet and tell everything.

- Let me explain to you what we did. You will understand, the first graders understand this.

Nastya is engaged in geophysics and has a very high citation index. This means that almost the entire world scientific community refers to scientific articles with her participation. Her latest work, published last year in the journal of the European Geophysical Union, became the most commented article of the year. In it, on several pages, no less is explained - why the wind blows and the rivers flow.

- Here the rivers are flowing, - Nastya is trying to shove annoying bouquet needles under the glossy wrapper. Hopelessly! The needles go into the mouth and into the porridge, but Nastya pushes them away and stubbornly bends her own. - Rivers flow into the oceans - the earth is tilted, so they all flow down there. Question: where does the water come from? For example, the sources of the Yenisei are thousands of kilometers away from the ocean. All fresh water supplies on land would drain into the ocean in four years. This means that it is necessary that moist air constantly flows from the sea, then precipitation will fall on land, water will fall into the rivers, and thus its circulation will occur. But what is the physical mechanism of this very cycle, which is responsible for life on land? After all, nothing like this happens in the desert. For example, the Sahara: it is located on the seashore, but the wind blows in the opposite direction - from the Sahara. It does not bring moisture - on the contrary, everything that some saxaul evaporates in the Sahara is carried away to the sea, which is already wet. So we have described this mechanism.

Nastya's idea is simple to tears. Not ours, of course, but specialists who have been dealing with this issue for at least three centuries and considered the mechanism of the movement of air flows as a heat engine. Even at school they teach: it's warm here, it's cold here, the air expands, becomes lighter, rises, and cold leaks from below. But why does the wind constantly blow from the warm ocean to the cold sources of the Amazon, and from the hot Sahara, the air carries air towards the cool sea? After all, everything should be the other way around. The model, built on the difference "warm - cold", works flawlessly only in the equator. Nastya suggested introducing not only temperature into the coordinate system, but also moisture condensation, which provides a pressure drop.

- After all, what is pressure? - she asks rhetorically, fishing for needles from the cooling porridge. - Gas molecules fly and beat about you and me. And when water vapor condenses into droplets, these molecules disappear, and what happens? That's right - the pressure drops, and air from the side begins to be sucked in, like in a vacuum cleaner. That is, this very condensation of water vapor leads to a decrease in pressure and the appearance of horizontal suction. Where do you think the condensation is most?

- Over the ocean? - I painfully recall the school course in physical geography. And I hit the sky with my finger.

- Not properly. Condensation is greater where there is more evaporation. And it is more where the forest grows. If the ocean can be compared to one wet rag, then the forest is many wet rags. The forest has a huge surface - many leaves. And more moisture evaporates there. The forest is pulling on the low pressure rope.

I am amazed to discover that I really understand. If the land is covered with forest, it provides a constant zone of reduced pressure and acts as a pump, pulling atmospheric moisture from the ocean.

This balance is stable. Until the forests began to be cut down on a massive scale, it existed for hundreds of millions of years. All the great rivers of the world are the result of the action of the forest pump of atmospheric moisture. But the violation of the integrity of the forest cover leads to a change in the direction of the wind: it begins to blow not from sea to land, but from land to sea. Which leads to final desertification.

This is exactly what, according to Nastya, happened with Australia. Imagine a blooming continent completely covered in forest, dotted with inland continental freshwater lakes. According to paleontologists, such was Australia about a hundred thousand years ago. And suddenly all this almost overnight becomes a desert. Why? Paleontologists only state a fact, without explaining anything. Nastya is trying to explain. The first settlers appear in Australia. They live near the ocean, and here they cut wood. At some point, the coastal forest belt is completely cut down. According to Nastya's logic, this is tantamount to cutting off the hose at the pump: the wind immediately changed direction and began to blow towards the sea, drying up the blooming continent. The forests that covered Australia for millions of years have dried up over several decades. It all happened with lightning speed. The same fate befell the Sahara, South Africa, our Central Asia. All you need to do is cut the hose and that's it.

- You see, - Nastya almost shouts, attracting the attention of people at the neighboring tables, - the problem of forests is not butterfly birds. This is the problem of everything - will there be life at all or not? Vaughn Luzhkov or someone there says: "Now we will turn the rivers and we will sell water." If we cut down the forest, we will have a desert. Have you seen the movie "Kin-dza-dza"? Here it will be the same with us. And there will be nothing to sell.

As one of the participants in the discussion of Nastya's work noted, the idea of a "biotic pump" that determines the direction of world air flows is about the same for meteorology as the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not vice versa, became for astronomy in its time. The "Biotic Pump" puts everything in its place, covering up the white spots.

- Now I can explain to anyone what a hurricane is, - says Nastya cheerfully. - It's just a reverse explosion. Just imagine: you took and poured water on a red-hot stove. What will happen? The water evaporated - pshshsh … and all that - the pressure increased sharply, and a kind of blast wave went off. And when condensation occurs, the process is reversed: the pressure drops sharply, and the air rushes not to the periphery, but to the center. Here comes the hurricane! After all, hurricanes and tornadoes are necessarily accompanied by intense precipitation. That is, there is a powerful condensation process going on. And the spin occurs as a secondary result of the Earth's rotation. This is a completely new approach to hurricanes! They are still considered as a heat cycle.

Hurricanes are hurricanes, but Nastya's porridge worries me greatly: it gets cold, and young Russian scientists should eat well.

- Nastya, please eat, you didn't have breakfast.

- A? Yes, I didn't have breakfast, okay … porridge … yes, indeed,”she looks at the porridge in surprise: where did it come from? - Yes, God bless her, I don't want to. I'd better tell you now why they didn't want to publish us anywhere.

In Russia, none of the three available specialized scientific journals dared to publish Nastya's data. They said: everything is wrong with you, such people should not be allowed near serious magazines at all. The idea of a "biotic pump" comes into irreconcilable conflict with existing meteorological theory.

- Let's meet in 40 years. To get the Nobel Prize, you have to live a long time, - Nastya is not joking at all, she just thinks.

The idea of a "biotic pump" makes it possible to do something almost unbelievable in meteorology, such as long-term weather forecasts. For example, if this theory appeared several years earlier, it would be possible to calculate the possibility of devastating hurricanes in the Southern Hemisphere.

All models available today state that there can be no hurricanes in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil. According to Nastya's theory, they were not there exactly because Brazil is covered with forest, which ensures uniform air circulation. But now Brazilian forests are being completely cut down. This makes hurricanes very likely. "Katarina" in 2004 is an eloquent confirmation of this. Until the last moment, the Brazilians did not believe that this was possible: we do not have hurricanes - that's all! The result was both casualties and destruction. And, according to Nastya, the Brazilians have to wait for the next disasters - they continue to cut down the forest.

The outcome of our conversation is deplorable. The bouquet was pretty much plucked, but it was not defeated, the porridge was not eaten. 2: 0 is not in favor of Nastya. But the hurricanes seem to be sorted out. It remains to figure out what kind of person Nastya herself is, who, at the age of 33, managed to encroach on the foundations of our ideas about the world. This woman herself resembles a hurricane.

- You see, all this does not come right away, - Nastya has already given the uneaten porridge to the waitress and abandoned the fruitless struggle with the bouquet, - when I entered the Polytechnic University, at the Department of Biophysics, I did not see what to apply myself to. She came to the pulpit and said, "Let me do something good." And they say to me: well, bacteria - pour more water. There I had to blow a straw, but I blew the wrong way, swallowed this mixture - disgusting, horror! But the main thing is that I did not see where the ministry was.

In search of service, Nastya secretly from her parents entered the philological faculty, the mathematical linguistics. Then she transferred to Scandinavian philology. And she would be a translator and, as she puts it, a "worthy person", if not for the meeting with Viktor Georgievich Gorshkov, a famous physicist who taught the course "Human Ecology" at the Polytechnic.

- Everything that I am telling you here, I am telling you as an apprentice, do you understand? - says Nastya. - Here he is - a scientist. It was he who created the concept of biotic regulation of the environment, he showed me what large-scale problems are and what a terrible situation we all are in. What attracted me? That I am not adjacent to something gilded. Here we must fight for justice.

- Generally speaking, academic science is associated with such quiet armchair studies …

- How quiet there! - Nastya is indignant. - This is something crazy! It's so addicting! Before that picture of the world that Gorshkov opened to me, everything is visible in front of it - moral qualities, intelligence, talent. All this is weighed on these scales.

- Why did you decide to go into science at all?

- You know, I myself have recently begun to think: why? - says Nastya seriously. - Why not Scandinavian philology, which I graduated with honors, but still geophysics? And now I can probably explain. When I was twelve years old, I somehow very clearly formulated for myself what I want. I want to bear the sorrow of the world. These are exactly the words. What is the sorrow of the world? Is she there? I had no idea then. But for some reason I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

- Tell me, are you happy?

- If we keep in mind the simple basic values - so that loved ones do not get sick, for example, - yes, I am happy. But you see, in view of what is happening on the planet now, I have now racked up this sorrow of the world so much that it has become a part of my personal life. That is, between my intimate female experiences, say, and my worries about the planet, there is no difference in the strength of sensations, do you understand? Well, one cannot be happy when forests are being destroyed so barbarously! If on the news I hear a deputy say: "We are now going to build a new woodworking plant," I cringe as if I am the Siamese twin of the tree that will be the first to fall on the woodworking machine. A scientist whose long-suffering predictions are ignored, whose warnings are trampled by actions on the scale of all mankind, and primarily in his native country, is doomed to such torment, do you understand?

But really - do I understand what Nastya is talking about? It seems that the idea of a "biotic pump" is much simpler than the desire to bear the world's sorrow.

Olga Andreeva, Russian Reporter March 11, 2009, no. 9 (88)

What they say about the articles of Anastasia Makareva

• This is an interesting article that I hope will generate widespread discussion … The fact that you have demonstrated that you can get constant or increasing precipitation with a non-zero runoff means that, obviously, some other mechanism is at work besides moisture rotation (recycling, then there is evaporation and condensation of moisture). If this truly is your biotic pump, then you have made an important contribution to understanding continental moisture balance. Professor H. H. G. Savenije Editor-in-Chief, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions
• It is surprising that such a simple idea that forests grow where favorable climatic conditions have developed, which provide sufficient soil moisture and an amount of energy for their existence, does not occur to the authors. Anonymous reviewer of the journal "Water Resources"
• The biotic pump article does introduce a very intriguing concept of actively involving terrestrial vegetation in the transport of water from the ocean to land … Professor Van den Hurk, Royal Meteorological Institute of the Netherlands
• … My conclusion is simple: do not publish the work. Anonymous reviewer of the journal "Physics of the Atmosphere and Ocean"