At Sea
Now the changes of this voyage are well begun. Cruising north from Tristan da Cunha, we have left the cold, grey-green seas of the south in our wake and entered a new realm: the bright blue waters of the subtropical South Atlantic. Now the real nature of our journey becomes clear. Over the past week and the next three we will traverse over 80 degrees of latitude and experience one of the great oceans of our planet in an intimate way, an intimacy known to very few travelers in the jet age. And, at the same time, we are all settling into the relaxed and contemplative pace of a long voyage at sea.
One of the first things we learn is that our world is banded. It is a relatively small planet, with oceans and atmosphere constantly mixed by wind and current, so these bands are not so obvious from space as those of Jupiter or Saturn. But the Earth is divided into great climatic zones along lines of latitude and on this journey we will traverse several of them, and come to know them as places rather than concepts.
Behind us now lie the windy waters of the west wind drift, the roaring forties and the furious fifties. All around us today the seas are calm and the winds light and variable as we enter the sub-tropical high, known to mariner of previous centuries as the horse latitudes. Ahead lay more famous and infamous bands of climate: the tradewinds and the doldrums.
Beneath the bright sunlit surface of the sea, the marine life reflects and enlarges these themes. At Tristan we looked again into kelp forest, as we did in the Falklands and South Georgia, but new species of kelp have appeared while others begin to drop out. Large shoals of fish, absent in the Antarctic, flit through the watery gardens here, and some of them, like the Tristan wrasse (Nelabrichthys ornatus), herald the tropical communities we will soon encounter at Saint Helena and Ascension Island.
In the 21st Century, jet travel has knit our globe together in a way that is both convenient and indispensable to modern commerce. But for travelers sometimes slowing down can provide the quickest route to a new understanding of our beautiful little world.
Now the changes of this voyage are well begun. Cruising north from Tristan da Cunha, we have left the cold, grey-green seas of the south in our wake and entered a new realm: the bright blue waters of the subtropical South Atlantic. Now the real nature of our journey becomes clear. Over the past week and the next three we will traverse over 80 degrees of latitude and experience one of the great oceans of our planet in an intimate way, an intimacy known to very few travelers in the jet age. And, at the same time, we are all settling into the relaxed and contemplative pace of a long voyage at sea.
One of the first things we learn is that our world is banded. It is a relatively small planet, with oceans and atmosphere constantly mixed by wind and current, so these bands are not so obvious from space as those of Jupiter or Saturn. But the Earth is divided into great climatic zones along lines of latitude and on this journey we will traverse several of them, and come to know them as places rather than concepts.
Behind us now lie the windy waters of the west wind drift, the roaring forties and the furious fifties. All around us today the seas are calm and the winds light and variable as we enter the sub-tropical high, known to mariner of previous centuries as the horse latitudes. Ahead lay more famous and infamous bands of climate: the tradewinds and the doldrums.
Beneath the bright sunlit surface of the sea, the marine life reflects and enlarges these themes. At Tristan we looked again into kelp forest, as we did in the Falklands and South Georgia, but new species of kelp have appeared while others begin to drop out. Large shoals of fish, absent in the Antarctic, flit through the watery gardens here, and some of them, like the Tristan wrasse (Nelabrichthys ornatus), herald the tropical communities we will soon encounter at Saint Helena and Ascension Island.
In the 21st Century, jet travel has knit our globe together in a way that is both convenient and indispensable to modern commerce. But for travelers sometimes slowing down can provide the quickest route to a new understanding of our beautiful little world.
