That same night as I listened, my spirit guide See Do went on. He talked about the air, the water, the winds, the geology, and life, within us and outside us.
And he talked about the infinite grains of dust moving over rock, sculpting with timeless patience. The dust is carried on the air and rock is carved away.
We can sit on the steps and feel the breeze. We raise our face into it to smell its offering. The richness of the world. It feels good to be outside in it.
But the air carries something more. In fact this something is its very life engine. It is heat. The dynamics of thermal energy on the air drive everything the air around us does. Everything it does for the world, for us and to us.
This paradise planet blooms with heat from the sun. It is carried through our atmosphere endlessly in a complex dance well beyond the powers of the mightiest computers to simulate. It unfolds and refolds its subtle computations with ease. And without error out to the very last decimal place.
So there is a price to pay for living in such intimate contact with such a dynamic and powerful system. Heat must be rebalanced. As the ocean warms in summer, the heat rises up into the air carrying great energy and great quantities of water. These movements naturally organize from randomly tumbling clouds spilling out their white cargo high in the sky into cooler air, into waves of mass in motion that, once attaining a certain scale, will be drawn toward a center, falling in step with a the natural rotation that further draws the upwelling of energy from the warm ocean surface below.
A hurricane is born. The world must seek balance and the heat is taken up on the air and carried to cooler, emptier latitudes. Along the way as the energy grows and tightens its spin, the wind will move at greater and greater speed.
The energy carried here is colossal. Well beyond man’s atomic bombs and rockets. And utterly invisible. A stunning fact of our world. We can feel the breeze; we can see the moisture, the mist, the rain. We can see the dust and flying debris. But the air will never show its face. Even drained of energy, condensed into liquid. Oxygen, nitrogen, helium, argon, hydrogen and the rest. They all become liquid metal as clear as the purest water.
But here in our world they swirl in motion all around. And that motion is driven by heat.
And inside the hurricane that swirling, turning, driving energy actually has the power to pull the ocean up from its moorings. The surface is sucked up. Pulled up by the low pressure suction of the core drawing more and more energy off the surface and driven on winds spilling out, reaching well over a hundred miles per hour. A new thing is given life: the tidal hurricane swell. During hurricane Katrina, along the coast of Louisiana, this swell exceeded twenty-three feet. It rolled ashore with predictably devastating consequences.
If you take a globe of the Earth into your hands, and with a marker, highlight the areas of shoreline that will regularly be hit by a devastating hurricane or typhoon, you will mark over a few very small stretches. Your marker trail will also express a fair warning. These places should take care. They should be ready. They should prepare. Or they should be empty.
They same will be true of earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and the rest. The patterns of life are written on this planet for everyone to read. The “when” is all we lack. The “where” becomes more precisely prescribed with each passing calamity.
The instruction is See Do. And I do think I’m getting it.
— continued (Part IV: The Earth’s energy within)