The Circulation of Earth’s Atmosphere and Ocean

Abstract

The modern atmospheric circulation reflects the state of the planet with ice on both poles. Warm air rises in the equatorial region and sinks in the polar regions. But the rotation of the earth causes equatorward flowing air to appear to be turned to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere. The result is three cells per hemisphere. Those on either side of the equator are the Hadley cells, those in the polar regions are the Polar cells; these drive an intermediate pair of cells, the Ferrell cells. The winds drive the ocean currents; the water moves to the right of the wind in the northern hemisphere, and to the left in the southern hemisphere. The winds set up large anticyclonic gyres between the equator and a latitude of about 60 ̊N and S. These warm water gyres overlie cold water that sinks in the polar region. The waters between these two masses in which the temperature declines rapidly with depth are known as thermocline and intermediate waters. They sink into the ocean along the Subtropical and Polar frontal system that border the great gyres. The deep waters of the ocean form a ‘Great Conveyor.’ Cold saline waters sink in the Greenland–Iceland–Norwegian (GIN) Sea and overflow the Greenland–Scotland Ridge into the North Atlantic Basin. There they mix with warm saline Mediterranean outflow waters, and flow southward as North Atlantic deep water. Some of this wells up near the Weddell Sea, is chilled, and sinks again as Antarctic Bottom Water, flowing eastward to end up in the Pacific. Slow upwelling of deep waters occurs throughout the lower latitude ocean, but more rapid upwelling occurs along the eastern margins of the ocean basins where equatorward blowing winds drive the surface water offshore. Special disturbances of the general circulation occur periodically in the Pacific (El Niño - La Niña, The Southern Oscillation) and the Atlantic (North Atlantic Oscillation) Ocean circulation on the warmer Earth of the Cretaceous was very different from that of today. Atmospheric pressure systems at the poles reversed with the seasons, winds were inconstant, and the great ocean gyres were replaced by myriads of eddies.

Intermezzo XXII. Decision Time

After the decision to cancel the Ocean Margin Drilling Program was made, the way was clear to re-open negotiations with the National Science Foundation and our international partners for scientific ocean drilling to succeed the DSDP which would end in 1983 . If fact two years is a short fuse to develop, organize, and implement such a complex effort.

• Meanwhile Ronald Reagan had discovered that the USSR was one of the programs supporters and ordered that they be dropped.

• A ‘Conference on Scientific Ocean Drilling’ to define the program’s objectives was held in Austin, Texas, in November 1981 . A proposal was prepared by JOIDES and sent to JOI to forward on to the National Science Foundation. As all this was proceeding we hit a snag.

• The DSDP had been managed by Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Lolla, California. The drilling vessel contracted by Scripps was the GLOMAR Challenger, owned and operated by Global Marine, Inc., of Houston, Texas. We were told that the White House wanted to have any future continuation of the DSDP be made through a sole-source contract with Scripps and Global Marine. A sole-source contract an only be made when no other organization can provide the necessary service.

• But a few years earlier I had visited SEDCO, and knew that they wanted to bid on any future program. Jack Clotworthy warned that trying to go sole-source would surely attract the ire of the Congress and torpedo the proposed program. The matter was brought before the JOI Board of Governors. Bill Nierenberg argued that Scripps was uniquely qualified to operate any future program. He angrily asked how SEDCO had gotten involved, and I recounted my meeting of a couple of years earlier. Finally, the Board agreed that Scripps was probably the most highly qualified potential operator, and would probably win the contract; but we had to go out for bids.

• In the meantime Mike Halbouty had contacted his old alma mater, Texas A & M, and convinced them that they should think about getting involved. You will remember that I had made a presentation about the OMD program to him when he was Acting Secretary of Energy. Mike understood that scientific ocean drilling was at the cutting edge of the science. He realized that if Texas A & M became the operator of the new program the University would achieve the international recognition it deserved. He must have made a very good presentation to the University administration because when the bids came back in, that from Texas A & M was far and away the best offer. They would build a facility at University expense and provide extensive support. Scripps offered no real competition. Similarly, the offer from SEDCO was significantly better than that from Global Marine.

• The new project, which became operational in 1985, was simply the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP). Its operations would continue until 2004. The international partnership no longer included the USSR, but was expanded by including ECOD , the European Science Foundation Consortium for Ocean Drilling with Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland being members.

• I thought I had seen though this difficult transition from DSDP to ODP through, and now it was time to do something different. I had accumulated 48 years of service on various JOIDES Committees and Panels. I didn’t want to sit back and oversee the new drilling operations from Washington. Ordinary, if one had served in a position like President of JOI, one could easily be recycled into other D.C. based organizations or into the governmental agencies, but I wanted to return to science. It was now 1982, the period of expansion of US science was over, and landing a senior faculty position was not going to be easy. I did not want to return to Miami; the Rosenstiel School had a new Dean, and being there could become awkward. I wanted to pursue a new direction, and there was an exciting opportunity for research in Colorado.

• In 1982 the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder was being considered fro possible expansion to also become the National Center for Oceanographic Computing. I wanted to continue the efforts at climate and ocean modeling we had started a few years earlier, when we had sent Eric Barron to NCAR. The results he had obtained, showing that the warm climate of the Cretaceous had resulted from increased levels of atmospheric CO ₂ were intriguing. Some in the scientific community were beginning to seriously wonder whether the burning of fossil fuels might eventually change Earth’s climate.

• As a geologist, I had little chance of getting a research position at NCAR itself, but I had contacts at two nearby universities. The University of Colorado in Boulder and Colorado School of Mines in Golden. I wrote to friends there and asked if they knew of any openings. No senior faculty in geology were being sought at either. But Erle Kaufmann at CU Boulder told me the University Museum was looking for a new Director.

• I had never thought about becoming Director of a Museum, but I did have a friend who was just that. J. Tuzo Wilson was a famous geophysicist who had become Director of the Ontario Museum in Toronto. I called him up. “Bill, being a Museum Director is the best job on Earth; you can continue your research and you will meet a host of interesting people”. I applied for the job in Colorado.

• As I began to think abut what I could do as a Museum Director it occurred to me that if there were going to be changes in Earth’s climate, Colorado, with its great elevation differences, would be one of the first places where it would be noticed. On doing a little research I realized that no one at CU Boulder was thinking about climate change. Susan Solomon’s work on the ozone hole would come a few years later.

• As I had my interviews with the faculty of the Museum and University administrators, I talked about climate change and the critical location of Colorado. Only one person took it seriously, Vice Chancellor Milton Lipetz, the person responsible for the hiring. I was ‘overqualified’ for the position and he was hesitant to offer it to me because he could not match my salary at JOI. I made it clear that salary was not the most important consideration for me, and we made a compromise. I started my new job in the fall of 1982.

• I was soon called back to Washington to be the speaker at a dinner for the potential foreign contributors of ODP. It was a joint NSF—State Department—JOI affair, and protocol dictated who sat were. I was impressed to be at the head table. Lev Ropes had made beautiful slides for my presentation and copies were given to each of the participants to use back home. My final statement was simple: “It is not a question whether you can afford to join this program; the question is whether you can afford not to join it”. That became a slogan. NSF was delighted. Everything looked very promising.

• I made another trip to Washington in the fall to explore the possibilities of grants to the Museum. Some colleagues from NSF wanted a private meeting. We met at one of my father’s favorite places for private meetings, over lunch at l’Espionage, a small restaurant in the Foggy Bottom area. NSF’s message was simple, the foreign partners were interested, but none had yet made a commitment. Somebody needed to kick the ball off dead center. Did I have any ideas? I did.

• Over the Christmas-New Year break I made a trip to Europe to visit Museums and look into their operations. Museum Directors love to talk to other Museum Directors as Tuzo had explained, so I was well received everywhere. But on my visit to Germany I had another goal. The Germans were very excited about the drilling program. Their contact person was Eugen Seibold, who I had come to know well over the years. He was the most well-known marine geologist in Germany. Eugen has an ebullient personality and it had always been a joy to work with him. We met in Munich in a little café near the National Theater and I explained the situation to him. He smiled. “The money is already appropriated here, so of course, I will make a big thing of it: Here is our funding for the program, now let’s get on with it”. A week or two after I got back, I learned that he had done just that, and the other partners were falling into line.

• Only one of my museum faculty took my idea of starting to document climate change seriously, Bill Weber, the botanist. While he insisted that research like that was not a curator’s job, he started keeping records.

• In 1983 I was also made a faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences, and named as a member of CIRES, the cooperative institute between NOAA and CU that had served as a model for CIMAS at the Rosenstiel School. Cooperation with colleagues at NCAR on research flourished. My efforts to encourage Museum faculty to seek outside support for their research were not so successful.

• I began to attend meetings of Museum Administrators and found them to be a very helpful group. We even received new display cases from a Museum in Calgary which no longer needed them. And I learned about the Museum equivalent to the Rosenstiel Schools yacht donation program.

• Many donations to Museums are valuable objects given with no strings attached, but there is also the ‘conditional gift’. This is usually a work of art or valuable artifact that is given on the condition that the Museum must fulfil some condition, such as its display, within a certain time frame. In most instances the condition is simply that the donor wants to object to be seen, and not just put in storage. However, some of the conditions are use in another way. You may get an offer, as we did at CU, of a valuable object or collection with the stipulation that it must be on permanent display, or even that a new room or wing of the Museum be built to house it. When the new room or wing is not built within a certain time, the objects must be returned to the donor. What happens is this; the donor take a tax write off when the gift is first made. When he takes it back, he simply forgets to correct that tax write off. By law, the Museum becomes responsible for paying the tax. It seemed that almost everyone at a meeting of Museum administrators had a story to tell abut such an innovative scheme.

• Vice Chancellor Milt Lipetz, who had enthusiastically supported me, died suddenly in 1987. His successor had no interest in the CU Museum. In 1988I would be up for a sabbatical leave, and so I decided to resign as Director, move to the Department of Geological Sciences, and then take my sabbatical.