Helmreich, Stefan. forthcoming, 2021. "Moderate Breeze: Seeing Sea States." In The Work of Wind: Sea. Christine Shaw and Etienne Turpin, eds. Pp ...
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Helmreich, Stefan. forthcoming, 2021. “Moderate Breeze:
Seeing Sea States.” In The Work of Wind: Sea. Christine
Shaw and Etienne Turpin, eds. Pp. 136-148. Berlin: K.
Verlag and Blackwood Gallery.
Small waves, becoming longer;
fairly frequent white horses
134 135
4 MODERATE BREEZE
Seeing Sea States
Stefan Helmreich
I am standing on a floating ocean-research platform stationed
thirty-five miles off the coast of Malibu, California, staring down
at the sea surface, which pulses and flutters some thirty-five feet
below me, visible through the grated metal walkway on which I
now steady my feet. I am on the FLoating Instrument Platform, or
R/P FLIP, a research vessel operated by the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, at the University of California at San Diego, just
down the coast in La Jolla. I’ve arrived here on this October day by
hiring a small boat from Marina Del Rey, a two-hour journey that
had the pilot and I skittering—actually more like thwacking—
across waves toward the coordinates provided by the chief scientist
for the research project now underway on FLIP. The nine people in
the science party and the five crew with whom I will spend the next
few days are already on board, working on a project examining the
interface where water meets air, where waves broker the turbulent
exchange of heat, gas, and momentum between sea and sky, modu-
lating weather and climate.
After a few years interviewing researchers at Scripps, I have
secured a berth on FLIP to do anthropological fieldwork on ocean-
ographic fieldwork. FLIP is a singular vessel, offering an off-kilter
vantage point on the sea. In its horizontal orientation, FLIP
travels in the orientation of an ordinary seagoing craft, although,
with no propulsive power of its own, it must be towed out from
port. But by “flipping” ninety degrees into a vertical position once
Fig. 1. FLIP upright, at sea.
Photo by author.
it arrives at a designated study location, it can become a towering
spar buoy, more or less stationary in the wave field, looking like
nothing so much as a floating metal treehouse. With seven-eighths
of the platform’s 108-meter length below the surface—and all of
137
the furniture and instrumentation inside its top eighth having A somewhat narrower set of questions—ones treated in parallel on
swiveled on gimbals by ninety degrees—scientists can study ocean this FLIP trip—focuses on how atmospheric conditions just above the
dynamics from a platform with only a slow bob. sea surface might affect the propagation of radio waves and micro-
FLIP’s capacity to flip by ninety degrees has made it an object waves from one site to another. 2 Understanding how the spatial 2 Qing Wang et al.,
“Sampling Spatial-
of scientific admiration and astonishment. The platform offers an distribution of water vapor (as moisture, humidity) hovering just Temporal Variability
of Electromagnetic
infrastructure that suggests the mind-and-gravity bending litho- above the waves might enable or ease telecommunication—might Propagation in CASPAR-
graphs of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, full of sideways doors, swivel- enable electromagnetic ducting—has applications to do with chan- West,” Proceedings of 13th
European Conference on
ing sinks, and tables in dual orientations. When I spend my first neling at-sea communication for a mix of civil, defense, and recre- Antennas and Propagation
(31 March–5 April 2019,
night on FLIP, I realize that my top bunk faces a ceiling that is, on ational purposes. Some uses might have to do with transmitting Krakow, Poland), online
at: ieeexplore.ieee.org/
sideways days, a door. signals across the surface with a minimum of distortion, even permit- document/8740189.
FLIP, built in 1962 and still largely in its original Tri-Ten steel ting over-the-horizon radar—a project that, it might be said, seeks to
self, came into service a couple of decades after Scripps research overcome the very notion of the horizon as a limit to knowledge.
on wave prediction during the Second World War, which mostly In all of this work about waves and their local conditions and
unfolded at or near beaches and aimed at forecasting wave patterns effects, knowing about the breeze is crucial. During my time on
in order to time Allied amphibious landings at Nazi-held beaches FLIP, however, no one talks, really, about anything like the old-
like Normandy. During the Cold War, Scripps oceanographers time Beaufort scale, that qualitative/quantitative optic for judging
turned their attention to the open sea, employing FLIP in research the strength of wind by observing the texture of a subtending sea.
tuned to monitoring and measuring wave trains consequent upon Instead, arrays of technologically animated wind measurements
Pacific Ocean storms—work that eventually provided the frame- are constantly in the making and taking. Wind is known not so
work for the surf forecasts upon which surfers, meteorologists, much by its feel on the face or its look to the eye, but rather though
coastal engineers, and others have come to depend. Scripps scien- its precisely measured speed as well as its shear. (According to the
tists also used FLIP during these years to study submarine acous- Oxford English Dictionary, a shear is “a variation in wind velocity
tics, research with a focused Cold War purpose. Indeed, the vessel, along a direction [usually vertical or horizontal] at right angles to
though operated by Scripps, is owned by the US Navy, a sign of the the wind’s direction.”) The impressionistic apprehension of wind
deep entanglement of oceanography with national military prerog- that was once given steady form by the Beaufort scale is not so
atives. As historian Naomi Oreskes has argued, many of the ques- much called for in this science—though it is true that the qualities
tions that have become of interest to oceanographers have been of the wind and waves are ever in the phenomenological experi-
contoured by military concerns, even if oceanographers them- ence of people on board. We all feel the wind on our faces, against
1
1 Naomi Oreskes, “A selves may have wider curiosities. our windbreakers, on our fingers. And we see its effects.
Context of Motivation:
U.S. Navy Oceanographic That remains the case, though a range of interesting questions On my second day at sea, I meet up with Dave Ortiz-Suslow,
Research and the
Discovery of Sea-Floor
has opened up. These days, investigations of how waves on the fresh from his PhD at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School
Hydrothermal Vents,” ocean surface interact with the atmosphere have become vital for of Marine and Atmospheric Science. 3 He stands on deck, studying 3 Suslow-Ortiz
Social Studies of Science is now an Assistant
33, no. 5 (2003): 697–742. physical oceanographers studying climate change. Air-sea interac- the waves. I ask him what he sees. Research Professor
in the Department of
tion at the oscillating, fluid boundaries of waves is of growing
Meteorology at the US
concern to research communities tracking the circuiting of green- Young waves developing. Westerlies turning on—it’s the after- Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, California.
house gases in sea and sky processes. Knowledge about ocean-at- noon sea breeze. It seems like the swell has died a little bit—
mosphere interchange is becoming key to climate models. but you can still see a longer oscillation coming in from the
138 139
Pacific Ocean. And the short waves we see here are going to
come and mess things up for everyone trying to surf. You’re
seeing whitecapping a bit—ten knots is about the cutoff. Nice
classic southern California wave field; this is what we’ve had
every single day. Except during the Santa Ana winds.
We are poised, I later realize, at the edge of the Beaufort scale’s
Force 3: Gentle Breeze, readying, perhaps, to enter Force 4: Moder-
ate Breeze. The young waves we see—waves just recently in the
making, by wind edging them into existence—will soon age,
stretching in wavelength and/or sometimes whitecapping. I take a
photo.
Many months later, I compare this image to a US National
Weather Service document entitled “Sea State Photographs for
Determining Wind Speed: The Beaufort Wind Force Scale,” 4 and I 4 United States National
Weather Service, “Sea
judge that it looks very much indeed like the photograph offered State Photographs for
Determining Wind Speed:
for Beaufort Force 4. The Beaufort Wind Force
Scale,” US Government
Posters. Book 59,
1987, online at: https://
digitalcommons.cwu.edu
/government_posters/59/
Fig 2. Wavescape, from
FLIP. Photo by author.
Fig. 3. Beaufort scale
reference image from
United States National
Weather Service, 1987.
There’s something uncanny about standing on the deck of FLIP,
and it is precisely due to the fact that FLIP does not really permit
one to feel the waves at which we are staring. Because of the
stability of the platform—and indeed because the vessel is a plat-
form—we seem to be suspended just above the sea surface. We are
among the waves, but not of them. That’s not surprising since FLIP
141
is meant to be a lab sited in the field, able to fix a frame of refer-
ence and objectify the sea and the winds, even in their midst. The
platform is not a vantage for what historian Lorraine Daston once
called “aperspectival objectivity,” but is rather an aerie offering a
kind of hovering, provisional, and located frame of reference, a
view not from nowhere, but from a close-by and controlled some-
where—though one that might later be factored out, to leave only
5 Lorraine Daston, wave measurements. 5
“Objectivity and the Escape
from Perspective,” Social As it happens, most of the scientific “seeing” of the effects of
Studies of Science 22, no.
4 (1992): 597–618.
wind on waves (and vice versa) is mediated by, delegated to, and
judged through technologies of digital visualization. Some of that
is through ever-updating and scrolling graphs of the frequencies at
which waves are forming and traveling. A moderate breeze might be
decodable from such a diagram although it would take a trained eye.
Some of the mediated scientific sea seeing out here on FLIP is
more traditionally photographic. Much of that visualization is
done at night, when scientists do not have to deal with the turbu-
lence caused by sunlight shining on—and further stirring up—the
water-air interface, where waves break. And so, questions about
wind and waves literally keep scientists up at night.
“The sun for me is noise,” Moscow-born, Florida-trained ocean-
ographer Ivan Savelyev tells me. Working at night, he avers, makes Fig. 4. An infrared image,
from above, of waves on
6 For a description of
the open-ocean “field” more like a “lab,” where variables are 1.5 square meters of sea
the technique, see Ivan controlled—and, indeed, the very flip of the platform from hori- surface, striped with laser
Savelyev and Julian Fuchs, lines projected to track
“Stereo Thermal Marking zontal to vertical makes the vessel not so much immersed in a field patterns of turbulence.
Velocimetry,” Frontiers in From the research of Ivan
Mechanical Engineering, as floating above it—moving from the tossed time of the sea, to a Savelyev.
Thermal and Mass
Transport 4, no. 1 (2018).
time outside and above. I have run into Ivan just as he is starting
For an account of its use his day at 5 p.m. The scientific apparatus he is using, on the star-
particularly in concert with board boom that pokes out from FLIP’s center, features two, mid-
of internal (subsurface) wave, infrared cameras pointed down at the ocean surface on an
Ortiz-Suslow, Qing Wang,
area of 1.5 square meters. Onto this patch of sea, Ivan projects
John Kalogiros, Ryan beams of infrared laser light—light just below the visible spec-
Yamaguchi, Tony de
Paolo, Eric Terrill, R. Kipp trum—that he has arranged into grids, points, and lines. He images
Shearman, Pat Welch, and
Ivan Savelyev, “Interactions those lines through two cameras (to compose a stereo image) whose
between Nonlinear Internal
Ocean Waves and the
feeds he can translate into visibility on his laptop in FLIP’s sci-
Atmosphere,” Geophysical ence lab [See Fig. 4, from one screen: we look down onto the sea
Research Letters 46, no. 15
(2019): 9291–9. surface, striped with infrared]. 6
142The lines wriggle on the sea surface, revealing patterns of tion. Marc likes these images; they remind him of Hokusai’s The
turbulence. I find the image transfixing. Infrared light, which Great Wave off Kanagawa. These images track, to quote the title of
discloses heat signatures, lingers for a moment after it hits a this collection, the work of wind.
surface, leaving lagging traces that track the motion of water. It is We are far, then, from the Beaufort scale. The effects of some-
almost as though Ivan’s apparatus enacts an ancient Greek theory thing like “moderate breeze” are no longer—or not so much—as-
of vision that has eyes shooting beams out at the world to know, to sayed with the unaided eye as they are monitored through tech-
behold. The images, which slur like molasses, relay the material niques of on-beyond-human machine visualization (often in
otherness of the sea, even as their eeriness emerges from algorith- spectral bands not available to the naked eye), techniques that
mic data conversions first developed for night-vision surveillance. make of the sea a different kind of territory than that imaged and
But while these look like otherworldly waves, waves with invisible imagined by the nineteenth-century maritime framers of the scale.
lives, they are also waves that, known through the thermoception For European mariners, the ocean was a site of colonial and
of infrared, are very much of our moment, when tracking the imperial maritime expansion and wind was one of its infrastruc-
exchange of temperature across the interface of water and air may tural conditions. For scientists on FLIP, the sea surface is a zone
be key to understanding what media theorist Nicole Starosielski to be queried for its news about weather and climate change.
7
7 Nicole Starosielski, calls the “intense thermal volatility” of climate change. At the same time, some of the work from this FLIP trip—par-
“Infrared,” Society and
Space, 1 April 2019, online ticularly to do with radar—will become available to US national
at: societyandspace.org/
articles/infrared.
What is Ivan trying to find out? He dictates the following: aims to project technological and political power across sea space.
Wind, now, is no longer understood so much for its effects on, say,
To resolve the fluctuations of wave and turbulence fields on sails—nor, here, for its effects on aero-hydrodynamics—but rather
the smallest spatial scales, and to see how they respond to for its effect on the near sea surface electromagnetic infrastruc-
atmospheric and wave forcing as well as larger scale oceano- ture of communication. Walter Mignolo might argue that wind is
graphic conditions, such as currents and internal waves. brought in as a standardized operator enlisted into an “epistemi-
Ultimately the results of this research should improve our cally imperial” modernist form, 9 something that enables what 9 Walter D. Mignolo, The
Darker Side of Western
10
understanding of mixing processes across the air-sea interface, James Scott would call “seeing like a state,” making the world Modernity: Global Futures,
Decolonial Options
with implications for weather and climate forecasts. legible for modern governance—or, forgive the pun, seeing like a (Durham: Duke University
sea state. But such an infrastructure unfolds into a complex net- Press, 2011), 205.
One of Ivan’s colleagues on board, Marc Buckley, a French-Ameri- work, with many players, not only American, not only national and 10 James C. Scott, Seeing
Like a State: How Certain
can postdoc, is also interested in wind-wave interactions. He has naval, but also civil, non-governmental, and more. More, as Dave Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have
stationed cameras that point obliquely at the sea surface below the pointed out in his mention of the Santa Ana winds: there are Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale
boom. Nearby, he has positioned a fog generation system, sending ongoing processes not fully brought into such regimes. During my University Press, 1998).
water particles dancing in the air above the waves. To take freeze- stay on FLIP, the Orange County Canyon Fire 2 sent smoke over
frame photos of this dance, he has installed a laser-beam generator the sea, interrupting any full, a priori account of the work of
8 This work seeks to
that, through beam manipulation, creates a sheet of green light wind.
lab work reported in Marc
P. Buckley and Fabrice that slices down through the air, reflecting fog droplets, permit- In his 2015 Antipode Lecture, Paul Gilroy calls for “sea level
Veron, “Structure of the
ting him to capture ten-nanosecond, cross-section snapshots of theory” as a remedy for “high-altitude theorizing” of the kind
Waves,” Journal of Physical waves. Figures 5A and 5B show two sequential images, half a lately done by Anthropocene commentators, who often seem to
Oceanography, no. 46
8
(2016): 1377–97. millisecond apart. Read as a movie, they record fog particle mo- approach thinking about the world as though they are in outer
144 145Figs. 5A & 5B. Two sequential images of cross- sectioned waves, imaged with laser light by Marc Buckley.
11 Paul Gilroy, “Where space. 11 But there are many sea levels. That is, there are many ways
Every Breeze Speaks
of Courage and Liberty: sea level operates as an epistemological vantage, not all of which
Marine Xenology, or,
counter the abstractions of theorizing at altitude. Consider that
Racism and the Problem the earliest articulations of sea level were to do with maritime
of Critique at Sea Level,”
Antipode 50, no. 1 (2018): standardization, particularly at Amsterdam, Liverpool, and Ven-
3–22.
ice. 12 Global sea-level is a historically and socially engineered
12 Wilko Graf von
Hardenberg, “Point Zero:
abstraction that emerges from European seafaring and colonial
The Mean Sea-Level in calibrations, which then sediment into a baseline for world mea-
Practice, Science, and
Diplomacy,” Colloquium, sures in fields like geodesy. On FLIP, the level of the sea is bound
Department III, Max Planck
Institute for the History of up with what we could call a kind of low-altitude theorizing, one
Science, Berlin, Germany,
2016.
that turns newly to the sea surface, at once a zone of striated state
space and a canary in the climate change coal mine, an at-risk sea
over which moderate breezes may betoken more than shifting sea
states.
STEFAN HELMREICH is Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is the author of Alien
Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press,
2009) and Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and
Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in Critical
Inquiry, Representations, Public Culture, The Wire, Cabinet, and BOMB.
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