Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  Typhoon Haiyan makes the point well. It was first spotted far away, by observers in Hawaii. The four duty officers who arrived for their night shift on the early evening of Friday, November 1, 2013, in the drab Pearl Harbor building that houses the offices of the Joint Typhoon Warning Center were the first to notice something unusual. The satellite images for their routine sweep of the far western Pacific (where it was already the afternoon of the next day, Saturday) were just scrolling onto their monitors. And while most of the ocean was quiet—just a single disorganized cluster of squalls, a small and nameless tropical storm, that was wandering aimlessly westward toward Mindanao—a new pattern of clouds had just sprung into view in the central ocean, and this one had an ominous look about it.

  The proto-cyclone, if that is what this was, must have been developing rapidly during the day, for the earlier shift had reported nothing from the satellite when it last transmitted pictures six hours previously. But now, quite clearly, wisps of cloud had arranged themselves in a manner suggesting that a definite and organized pattern was forming, about two hundred fifty miles to the southeast of the tiny island of Pohnpei, in Micronesia, and that it was changing its appearance fast. Real-time imagery then showed that it was assuming the all too familiar, vaguely swirling cyclonic appearance that betokens danger. The suddenness of its appearance and the fast lowering of pressure beneath the cover of clouds all struck the weather analysts as noteworthy, at the very least.

  They promptly sent a message across the road to the operations room of Pacific Fleet headquarters: U.S. Navy ships in the area might want to know that wind and rain could well affect any vessels heading for that quarter of the sea. A routine message. No alarums and excursions. Not yet.

  By November 3, the Japan Meteorological Agency outside Tokyo had assigned the now swirling wisps of cloud a number, Tropical Storm 31W. By the next day, the swirls had grown very much more powerful, and the storm had been upgraded to full typhoon status. It was given the preassigned name Haiyan, the Chinese word for “petrel,” a bird that in mariners’ lore is often associated with foul weather. The fast-gathering beast by now appeared to be moving in a westerly direction, traveling directly toward the barrier wall of the Philippine Islands, where the local weather agency, following its own naming rules, had confusingly decided not to follow the international rules, but to call the storm Yolanda.

  The situation was becoming alarming. The American and Japanese weather forecasters, and later those watching the big weather radars in China and Hong Kong, knew this was going to be a monster storm. They began to issue warnings to the civil defense agencies in the southern Philippines—the accuracy of their forecast allowing them to offer some days of preparation for the onslaught of what was now clearly going to be a storm of a power seldom seen before at sea, and perhaps never before experienced on land. Evacuations were ordered, and people began to stream away from the country’s southeastern coasts, where the storm was predicted to land.

  The forecasts were right, nearly to the minute. Typhoon Haiyan struck head-on into the eastern Philippines, hitting the islands of Samar and Leyte almost simultaneously, at about 9:00 a.m. on Friday, November 8. By the time it reached land, it had become the fiercest typhoon to have done so in the world’s recorded history. When the northern eye wall of the storm struck the village of Guiuan, such anemometers as hadn’t already whirled off scale recorded wind gusts of 196 miles per hour—greater by far than anything previously known.

  The physical and human damage was terrifying in its extent and consequence, although the warnings and the precision of the forecasts certainly helped keep down the total of human casualties. Sixty-five hundred people were killed, twenty-seven thousand were injured, and more than a thousand were missing. Just as in Darwin forty years before, whole cities were flattened, every building reduced to mere debris as if by an earthquake or an atom bomb. The city of Tacloban, the biggest in the region, was almost unrecognizable after first being hit by the full force of the storm, and then being swamped by the corrosive seawaters of the thirteen-foot storm surge that followed.

  There was an uncanny coincidence in the Philippines that did not pass unnoticed. Landfall in 2013 of Haiyan, the most savage of all the world’s storms, was made along the coast of Leyte Gulf, the site in 1944 of the most savage of all the world’s naval battles. Two of the nearby villages have since been named for Douglas MacArthur, the general being a great hero in these parts. His famous “I Shall Return” promise is commemorated by a bronze statue depicting him and his staff striding through the ankle-deep waters to resume control of the Philippines; it stands by the beach where the event took place, in the tiny town of Palo. All three of these places, Palo and the two villages called MacArthur, were savagely damaged by the violence of the typhoon.

  Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated much of the Leyte Gulf region of the southeastern Philippines in late 2013, brought a massive international response, most notably by the U.S. military—a classic demonstration of Washington’s use of “soft power.”* [Jacques Descloitres/NASA.]

  American military forces were quite as heavily involved in dealing with Haiyan’s violence now, seventy years after the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Thanks once again to the accuracy of the forecasts, U.S. Marines and U.S. Navy ships were already on standby in Japan and Okinawa, or they were out at sea. Once the signal came that the State Department had agreed to respond to Manila’s official request for help, the well-oiled machinery of a full-blown American-led rescue operation got under way.

  Operation Damayan, the $21 million quick in-and-out rescue operation, formally began the next morning, Saturday, November 9. The night before, however, when a stunned Tacloban was still crawling out from under the storm’s wreckage, a small flotilla of helicopters quietly brought in members of a U.S. Special Forces team that was already in-country, secretly helping to deal with a long-running insurgency.2 They set up radios and began talking to the incoming armada of ships and the waves of marines who would soon fill Leyte Gulf with as many vessels as had been there seventy years earlier, during the legendary naval battle.

  More than eight hundred U.S. Marines from the Third Expeditionary Brigade in Okinawa were on the ground in the Philippines by the Saturday afternoon. A survey ship already working in the gulf was on station the next day, and then a submarine tender, filled with emergency supplies and drinking water. The high point, at least cinematically, was the arrival on the Thursday of the huge nuclear-powered carrier USS George Washington, with her attendant strike group of destroyers and frigates. She anchored in the bay and, for the next eight days, served as a floating headquarters for a relief operation that ultimately involved twenty-two hundred U.S. military personnel, thirteen warships, twenty-one helicopters, and the distribution of two thousand tons of American food, blankets, tents, generators, water purifiers, and myriad other kinds of aid invariably needed in the aftermath of such a calamity.

  The sight of this vastly impressive, hulking, broad-shouldered behemoth of a warship, and of the squadrons of lesser vessels anchored around her (these later included two British ships, a destroyer and a carrier) was at once powerful, comforting, reassuring. It served as a reminder, important in the propaganda wars, that American military influence in the world is predicated not only on war and the projection of hard power. This was so-called soft power projection at its most effective—and once the immediate storm crisis was over and the American carrier had weighed anchor and slipped off back into patrolling the China seas, Washington propagandists publicly pointed out how little the Chinese had done to help. Beijing had initially offered a laughable $100,000. Only when stung by the world’s response to their seeming niggardliness did they increase the aid to $1.6 million, and send down from Shanghai a new hospital ship, on what turned out to be her maiden voyage. She arrived too late to be of much use.

  Beyond the melancholy dramas of their immediate impact, storms like these have proved of great use in recent studies of the world’s climate. They and their kin offer
in particular many clues for understanding one thing and for realizing another. They have allowed for an ever-greater understanding of the dramatic recent changes in the planet’s atmospheric environment. And they and their like have served to offer a confirmation of something long suspected but never firmly proved: that whatever the changes in the earth’s climate may be, it is and always has been the Pacific Ocean that is the generator, the originator, of much of the world’s weather.

  Tracy and Haiyan were more than simple events, however individually tragic and dramatic. They were bookends to a catalogue of atmospheric occurrences in the Pacific Ocean that have been getting steadily more ferocious in recent years, and to some they tell a much greater and more significant story—a story that many are now beginning to relate with ever-greater urgency.

  In March 2013, for example, six full months before Haiyan hit the Philippines, Samuel Locklear III, the American four-star admiral who was then in charge of all U.S. forces in and around the Pacific (three hundred thousand navy, army, marine, and air force personnel, ranged around more than half the world), detected a pattern in the frequency and violence of recent Pacific typhoons, and then made what seemed to many an eccentric prediction. His initial observation was factually unremarkable: “Weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past,” he declared at a meeting in Boston. “We are already on super-typhoon 27 or 28 here in the Western Pacific. The annual average is about 17.”

  The conclusion he drew from the trend, though, was quite unanticipated. In spite of the tensions between China and Japan, between North and South Korea, between Beijing and Washington, the admiral declared his belief that it was actually changes to the climate—changes that were powerfully suggested by typhoon clusterings that he and his weather analysts had observed—that posed the greatest of all security threats in the region.

  “Significant upheaval related to the warming planet is probably the thing most likely to happen . . . and that will cripple the security environment. Probably that will be more likely than the other scenarios we often talk about.” A ripple of amazement coursed through Washington. Significantly, no one in the White House or the Pentagon, however, chose to challenge the admiral’s view. It was clear that he spoke with gazetted authority.3

  Not that the admiral’s stated concern over the number of storms that gathered within his AOR (navyspeak for “area of responsibility”) was meant to imply that storms in the other, lesser oceans were any less daunting. Notorious monsters such as Katrina, Camille, Andrew, Ike, Sandy, Hugo, Wilma, Rita, the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, the Okeechobee hurricane of 1928—all these were great Atlantic storms of truly historic proportions, and all were hugely destructive and frightening.

  “Destructive” and “frightening” are not true measurements, however. Nor is the most commonly used metric of a storm’s financial cost. In America, Atlantic hurricanes tend to be popularly described by their eventual price—the quoted losses for the insurance companies of $108 billion in and around New Orleans in 2005 have made Katrina come to be seen as the absolute worst storm in American history. But cost can hardly be a neutral descriptor: Storms that strike American cities are expensive because they wreck expensive things. Storms that strike isolated cities in the eastern Philippines may cause just as much devastation, but in dollar terms are much less costly. Human damage, of course, is different—still, that is not neutral, either, since a typhoon hitting a crowded slum will kill far more than one that sinks ships and swamps atolls in the middle of the ocean.

  We do have scales to measure storm intensity, but they are not perfect. Most use wind speed as a categorizing device because wind is what does the greatest damage. It also suggests the overall energy (the kinetic energy of a fast-rotating body of air) of the storm as a whole. Critics reasonably complain also that it is imprudent to ignore the amount of rainfall dropped by a storm, or the speed with which the storm develops, or the surge it creates in the sea. They insist that a wind-only classification is of somewhat limited use—at least, beyond the television news.

  Arguably the most ideal and neutral way to describe a storm is much simpler, if hardly telegenic, and that is according to the lowest pressure in the storm’s eye. The lower the pressure, the more intense the storm. The more numerous the isobars, and the more tightly these imaginary lines of equal atmospheric pressure are wound together, the more vicious is the weather below.

  This measurement of a storm’s minimum central pressure—something that was not always easy to acquire in the days before satellites and storm-hunting aircraft, and even today often requires that a dropsonde be trickily inserted into the storm’s eye—makes comparison much easier. It makes it possible to measure one ocean’s violence against that of another, for instance. It makes it simpler to compare the storms of one year with those of previous years, to range decades against earlier decades. In short, and therefore most usefully, it allows climatologists to spot and identify real climatic trends.

  By employing this one measure, scientists are able to determine that the apparently biggest and costliest storms do in fact, and much as expected, tend to be the deeper and more isobarically intense ones. By this same measure, oceans can now be compared with other oceans. And recent data show that most Atlantic hurricanes, when measured according to the lowest pressure in their eyes, yield overwhelmingly in their strength, power, and destructiveness to those gigantic storms (such as Tracy and Haiyan) that now regularly cannonade across the broad reaches of the Pacific.

  The key number that the World Meteorological Organization has chosen as a baseline for assessing a storm’s strength is 925 hectopascals, or what used to be called millibars (mbar). Any storm eye with a pressure measured as less than 925 mbar is one for the books, intense enough to be worthy of record.4 And when one looks at the Pacific Ocean using that measure alone, it becomes swiftly clear that this body of water is beyond any other when it comes to playing host to a number of the world’s truly intense tropical storms.

  The figures are telling. In the Atlantic since 1924, just nineteen hurricanes made it into the list of storms with eye pressures of less than 925 mbar. Just one out of five of those (the hurricanes known as Labor Day 1935, Allen, Gilbert, Rita, and Wilma) were superintense, with eye pressures of less than 900 mbar. Neither Camille nor Katrina managed to figure below the 900 mbar number. Hurricane Sandy, infamous in recent New York and New Jersey history, did not even make the World Meteorological Organization cut, registering a comparatively benign 940 mbar in its nonspinning center.

  In the western North Pacific, however, atmospheric violence as measured by intensely low eye pressure is much more common, almost routine. Since 1950, there have been fifty-nine fully formed typhoons north of the equator, and in the western South Pacific and off Australia there have been twenty-five similarly rated cyclones since 1975. In the Atlantic, the rate of occurrences of the sub-925 mbar storms runs at about one every five years. In the western Pacific they are much more numerous, with about one every single year.

  Moreover, the large, sprawling, ultra-low-pressure storms occur five times more often in the Pacific than elsewhere in the world. They are generally much more intense, with thirty-seven of the northwest Pacific’s fifty-nine having pressures lower than 900 mbar. Typhoon Tip, the deepest of them all, recorded an eye-watering low pressure of just 870 mbar—and enjoyed the unique distinction of being both the deepest and the widest of all tropical storms on record, with an edge-to-edge spread of 1,380 miles—meaning that if superimposed on the United States, it would have extended from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, and from Yosemite to the Mississippi River, with its eye directly above Denver.5

  The best explanation for why the Pacific storms are now more numerous and violent has much to do with the ocean’s vast size and, most crucially, with the near-unimaginable amount of heat that its waters collect from the sun. And this, it seems, is key to everything else: if the Pacific Ocean is the principal generator of the world’s weather, then the ul
timate source of all the Pacific’s extreme meteorological behavior is the initial presence of its massive aggregation of solar-generated heat. This changes the long-term phenomenon we know as the climate. The climate in turn brings about the short-term phenomena we know as the weather.

  The Pacific Ocean is broiled by the sun, whatever the season. Given the tilt of the planet, the 23.5 degrees offset from vertical of the axis around which the world spins, the ocean’s northern parts are broiled in the northern summer, and the southern parts in the southern summer. The immense region of sea that lies between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are being broiled all the time.

  The heat, the thermal energy, that blasts endlessly down on the planet is dealt with differently depending on whether it strikes solid or liquid below. When intense sunshine radiates down onto the solid earth, the rocks become very hot very quickly—but then, because of the immutable physics of solids, they release this heat equally fast, return it to the atmosphere, and retain little. To a wanderer in the desert, a rock at nighttime can be blessedly cool.

  It is different when the same intense heat is radiated down onto the ocean. Initially the water warms slowly, but then, and crucially, it retains the heat it has absorbed for some long while. Because it is a liquid, mobile entity, it then shifts this captured heat about, three-dimensionally. Under the influence of its currents and its surface winds, it drives the captured thermal energy either laterally, from east to west, or from north to south. Or else, by way of a pattern known as thermohaline circulation, it shifts the heat deep downward into its depths. Since the Pacific is by far the deepest ocean as well as the broadest and longest, the amount of heat it can incorporate within is almost beyond imagination.

  Heat, in immeasurable quantities, is stored in the world’s oceans generally. The Pacific, which occupies one-third of the planet’s entire surface area, is responsible, then, for storing a very great deal of it. Much of this stored heat then warms the atmosphere. It does so most especially where the sea is subject to the most intense solar heating, along that wide band of ocean between the tropics and along the equator, a band that shifts to the north and the south as the seasons change.