“Category Five”
Porter Fox
Little, Brown, $30
Tales of sailing in storms and reporting on the oceanic dynamics that feed those storms combine to make up the bulk of this well-written book, marrying adventure with science. Porter Fox’s “Category Five” is about experiencing the ocean in all its awesome power and about its potential to help save the planet.
We all have observed in the media the ravages of ever stronger and more damaging storms whipped up over the ocean, storms that not only ravage coastlines but wreak disaster inland, as Helene did in the area around Asheville, N.C., just a few weeks ago.
In the bulk of this book, Mr. Fox explains how ocean currents and deep ocean processes create weather. He concludes with the hope that oceanographic research will provide viable answers to our climate crisis.
Here is how he predicts the weather, created by ocean processes, could look in 75 years:
“The most powerful storm ever seen on earth will form from a cluster of convective supercells” — rotations in the updraft of a storm — “sometime around 2100. The hurricane will be presaged by half a century of droughts, wildfires, floods, famines, and sea level rise. . . . Miami residents will no longer have to worry about superstorms, seawalls, building codes, or insurance lapses in 2100, as the city will no longer exist.”
A water-borne apocalypse.
He recounts recently sailing his boat from New York City to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod to consult with scientists studying ocean dynamics. His goal was to understand more about how the seas absorb CO2 (today they take in 50 percent of carbons in the atmosphere) and how these processes could be used to mitigate the oncoming climate catastrophe described above.
Most of us in the Northeast have so far been spared the worst of these negative weather changes — so far. But sailors here are more familiar with the drama of sudden storms at sea, and Porter Fox is one of them. To set the stage for the bad news to follow, he opens the book with a description of one of his own adventures on the deep blue.
“The storm hit like a breaking wave — a taut coil of energy that unleashed pulses of rain, swell, and lightning across the sea. Gusts blew so hard they knocked the tops off waves, vaporizing seawater into salty clouds of spray that blinded the man at the helm. . . . Wind moving that swiftly has weight and shape. It becomes a semisolid mass that can bend steel, uproot trees, or snap a boat’s mast in half. You can’t help but marvel in the middle of a blow. It’s often difficult to imagine that you will survive it either.”
Survival is his quest.
According to the scientists Mr. Fox interviews, the ocean, “which contains 95 percent of livable space on earth and nearly 100 percent of unexplored earth, could be the key to solving our current crises. Especially the extreme deep, where sunlight — even the thin beam of our metaphorical flashlight of knowledge — ends.”
The livable space he refers to is called the oceanic twilight zone, the ultimate deep.
“Those of us who grew up near the ocean know that plankton form the foundation of the marine food web,” he writes. Now we learn that plankton is eaten by phytoplankton, microscopic marine algae, and “zooplankton and other micro predators . . . digest phytoplankton and absorb their organic carbon. Larger animals then digest them and are eaten by ever larger ones” that “digest all the accumulated carbon and help transport it deeper into the ocean” in the form of marine snow (or fish poop).
That is how the seas absorb 50 percent of atmospheric carbon today.
But, as on land, the human species is of course the ultimate predator at sea — by overfishing. Lantern fish, for example, live in the twilight zone. They too are now becoming a viable catch.
“Norway issued forty-six exploratory fishing licenses for the zone in 2017” to make snacks. If, out of physical and monetary greed, we “wipe out all the lantern fish in the twilight zone you might just see a deadly spike in the sea and surface temperatures that jacks up severe storms and puts the planet over the climate tipping point.”
Fish eaters beware.
Ana Daniel, retired from business and academia, regularly reviews books for The Star. She lives in Bridgehampton.
Porter Fox teaches writing at Columbia University. His books include “The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World.”