Book description
In 1960 Captain Joseph Kittinger fell to earth from the edge of
space and survived. He stepped from the basket of a gigantic helium
balloon into an appalling, hostile environment which, without the
protection of a pressure suit, would have simultaneously frozen his
body and boiled away his blood. And yet it is the air that Kittinger
fell through that makes our lives on earth possible.
We not only live in the air, we live because of it.
And air is about much more than just breathing. At ground level air
transforms miraculously into solid food, and without it every creature
on earth would starve; it wraps our planet in a blanket of warmth;
radio signals bounce off a floating mirror of metal in the air to
travel round the world; and the outer layer of our atmosphere soaks up
flares from the sun more violent than all the world's nuclear warheads
put together.
Gabrielle Walker traces a journey of groundbreaking
scientific discovery, from the Italian Renaissance scientist
Torricelli, disciple of Galileo, who realised that we live at the
bottom of a dense ocean of air, to the West Virginian farmhand William
Ferrel, who unlocked the secrets of the trade winds by making
calculations with a pitchfork on the back of a barn door. Then there
is the hapless 1920s inventor Thomas Midgley, who when trying to solve
a refrigeration problem inadvertently created chemicals that punched a
hole in the sky, and the extraordinary American discovery at the
height of the Cold War that space itself is radioactive.
An Ocean of Air is a triumphant celebration of the fragile
complexity of Earth's atmosphere and a completely engaging work of
popular science.
'Who knew air could be so interesting? Like the scientific mavericks
she profiles, Gabrielle Walker had the freshness of vision to realize
that within its presumed-nothingness lay the most fascinating, profound
revelations about life on earth. This is science writing at its best:
clear, witty, relevant, unbelievably interesting, and just plain great.'
Gabrielle Walker has a PhD in chemistry from Cambridge University
and has taught at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. She is a
consultant to
New Scientist, contributes frequently to BBC
radio and writes for many newspapers and magazines. The author of
Snowball Earth and presenter of BBC Radio 4 s
 Planet
Earth Under Threat , she lives in London and France.
