In mid-July the world experiences the hottest days on record. They are sequential. Reading this news creates numbness. The meaning of this news is, there will be more records broken. Denialists are made to look small, as small as all other humans, by which I mean, denialists are human-sized, more or less the same size as you and me. The news creates numbness that has to do with acceptance. The news is talking about the future, one kind of future, a future no one wants to know about. Numbness will pass as the truth sets in. What next? In late-May I was reading in the same newspaper about the Antarctic iceshelf. The word sverdrup was employed. Being tuned to understand new words, I googled sverdrup. One sverdrup (symbol: Sv) is equal to 1 million cubic metres of flowrate per second, which is about five times the capacity of the Amazon River. The melting iceshelf is slowing down the Southern Ocean’s overturning circulation, an activity that is a key influence on the globe’s climate. Sea levels rise, weather patterns alter, marine ecosystems suffer. The shelf water is not as dense as once upon a time, because it’s less salty. The net slowdown in circulation per decade, the newspaper said, is 0.8 sverdrups. That was late-May, the week before the hottest June in recorded history. This is written after the hottest July days in the uptop hemisphere, with more to come. I sit, trying to read about heat, trying to understand what I already know this really means. The word sverdrup seems a simple distraction from an expression like heat storm. I have to sit for a good while absorbing what this means also, heat storm, of the kind expected in Italy, or occurring already, and why it is I spend so much time on imagining a sverdrup. Even if I stared all day at the ocean, I don’t expect I could imagine a sverdrup. Swerved up, severe drown, swart rupture and other wordplays percolate through the mind. They feel like a drop in the bucket. Poetics is what I am paid (in my dreams) to do, such play springing up from practice as a fountain. I examine my wordplay results with a sense of futility, knowing they will change nothing, except maybe the way we might think about sverdrup. In a crisis, though, such words may be about the only thing left, other than prayer. What to do? Oceanographers get their names used for activities of water. My spellchecker capitalises sverdrup every time because Sverdrup, Harald Sverdrup (1888-1957), was the Norwegian who theorised about damming the Bering Sea so Atlantic water could be regulated to warm up the Arctic Ocean. Today, this is a theory going nowhere, the idea being it would make Siberia and northern Canada more habitable. Such an idea is already redundant, in a world of heat storms.
Image: “Random Seaviews Oft Took”, from the LRB
series no. 11, sometime in lockdown 2020-21. Article:
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