of Cape Cod clapboard and academic brick. But when she looked straight ahead, at the crowd gathered on the dock, whatever she tried to focus on disappeared. In the crowd were Bower’s husband, David Fisichella, and, in his arms, dressed in pink leggings and a fleece sweatshirt, their adopted Guatemalan daughter, five-year-old, black-haired Sara. It was to Sara that Bower blindly waved. That morning Sara had been “acting out” in protest of her mother’s desertion, or so Bower believed. “She wanted to wear a bunny costume to bed last night, and when she woke up one of the socks was missing, and she had a total meltdown,” Bower said.
Sending forth from its stack a yellowy stocking of diesel fumes, the Knorr circled about and steamed north, past the wooded coast of Martha’s Vineyard. From the Knorr’s mast an American flag snapped in the headwind. Atop the bridge the white bar of the LORAN lazily spun. At the starboard rail, Bower reported the day’s forecast: “Four- to five-foot waves out of the northeast. Sounds good to me.”
Meanwhile, 828 miles above the lowering clouds, hurtling through space at 17.4 times the speed of sound, a NASA satellite named Jason-1 was beaming microwaves silently and invisibly down, and eight hundred miles north of Woods Hole a mesoscale eddy was invisibly gathering in the depths of the Labrador Sea.
“Mesoscale eddies are like watery storms, kind of like tornadoes, only much slower,” Bower tells me that first morning in the Knorr’s main lab, as we’re steaming past Nantucket, making twelve knots. The main lab is a long room lit by portholes and fluorescent lights and furnished with galvanized metal workbenches surfaced in plywood and bolted to the floor. We’re seated at one of these workbenches, in front of our computers, beneath a pair of portholes through which can be seen—though not by Bower—the leaping shapes of the waves. As the ship rolls to port, the portholes seem to fill, just a little, with water. As it rolls to starboard, they seem to drain. Plugged into power strips bracketed to the ceiling, the cords of our computers sway, and from belowdecks come the rumble and throb of the Knorr’s four engines.
Not only are mesoscale eddies like watery storms, Bower explains; from the viewpoint of a physicist, they are watery storms—not storms of wind and waves, rain and lightning, all the usual atmospheric jazz, but storms of spinning water. To a physicist, water and air are both turbulent fluids. “Mesoscale” means that, relative to other climatological phenomena, these eddies we’re hunting are pretty big—dozens of miles wide—but relative to others, not that big, not megascale big, not thousands of miles wide; not as big as the great oceanic gyres Curtis Ebbesmeyer had taught me about.
At the other extreme from the megascale gyres are “microscale eddies,” eddies the size of dance floors or dimes, and if you would like to see one, drag your hand through a bathtub and watch. There they go, swirling away, as ephemeral as they are small. Throw a rubber duck in and you can watch it swirl away too. If you were a god dragging your divine hand through the ocean basins, that’s what mesoscale eddies would be like. Underwater storms are slower than atmospheric ones. The watery winds of an Irminger Ring attain a “swirl speed,” Bower said, of around one mile per hour—the speed, in other words, not of a hurricane or a gale but of a breeze.
Their slowness belies their strength. In their watery coils they can transport up to 1.95 trillion cubic meters of water, along with flora and fauna and flotsam, seaweed and krill, driftwood and rubber ducks. They can also, if warmer than the water through which they swirl, as Irminger Rings are, transport heat, how much no one precisely knows. A few years ago, a Seaglider—a kind of motorized remote-controlled underwater drone—strayed into a gathering Irminger Ring while exploring the Irminger Current, which winds westward around Greenland’s continental shelf. Caught in an underwater storm, it took the motorized glider fourteen days to break free and resume its preprogrammed route.
Underwater storms are also smaller than atmospheric ones—Irminger Rings measure, on average, thirty miles across. They’re also denser, of course, which explains their sluggishness, and their sluggishness in turn explains this: much as mammals with slow metabolisms tend to have long life spans, so the longevity of underwater storms tends to exceed that of their atmospheric counterparts. Hurricanes decay and vanish just days after meteorologists name them. A