The westbound tracks are designated A, B, C, D, and E, and the eastbound V, W, X, Y, Z. The six hundred or so planes that head west each day—BA 113 being one of them—fly at even-numbered altitudes, separated by 2,000 feet: at 40,000 feet, 38,000 feet, 36,000, and so on. Eastbound craft operate conversely at odd-numbered levels—39,000 feet, 37,000, down to 31,000. On this day my BA 113—its call sign on the radio Speedbird 113—had been told to fly on Track NAT Charlie, at Flight Level 380. She would prepare to enter the critical transoceanic sector at an invisible waypoint that Atlantic aviation chartmakers had given the unlovely name of BURAK. She would make her actual entrance into the oceanic sector, sashaying elegantly into the most critical portion of the flight, at a second waypoint designated as MALOT.75
The two bodies that police the ocean at high altitude and try to maintain good order and safety for the aircraft and their thousands of daily passengers are based in Prestwick in Scotland and in Gander in Newfoundland. The first, the Shanwick Oceanic Control Centre, is an enormous complex of buildings—appropriately known as Atlantic House—situated on public housing land south of the main runways at Prestwick Airport. It has control—by way of an immensely powerful shortwave radio station sited far away in the village of Ballygirreen in southwest Ireland—over all aircraft coming to and going from the British Isles as they pass across a vast swathe of sea that extends from Icelandic waters in the north to the Bay of Biscay in the south, and onward to a line halfway across the ocean at 30 degrees west longitude.
Shanwick is usually an intense and busy place, as one might expect. But for periods in the late spring of 2010 a bizarre and eerie quiet fell on the main control room. High-altitude clouds of volcanic dust from Iceland were found to be wafting across northern Europe, and cautious bureaucrats in Brussels decided to ground most European flights and to ban nearly all air traffic across the north Atlantic. Their decision, much criticized, left millions of passengers stranded around the world, and the Shanwick controllers with precious little to do.
Shanwick’s mirror opposite is across in Newfoundland: Gander Oceanic Control, by far the busiest oceanic control center in the world—its staff monitored no fewer than 414,000 crossings in 2007—handles all deep ocean traffic that passes to the west of the same thirty-degree longitude line. While Prestwick’s center is located in a homely Scottish suburb, Gander occupies a series of low and unlovely structures beside a lonely former military staging post airfield among the pine trees and swamps of northeastern Newfoundland, and is remote in the extreme. Yet Gander airfield has a uniqueness beyond being far away: it is also an airport open continually, without any time or noise restriction—“A curfew, up here? You’ve got to be joking!”—and the airfield prides itself on being what it calls the “airlines’ lifeboat,” a sanctuary kept always stocked and ready on the davits for any kind of trouble that may occur in flight. “We can handle anything,” the managers say. “Mechanical, navigational, unruly passengers, bomb scares, hijacking, what have you. We’re trained, we’re prepared. Whatever the time, whatever the need, whatever the weather, we here at Gander can take care of it.”76
Speedbird 113 was due to spend about three hours of its transatlantic passage in the unreal world of the oceanic control sector, a place commanded by the ever-fading shortwave radio signals from Gander and Shanwick. To the passengers seated aft of the armored cockpit doors, the ocean below is a place of utter unremarkability—less a matter of space, more an expanse of time, a period of necessary tedium. It is a place and a time with no markers, no fixed waypoints—other than the invisible coordinates of latitude and longitude, which the commander up front would report by radio or by satellite data link to either Scotland or Canada as he flew along—with no landmarks, and with no visible means of support, other than the aerofoils and the constant low thunder of the twin Trent engines. If things went badly wrong here—if there was an engine fire, say, or a sudden loss of cabin pressure—the pilot could, for most of the journey across it, either turn back or make a turn for one of the two possible alternate airfields that were manageably close to his chosen route—in this case either Keflavik in Iceland or Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland.
That would be true only for most of his journey, that is. There is one relatively small sector of the transatlantic track—and which on this particular flight was designated as a line about five hundred miles long, an hour or so of flying between longitudes 25 degrees west and 44 degrees west—where it would be quite impractical to think of trying to make an alternate airport. Within this sector both Keflavik and Narsarsuaq would be more distant than the airports either behind or ahead on the destination continent. The only way out of a serious problem here would be to head straight on, to keep calm, appear unruffled, pray if so inclined, and hope. This few hundred miles is by far the most risky part of any North Atlantic transit—and for the pilots who cross it, it is the part where any disrespect and disdain for the ocean below fades away, where world-weariness becomes a secondary issue, and where awe for the vastness and unforgiving hostility of the sea beneath becomes a firm and intractable reality.
But as it happens—and mercifully it seldom happens otherwise—there was no problem whatsoever on my crossing that day. There had been little by way of turbulence or unanticipated diversion en route; the descent was as normal as the takeoff had been; the plane arrived in Kennedy Airport precisely on time; and when I mentioned to the pilot in the baggage area that I had been a little nervous crossing through the dead zone, as I called it, he laughed and said simply, it’s just the place where we have to keep on our toes.
2. FOULING THE NEST
Yet if we return to the original point—that the casual public acceptance of transoceanic air travel has dulled us to the wonders and the beauties and the preciousness of the seas below—it is not simply the pilots in flight who need to keep on their toes. The world at large is now having to keep super-aware of the implications of flight as well, and for an entirely different reason. Aircraft in flight are dirty and fuel-hungry monsters, and because there now are so very many of them—currently some twenty thousand big commercial jets, carrying 2,200 million passengers around the world (and 100 million of them across the Atlantic Ocean) each year—the damage they appear to be doing to the fragile shroud of the earth’s atmosphere, and by extension to the seas, is said by many students of the environment to be very grave indeed.
As they soar across the oceans, seven miles high and serenely beautiful to see, the planes may be out of intimate touch with land and flying all alone in the sky—but they are also leaving behind them long trails of apparently harmful gases and gray fogs of polluting particles. The Jet-A kerosene these airplanes burn emits huge quantities of the very greenhouse gases that are believed by many to contribute to the warming of the planet, mostly either carbon dioxide and oxides of nitrogen (which can increase the production of ozone in the upper atmosphere); as they whoosh steadily past, the airliners also gush out great quantities of soot and sulfates and, deceptive in their pure-white loveliness, damaging trails of condensed water vapor, too.
The amounts involved are quite remarkable. A fully laden Boeing 777 traveling from London to New York will—if burning present-day fuels—stream out fully seventy tons of carbon dioxide. A big old 747 jumbo jet, now something of an aeronautical dinosaur, will spew out 540,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year if it is exclusively employed ferrying tourists between London and Miami. Multiplying the average exhaust tonnages by the 475,000 Atlantic crossings of varying distances—a journey from Rio to Frankfurt is clearly a lot longer and more polluting than a hop between Shannon and Halifax—and given the variety of different aircraft that are recorded every year, the ocean sees more than thirty-three million tons of plane-made carbon created in its skies every year. Every one of the three hundred passengers on my flight that January afternoon bore the burden of having poured two hundred pounds of carbon emissions into the upper atmosphere. I might as well have driven across the sea, on my own, in a car made
for four.
However, there are efforts ongoing to make such travel both more efficient and more carbon neutral. Engines are being more cleverly designed and planes are becoming lighter (the new and much-delayed Boeing 787 Dreamliner is half made of carbon fiber, for instance, has super-efficient engines, and is said to be able to fly long routes on a fifth less fuel than current commercial jets ). There is also a great deal of research into biologically based fuels made from plants and living creatures that themselves use up in their growing the very same carbon dioxide the jets spew out when flying. If an aircraft can establish a balance between the two, between its own CO2 output and CO2 absorption in the fuel-growing meadows, then carbon neutrality is achieved and the owner of the aircraft—the airline, in most cases—can claim to be green, or environmentally responsible.
As a result of the new interest in preventing or severely limiting anthropogenic climate change—if indeed such a phenomenon exists, which a small number of entirely sensible scientists are still unable to accept—a lexicon of strange and exotic new words are being uttered abroad: jatropha, camelina, babassu, and halophytes—all of them plants that currently are of little use to man or animals (jatropha is poisonous to both), grow happily in marginally useful areas like near-deserts and salt marshes, and hungrily absorb carbon dioxide by the ton and produce, when pressed hard in special machines, large quantities of flammable oils.
Airlines—Japan Airlines and Virgin Atlantic being the pioneers, with the latter testing on routes over the eastern Atlantic and the North Sea—have adapted some of their aircraft engines to use the new experimental biofuels, though usually flying with only one adapted engine on a four-engine plane, for safety’s sake. The initial reports said that the engines did indeed work, that they would restart if shut down (one early fear was that they might not), and that the fuels did not freeze at high altitude (which was another). Some airlines say that so-called green fuels could be employed in passenger flights by 2015; Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace promptly said they were skeptical, asserting that the only way to cut climate-threatening carbon emissions was by slowing the ever-growing phenomenon of mass flying, and to do so by at the very least imposing a massive tax on thus-far-untaxed aviation fuel.
But precious few current forms of mass human transport, or the mass carrying of cargo, can be entirely blameless when it comes to the current sin of producing carbon emissions—and not least among these, now that the world has almost entirely abandoned sail for motive power, is the shipping industry. Ships are every bit as dirty and fuel-hungry as airplanes—the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, which is even more crowded than the airways above, contributes in no small measure to the problem, too. A figure released in 2007 both by the oil company BP and by a German physics institute77 suggested that the funnels of the world’s entire fleet of some seventy thousand fuel-burning cargo and passenger ships pour more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than is currently produced by every single country in Africa combined.
The head of a research group studying the effects of shipping on the environment, Dr. Veronika Eyring, has used sensors aboard the European satellite Envisat, which was launched in 2002, to plot the visible lines of clouds that mark the passage of long-haul cargo ships. The high-speed winds in the upper atmosphere make sure that condensation trails laid by aircraft are dissipated within moments of their creation. The same cannot be said of ships, however: the enormous quantities of sulfur-laden soot and other particles found in the exhaust that pours upward from ships’ smokestacks—and which continues to rise, since it is so much warmer than the ambient air—has been shown in recent years to create lines of low-level clouds that can linger in the atmosphere for weeks and months.
Seen from space they are known, somewhat unimaginatively, as ship tracks, easily spotted by satellites—major east-west lines of persistent and seemingly nonweather-related clouds that stand visible in the North Atlantic, easily matched to the actual paths of shipping below. There are other tracks visible in the eastern Atlantic, running from the bulge of West Africa down to the Cape. There is an especially prominent line running between Sri Lanka and the Strait of Malacca. There is another that snakes sinuously between the great port cities of Singapore and Hong Kong.
The uncanny permanence to these clouds is due to the constant replenishment by more ships steaming beneath them—most cargo ships, even those out in mid-ocean, generally stick to accepted shipping lanes, the better to take advantage of winds and currents and in acceptance of the mathematical realities of great-circle navigation. Two of the ten main sensors aboard Envisat have proved exceptionally useful. One, known as the Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer, has produced maps of the oceans showing the curious matches between low-level cloud patterns and the known habitual pathways used by cargo ships; an immensely sophisticated spectrometer, the SCIAMACHY78 device, has managed to break down the emissions patterns, visible and unseen, both in scale and chemistry. The results are impressive: according to SCIAMACHY, by way of Dr. Eyring’s work, the thousands of ships’ engines that turn the screws of great cargo vessels around the world produce eight hundred million tons of carbon emissions annually—approaching 3 percent of all carbon emissions produced by humankind. The figure for ships’ emissions happens to be almost exactly the same as the amount of carbon laid down by aircraft—the two thus adding up to almost 6 percent of total anthropogenic carbon.
So, in addition to dealing with polluting aircraft, there are plans afoot today to make ships a great deal more efficient and environmentally acceptable, too—by all means available, except of course by cutting their numbers, something restless modern man seems incapable of doing.
One of the most effective early ways of bringing order to what was a historically ramshackle industry—an industry unchanged in its operating principles since the Phoenicians loaded murex shells in Mogador three thousand years before and shipped them back to Tyre—was that taken in the mid-1950s, when an American trucking executive named Malcom McLean hit on the idea of packing cargoes into enormous steel boxes—shipping containers. Up until then, cargoes—whether they were bags of potatoes, bales of cotton, bottles of whisky, motorcars, or machine guns—had all been loaded deep into a ship’s hold by cranes, then stacked as best as their shapes and sizes would permit, by gangs of expensive, often corrupt, and rigorously unionized stevedores—in the kinds of scenes so memorably recorded by Elia Kazan in On the Waterfront.
The advantage of using standard-sized containers, twenty or forty feet long, and into which makers and merchants packed their own goods at the factory or the farm, was that the boxes could be put onto trucks or railroad flatcars, taken to the dockside, and loaded swiftly by specially made cranes onto the upper parts of a waiting ship as well as down in the holds. They could then be shipped to a faraway port and, without once having been opened or tinkered with or touched by interfering human hand, could be unloaded and placed on another set of trucks or railroad flatcars and taken off to the distant destination. This was the birth of what was to be called intermodal shipping, whereby a floating vessel—a ship—became just one part of a long chain of types of transport that with brutal efficiency and economy would henceforward move products from all points in the world to all others.
It was a development that may have reduced costs and enhanced efficiency—but at a stroke it also stripped ocean trading of all its remaining romance and allure. Container ships—and they are now by far the biggest vessels in the world; the biggest of all at the time of writing, the Danish MV Emma Maersk, weighs in at 170,000 tons and can carry fifteen thousand containers at speeds of up to thirty-one knots—must be among the ugliest of man-made creations since Le Corbusier’s public housing projects. Those who retain a fondness for clipper ships, for quinquiremes, or even for dirty British coasters long rue the day that these boxy monstrosities, which must be among the most familiar emblems of today’s globalized world, were ever invented. But Malcom McLean—who tried his first ship out in the Atlantic Ocean, in A
pril 1956, running a converted U.S. Navy tanker, the Ideal-X, from Newark to Houston, with fifty-eight containers—knew that in the shipping industry time was everything and money was everything, and that to load a ton of cargo by hand cost nearly six dollars, while to do so on a containerized ship—indeed, on the Ideal-X itself, that late spring day—cost only sixteen cents. Romance may have gone out the window in a single instant, but so too did the stevedore go the same way as the supercargo, the hold vanished with the fo’c’sle, the shipping business transformed overnight from a business that involved tides and winds and gulls and sextants and signal flags and the smells of tar and sea-wet rope, into a universe of slickly oiled machines, of GPS-made, computer-calculated navigation courses, and loading cranes programmed by machine and timed to the millisecond.
McLean, whose first company was called Pan-Atlantic Steamships—and who later sold it to a tobacco company and then to a railroad firm and in the end to Maersk, who now has a fleet of seven of the biggest ships ever built—and who died in 2001 having accumulated unimaginable wealth—created with his containers something that changed the world’s view of the sea forever. The containerization of the shipping industry simply grew and grew, without particular concern for the pollution its ever-enlarging global fleet of vessels was causing. Nowadays, with the data from German researchers and others beginning to impinge on the consciences of shipping company executives, in much the same way as airline companies and plane makers are also realizing the consequences of what they do, research is under way to find better and cleaner fuels; and other means of hauling ships around the world’s bodies of water. New rules have recently been put in place, in both the Baltic and the North Sea, limiting the amount of sulfur in marine diesel fuel, in the hopes of cutting pollution and lessening the possibility that the satellites will be able to spot the ship tracks from the clouds the vessels leave above them.
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