Feeding the Blue
Phase changes and climatic shifts, from the perspective of three united atoms
Juneau, Alaska, is blue and grey. And green.
From inside my home the rain seemed to slap the earth, falling in long strands that would beat any human venturing out of doors
I was surrounded on six sides, looking past a wall painted red, roof protection above me, and gazing warily outside at the ocean. My computer screen beamed artificial light into my face as I pressed buttons and created working letters and documents for one of the organizations I work for.
March for Science was a movement that began in January 2017, when many people, including scientists, became worried about the USA’s Federal Administration. They were concerned that it was following its own path of administration, without using evidence-based science as its guide. Then, on the 22nd of April last year, over a million people around the world marched to declare “Science not Silence,” and voice their opinions that political decisions in their countries should be made in accordance to reason and evidence.
Now, it’s grown to be an organization aiming to get people and governments around the world to use science in their policies.
Yesterday, my typing on the computer may have seemed far removed from the actual reality on the ground.
But now I’m on my paddleboard, on a sheet of silty grey freshwater. The raindrops from my inside my window seem to fade and then disappear — now a part of the grander watershed and landscape.
I can’t even feel the drops. My body is water.
My body is water. Two atoms of hydrogen, clinging to one oxygen. These molecules unite, and, as united droplets, fall from the sky. Fall, then fade to the glitter that dots this grey glacial lake. I drop to Earth from clouds to join and fill this basin of silty freshwater. Small molecules compile en masse — to form and sustain lakes, animals, ice, plants, ocean.
I make up the blue shades of Planet Earth. I also feed the green.
My liquid form is the most commonly known — and the most useful to living things. As water you eat and drink me; I compose about three-fifths of your human body weight and up to 90% of other life forms.
Though you may not feel me now, you can certainly hear my flow. You hear the explosive sound where the waterfall of Nugget Creek pounds rock — falling from 600 feet above, now pushing me through the lake, and, eventually, downriver to the ocean. I will continue to migrate around the planet, fluctuating through different phase states.
I take on different forms at different temperatures. At zero degrees Celsius I solidify into ice, and at 100 degrees I change from liquid to gas. In the winter, and at thousands of feet high in the mountains of Alaska, I fall from the sky as solid, crystalline flakes. Part of me stays back, clinging on to the sides of mountains, or resting atop glaciers in large gatherings. The rest of me continues on to sea-level,where I will more quickly melt — enduring just another change of state.
High in the Juneau Icefield, flakes gather and over time compress — bond — to create huge fields and masses of ice. Even in this cold, solid, glacial form, I still take on properties of water. My icy bulk flows through valleys, pulled by gravity as a glacier to sculpt the land.
Get Theresa Soley’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Under the right conditions, I can even sublimate directly from solid into gas. With the correct amount of sunlight, low temperature, pressure, and wind, I get picked up and carried into the sky, without ever turning liquid at all. From the side of a mountain I can transform directly from snow into blowing vapour, carried up by the rushing air.
Or, from solid glacier, I can transform into the liquefied, yet bitter-cold, phase surrounding me in this lake.
Driven by blue. Painted bright blue. Dark blue ocean, bright blue sky. Grey air, green life.
The Mendenhall Lake is a water body made up of snow and glacial meltwater. I start my journey as frozen ice, that, at the end, gives out a liquid trickle. But I don’t stop there. I keep on going.
Now the route has become narrow. I get squeezed in from both sides, and still I continue, onward. The weight of the lake pushes me forward, while the land pulls me down. My form gets squeezed into a narrow shape, and I flow as a slender river through the Tongass National Forest. Finally, I am released again, into the open ocean where I mix with a salty sea. Dispersing nutrients carried down from the land, to fertilize a big, blue body.
In liquid form, my river water carries minerals — phosphorus and iron — from the mountains and delivers it to phytoplankton in the ocean. The phytoplankton twirl around me in seawater, and feed zooplankton, Dungeness crabs, harbour seals and whales.
From land to sea, I change form, shape and size as I flow through a food chain to sustain life, toward the ocean’s top predator — the transient killer whale. And then back to individual atoms and molecules and droplets again, once the orca carcass washes onto a beach to be degraded by sand fleas, bacteria, bears and birds. Consumption, desiccation, evaporation, sublimation. Absorbed by the air, the atmosphere, becoming clouds, then rain, snow and ice.
What an incredible system I sustain; I’m just a tiny molecule fostering relationships that tie and flow together to construct life and planet Earth.
Water unites this temperate rainforest ecosystem in its solid, liquid and gaseous forms.
I float on my paddleboard before the white face of a glacier — a glacier that is now thinning from both sides. It’s flattening like an ice-cream cake. The liquefied cream leaks more water from within — while the ice shrinks, or rather transforms, into a more fluid state, as human-induced climate-change makes Alaska become increasingly warmer.
An increase of just a few degrees here means rain in winter instead of falling snow. Glacier ice flows away as lakes and rivers, and the Great Icefield — the great source of cold and winter that feeds and sustains Alaska’s glaciers — is shrinking away into the mountains.
Although the changes are subtle and quiet, humans are imprinting the environment all across the planet. Automobiles and aeroplanes send their greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, making it trap more sunlight and turn the whole planet warmer. The noise of automation creates engine-fuelled soundscape to accompany it. Rivers are flushed with contaminants from metal mines. Cities are enlarging, forests shrinking, and plastics aggregating in the ocean. And, the current Federal administration doesn’t seem to think that’s a problem.
Here in Juneau, the way the water system is impacted by human factors tells a story. While these changes are subtle, and caused by just a few degrees of warmer temperature, the environmental effects add up over time. You may not notice it, in a casual glance, but the changes are observable. And growing.
My love for this blue planet is why I Marched for Science in Juneau, Alaska in 2017 and 2018. This article was written in association with March for Science, a nonprofit organisation aiming to reach politicians, educate the public and give modern scientific concerns a strong voice for policy.
To hear more March for Science stories, and see our faces, check out their Science Not Silence book.
