The sound of the sea breathing
the roar of a billion billion tiny air bubbles
We’ve had days and days of unrelenting wind here. Of wind you can lean your full weight into. Wind that fills your ears with roaring and sucks the air out of your open mouth. Wind that shoves and tugs at everything, that yanks the door from your hands, that snatches at your unfastened jacket and slaps your rain-soaked hair into your face. Wind that hoots like an owl in the chimney and whistles under doors, that flings the rain at the windows so hard it seems like someone is standing outside with a power-hose and a bucket of gravel.
To walk by the sea in this wind is to stagger, head tilted away from the sting of the salt spray, legs wide set and braced, as if crossing the heaving deck of a boat. The fulmars are in their element here, bright white flecks against the grey of the sky. Storm riders, wind dancers, they spiral and bank nonchalantly in the heavy gusts, trimming their stiff wings to the air currents with elegant precision as they skim past the cliff face and swoop to pick morsels from the spume.
The sea is mountains, avalanches, explosions, earthquakes, landslides. It booms and rumbles. It boisters, batters, bullies and brawls. The whole wide bay before me is a churn of gleaming white froth. The black rocks are garlanded with waterfalls of glistening white. The waves break clean over top of the tall stacks where, in summer, arctic terns make their nests. Salt spray rolls inland like fog, souring what’s left of the winter grass.
Between the rocks along the north shore the water is churned into porridgey vats of curdled milk. Where normally the sea is all greys, blues, silvers, clear in the shallows, today it is all an opaque, creamy white.
The noise is thunderous. A nonstop, undifferentiated, deep roar.
And yet what we are seeing and hearing in a stormy sea, what creates such a monumental roar, is billions upon billions of tiny, ephemeral air bubbles.
Bubbles of air get churned up with the surface seawater and mixed by the action of the wind and waves. Water rears up and falls, trapping air cavities inside breaking waves. These air pockets are crushed by the weight of water, sending out jets of mixed water and air, making plumes and clouds of bubbles that scatter the light we see as white. This constant kneading movement of waves at the ocean surface is an important part of the sea’s interaction with atmospheric gases, climate and weather.
There are, according to researchers, four kinds of wave: spilling, surging, plunging, collapsing. Out in the open sea wind-driven waves smash into each other, their peaks ripped off and scattered, and where they fray, they mix with air and form ‘white horses’. At the coasts the shallowing seabed lifts waves high until they topple and break, fall into themselves, folding air into themselves as they sprawl towards the beach and dissipate their energy. The wave loses half of its energy pushing the bubbles down against their buoyancy.
It's not the bursting of the bubbles that we hear, but the burst of sound that radiates at their forming, at the impact of water onto water, where it boils with turbulence. The wind-created energy is released as sound.
If the sea sounds like breathing that’s because it is. It’s the sound of billions of bubbles forming. What we hear is the sea’s inhalation.
Many thanks to Raymond Besant for kind permission to use his stunning photographs this week. If you’re in Kirkwall don’t forget to drop by the Highland Park shop in Albert Street to see his exhibition of photographs of Orkney’s Sea Grass Meadows. 50% of the profits will go towards the important work of Project Seagrass. The exhibition is open until March 2nd, Mon-Sat 10-5pm.
Join the Life Raft!
As usual we’ll be getting together for our regular Wednesday Zoom co-working session from 3pm to 4pm UK time. We just say hello, share what we’ll be working on and work quietly in a shared online space for moral support and a bit of quiet conviviality. Come join us!
And if the time doesn’t suit, or you’d like to check us out first, you can take part asynchronously by watching last week’s replay [Passcode: q5siFX=&]
As ever, thanks for reading. If you’re a paid subscriber, even though I don’t have anything hidden behind a paywall, you have my heartfelt gratitude for your support. You make this writing and sharing possible. Thank you. And if you know someone who you think would enjoy reading or coming along to our Life Raft Co-Working sessions feel free to share the meeting link above. It’s the same one every week.
windswept wishes from Orkney
Sam
Your newsletter is such a treat.
The Sound of the Sea Breathing is such beautiful writing. Thank you. The continuous thread between your link with the sea in words and your art is amazing.