The Izzle Of Wiggot

We’re often told about something being the size of a football pitch, an Olympic swimming pool or Wales, or the length or size of a double decker bus, or several. In terms of mass, there’s much talk about Afrikan elephants. One such unit is of course the Isle of Wight, shown above in a photo from the International Space Station. In particular, in around 1910 CE, the observation was made that the population of the world could stand on the island. It was later noted, in 1968, that the information was out of date and the Isle of Man would now be required, and that year, John Brunner wrote his memorably titled novel ‘Stand On Zanzibar’, which estimated, as it turns out almost perfectly accurately, that by 2010 the seven millard people on this planet would require the floor space of the East Afrikan island of Zanzibar. These three islands have areas of 381, 572 and 1554 km² respectively.

Of the various units of area used, the Isle of Wight is not particularly common. From 1974, it became its own county, but it’s long been a familiar and discrete unit, particularly for people living in the English Home Counties. I understand that in the US, Martha’s Vineyard tends to be used. It has certain advantages over “the size of Wales” because that country has a largely politically defined border and there may in the past have been issues with Monmouthshire, a place which totally does my head in but has several significant personal associations for me which mean I can’t ignore it. As far as I can tell, Monmouthshire is now absolutely Welsh territory, but for a long time its status was ambiguous, and I can remember a late nineteenth century gazetteer repeatedly referring to “Wales and Monmouthshire” due to this confusion. Perhaps the issue of Monmouthshire will come up again on this blog.

A more precise definition of the statement that the population of the world could fit on the Isle of Wight is that 2 600 million people would occupy the island at a density of six people per square metre. This number was passed between 1951 and 1952, which is more recent than I expected. The issue of human population being a problem or not is another important matter which I plan to address soon, particularly in connection with the controversial documentary film ‘Planet Of The Humans’. There are cultural biasses in all these units, but this can be a good thing. For instance, deforestation is often quoted to the British in “Waleses”. A Wales, incidentally, is equivalent to 54½ Isles of Wight.

While I’ve been posting stuff about the Solar System, I’ve found myself using these kinds of units, particularly in terms of surface areas although there are some others. For instance, the Cassini Division in Saturn’s rings is about as wide as the east-west distance across North America at its widest point, probably roughly Vancouver to Nova Scotia. To some extent it may help to visualise the scale, but there also comes a point where it becomes impossible to relate to and one may as well just be saying “very big”. That said, it is startling that the maximum possible distance across Titan, for example, is roughly the same as London to Los Angeles, which feels like it’s practically on the other side of the world, and it’s fair to note that this is a slightly confusing statement because it isn’t east to west but across the Arctic, as an aircraft might fly.

Another issue, particularly with Wales, is that “if Wales was flattened out it’d be bigger than England”. The problem with this statement is that if England was flattened out it’d be bigger than England too, and the extent to which something is “flattened out”. Is it supposed to include just mountains and valleys imagined as pyramids or does it go down to the level of irregularities on the surfaces of grains of sand? How attached does a grain have to be to the rest of the surface? I’ve been into this before though.

Getting back to the Isle of Wight, I have the radio on as I’m typing this and it’s just been stated that an area of orchards the size of the Isle of Wight has been lost in this country since 1900. This shows how common this measurement is. It’s probably easier to relate to than Wales because it’s on the lowland side of the British Isles, so the whole flattened out issue doesn’t apply. Other linguistic spheres tend to use small local governmental units, perhaps their smallest such as Saarland, and may differ in that they are themselves not the official languages of island nations and therefore less focussed on islands and coastlines even though on the same scale their coastlines may be longer, as with Norway, so they lack “natural” geographical units of the same prominence. Denmark, I think, tends to use Bornholm. In terms of the “U”K, we have Rutland and Clackmannanshire, but the latter is as far as I know never used in this way, partly due to the 1974 reorganisation even though that’s now past. Rutland also temporarily disappeared at that time but came back in 1997 thanks to an enthusiastic local campaign. It’s a single square kilometre larger than the Isle of Wight.

The island was historically part of Hampshire and is not a ceremonial county. During the 1960s when metropolitan counties were being proposed, there was one suggestion which never got taken on board whereas all other suggestions were: the Solent area was considered as a metropolitan county. I don’t know if it would’ve been called “Solent” or included the island, but if it hadn’t there would’ve been an odd division between two halves of Hampshire, so presumably the Isle of Wight would still have become independent. Incidentally, the Solent area now has a population of 750 000, so it does seem valid as a metropolitan county although it never happened. They were in any case abolished in 1986.

Historically, the island has cultural connections to East Kent, my own original local area. These are the two areas prominently settled by the somewhat mysterious Jutes after the fall of Rome. The Jutes are a poorly-known tribe compared to the Angles, Saxons and Frisians, whose name seems to be cognate with the Goths and Geats (as mentioned in ‘Beowulf’). They’re also rumoured to have suffered a genocide and to have therefore made little contribution to modern English culture although they are responsible for the division between maids of Kent and Kentish maids. Jutes were the maids and men of Kent, so to speak. I’m wondering if they were massacred for refusing to convert to Christianity.

I described Telesto and Calypso, Dione’s coörbitals, as both around the size of the Isle of Wight, but comparing a small celestial body to the island is ambiguous. Does it mean surface area, volume, or perhaps mass? A sphere with a surface area the same as the island would have a diameter of nine kilometres, which is quite a bit smaller than Telesto or Calypso.

By Mikenorton – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26055216

This is a geological map of the island. The multicoloured sands of Alum Bay should be enough to convince most people that it’s quite heterogeneous. This varied composition makes it quite difficult to assess its mean density and therefore mass accurately. The Needles are obviously made of chalk, whose density is 2.499 compared to water. It’s tempting at this point to go off on a tangent and attempt to describe the island as if it’s a tiny moon of this planet, but I shall resist that. Nonetheless I do want to know how large and heavy it is.

As usual, I have little idea what’s known generally or just to me, so I may be recounting common knowledge here but if not, in the ‘noughties there was a Radio 4 sitcom which was mainly a parody of television science fiction tropes, called ‘Nebulous’. The central character, Professor Nebulous, has a backstory of accidentally destroying the Isle Of Wight by moving it ten kilometres to the left so it can get more sunlight, killing the whole population in the process and severely maiming one of the other main characters, Harry Hayes. This has made me curious about how much the island actually weighs. In order to decide this, it’s necessary to work out where it starts.

The Solent is between fifty and 120 metres deep and the Isle of Wight has an average elevation of about sixty metres, although St Boniface Down is 241 metres above sea level. I’m going to say, therefore, that the island is a prism with cross-sectional area of 381 km² and a total height top to bottom of 180 metres. I’m also going to assume it’s half chalk and half sandstone, although I’m aware it also contains substantial quantities of clay. The density of sandstone is up to 2.6, so a fair estimate is 2.55. Hence the volume of the island is only 68.5 km³ and its mass is just under 175 000 million tonnes. By this calculation, more than half of the island is below sea level.

Things can be done with these data.

Make the island a ball of rock. It then has a diameter of five kilometres and a surface area of eighty square kilometres, which indicates how flat and thin the real island is. This is kind of uselessly small for astronomical purposes. Both Phobos and Deimos are several times larger. If the Isle of Wight was orbiting us as a second moon, it would be relatively bright due to the chalk content but also very small. Perhaps people could live inside it in caves. It could have no external atmosphere and its gravity would be negligible, but it could be spun to give it artificial gravity. Unfortunately it wouldn’t do the squirrels much good and the fossil record would be . On the whole it doesn’t sound like a good idea. The population of the island is 141 606, and the question arises of whether it could be self-sufficient as a tiny moon. Perhaps if it were covered in greenhouses full of tanks of algæ. I’m not sure. I imagine the current inhabitants of the island would have something to say about it and wouldn’t be entirely behind such a plan.

As for the real Isle of Wight, I have been there on holiday and seem to remember being there on another occasion. This was in 1976. There used to be schools programme footage of me and my brother sitting on the jetty waiting for the ferry from, I think, Portsmouth. This was in July at the height of the famous drought. While there, I got tonsilitis and ran a fever, as did my brother, although I did manage to visit Blackgang Chine and the dinosaurs. Although it was difficult to find the holiday home, the small size of the island also made it fairly difficult to get lost.

To me, as a child, the Isle of Wight kind of marked the edge of the known world, or rather it was slightly beyond that edge. I was familiar enough with most of Kent and aware that Sussex and London were beyond it, and had visited them many times, but Hampshire and the island were not part of my local sphere.

That’s it really.

The Solstice

Photo by John Nail on Pexels.com

Today has been the Summer Solstice in Britain and this time will have been the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a little confusing how the solstices appear to move around. This is mainly because of leap years and the fact that the year is not exactly 365 days long in reality. I think there’s another explanation too, but I have difficulty remembering what it is. It’s also the case that Earth’s axis is precessing, which moves the position in the year of the solstices, and also the eccentricity of our orbit and the position of the points where we’re closest to and furthest from the Sun gradually change, although this may not be directly linked to the equinoctes and solstices.

One of the peculiarities of living in these isles compared to North America is that we’re a lot further north than either people living in North America or we think we are. This is of course because our climate is currently strongly influenced by the Gulf Stream. A dramatic way of illustrating how close to the North Pole we really are is to consider our position relative to the Alaskan Panhandle, which extends from 54°43′ to around 62° North. The southern figure is also the latitude of Hartlepool, and the whole of Scotland is north of that latitude, as is about half of Ulster. The northernmost point of Scotland, Out Stack (and not Muckle Flugga as many claim) is about 60°51′ North, meaning that most of the Panhandle is actually south of the Shetlands. As for the Aleutians, they extend as far south as 51° North, which is even south of most of Kent.

Anyway, one of the consequences of this is that even in England we get a six week period around the Summer Solstice where it doesn’t get properly dark. Today, the Sun will set at 10:42 pm on Muckle Flugga and sunrise tomorrow there will be 3:29 am. Compare that to Le Marais de Samarès in Jersey, which is more or less the southernmost point of any part of the Atlantic which might be considered to be entangled officially with our government, where the sunset will be at 9:17 pm and tomorrow’s sunrise at 5:03 am. The midpoint between those two, or rather the closest point on land to it, is the Northumberland village of Boulmer, where sunrise tomorrow will be 4:24 am and sunset tonight will be 9:52 pm. I feel a bit twitchy about the idea that Boulmer, which is only thirty-seven kilometres from Scotland, is in a sense the midpoint of this political entity. This gives us a maximum apparent length of summer solstice night for these three places, north to south, of four hours and forty-seven minutes, six hours and thirty-two minutes and seven hours forty-six minutes, or so says my brain calculator. However, this isn’t the whole story because the Sun will not just cut out when it sets, and this means, for example, that the stars, or strictly speaking any other stars than the Sun, will not become visible for quite some time sunset and will also disappear considerably before sunrise. And even here in the English Midlands it doesn’t get completely dark.

This might sound wonderful to someone living closer to the Equator, and I admit that I’d like to see the midnight Sun one day, but in fact I find it a complete pain, as do many other people. It makes it difficult for people to sleep and the long days also seem to stir people up and agitate them into “midsummer madness”. Last night I went to bed before sunset, which is always disconcerting. Patients I’ve had with mental health issues, particularly those who are bipolar, often find themselves entering a manic phase at this time of year. It’s sometimes felt like a race against time when a client has started to report problems or behave in a manner which is cause for concern several days before the solstice and knowing that there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent the main precipitating factor from getting worse for a week or more, and double that time coming out of the other side, by which time the person may have done something to themselves which may have a long-term impact on their well-being. It isn’t just bipolar either, because poor sleep is involved in other mental health issues. It’s now thought that the correlation of poor sleep with mental health problems is not causative, but I find myself K-skeptical of that because sleep deprivation clearly does have an adverse influence on it. The worrying and rumination which occur for many when they’re lying awake is not going to get better if it’s too light for them to sleep well, and paranoia and schizophrenia do seem to be triggered by it. This feels sometimes like a train bearing down on one at full speed because obviously we live on a massive great rock with a huge amount of momentum and it isn’t feasible or even desirable just to flip it into an upright position with respect to its orbit, which would in any case probably trigger a mass extinction and cause the ice caps to melt. We can’t live without seasons either.

There’s also the spiritual aspect. Judaism, Christianity and others do have a midwinter festival and this makes sense psychologically because it counteracts the misery of the cold and dark, and also the fact that many sources of food have shut down for the winter so we have to rely on all that is safely gathered in, but a midsummer festival isn’t as celebrated in the Abrahamic tradition today, although of course it is a big thing for Neo-Pagans. Like Xmas, Midsummer is for some reason considered to be several days after the solstice. I don’t know why this is, although if one regards today as the beginning of summer, which it is astronomically (i.e. declared to be so by the astronomical community), summer ought to be over by the start of July. Clearly it isn’t, although it does seem to be rather short here.

The summer solstice is one of those astronomical events which is almost the opposite of an astronomical event, along with the Full “Moon”. It makes it harder to observe the night sky, and in the latter case harder to see details on Cynthia herself as well as fainter objects in the sky at the same time. This issue makes the observation of the Jewish Sabbath more complicated far from the Equator. According to Halakha, which does not speak for all Jewish traditions, the Sabbath ends when three stars are visible in the night sky on Saturday evening. Within the polar circles this may not happen for weeks at a time, and even in England there can be a problem, not least because it tends to be cloudy as well. The alternative is to look at a white and a blue string until it’s no longer possible to distinguish their colours. This too can be a tall order in these parts of the world at certain times of year. As with some other cultures, this links to a timekeeping system where hours vary in length according to the length of daylight and night because of the interval between sunset and when this is no longer possible. In physiological terms it means the point from which the blue wavelength cone cell no longer functions, and in my mind it raises the questions of visual impairment, complete colour blindness and the extent to which the blue string is dyed. In a way, this is not my problem but in another way it is because I want to observe the Sabbath “properly”, even though I’m not Jewish, because mindfulness on the rituals is spiritually significant. In the Church of England, there are a number of sacraments, including the Eucharist and Baptism, and as an ex-deputy church warden it has been my rôle to prepare for both. Pouring water into a font and wine into a chalice are similar experiences, to be done mindfully, almost as a form of meditation, taking care not to spill any and although it’s vital to avoid idolatry, these liquids become charged with spiritual cathexis. The same applies to beginning and ending the Sabbath, and although I also feel that I’m engaging in cultural appropriation here, am I doing so to a greater extent than when I practice Yoga? If it makes it easier for me to behave compassionately towards others by practicing this, I don’t understand why I shouldn’t do it. It’s all rather complicated.

Islam, a proselytising universalist faith to which I ironically feel much less drawn, also has issues when practiced far from the Equator, mainly because of Ramadan. Because in terms of the solar calendar Ramadan cycles through the year, the requirement neither to eat nor drink during daylight hours is difficult to fulfil near the poles because of twenty-four hour daylight for some of the year, although there are rulings regarding this, and also ad hoc practices. Some people, for example, decide to use the time of sunset and sunrise in Mecca to time their fast. A similar problem exists with the qibla for Muslims in low Earth orbit, because this constantly shifts. I was once curious about the antipodes of Mecca and found that it was, as expected, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean but nonetheless close to Mururoa, since at that location the qibla is in all directions, bringing to mind the possibly apocryphal story about the Sikh guru who fell asleep in a mosque with his feet pointing at the qibla, and on being awakened and made aware of this fact saying “point my feet in a direction where Shabad is not”. I’m afraid my memory of this is rather sketchy and I apologise for that, and for my terminology.

I don’t want to problematise the solstice though. I’m aware that as I’ve been writing I’ve mainly used this post to complain about the negative side of this day. It’s also a day of high energy, with exuberant plant growth, animals foraging over a longer period of time and feeding their young and so forth. It’s also a breeding season for many species, which makes me wonder if it was in the distant prehistoric past. Would this also have been the time of year that non-avian dinosaurs were displaying, performing courtship rituals and tending their young, for example? Is there a way of knowing? Or were there fewer reasons to do so because the seasons were different and the climate was warm throughout the year? Does it depend on that or is the signal simply the longer days, used to coördinate breeding behaviour?

I have occasionally decided to stay up all night near the solstice, notably in ’86 although that year I actually did it on 26th June. Until very recently, I had never seen a sunrise and in my attempt to do so then I also failed because after a while I realised I was looking at a street lamp from a great distance. There is a problem with deciding when sunrise and sunset really happen if you don’t live in a relatively flat and featureless environment, because the Sun will only appear over the skyline and not the horizon, which is an abstract concept in most places I’ve been. However, there are a few places in Great Britain where one can genuinely see the horizon at sea level, without it being interrupted by land, and where this is in the West, a rarer circumstance than the East, it’s possible to witness the “green flash” and the “green ray”. These are optical phenomena taking place at sunrise or sunset, but the chances of being around to see the sunrise are lower. For a second or two as the Sun becomes invisible or visible behind Earth’s limb, and the air is clear, refraction separates the colours of sunlight and Rayleigh scattering – the cause for the sky being blue – is removed from what’s visible to the eye. Because the shorter wavelengths of light are bent differently than longer ones, the visible portion of the Sun is then green-looking. Sometimes this takes the form of a ray projecting from the horizon. It’s also enhanced by shimmering air, which I think probably makes it more likely at sunset when the air is warmer, and also quite rare in Britain. Hence one likely place for it to be seen is in West Cornwall, which is warmer and faces the Celtic Sea rather than the Irish.

To finish, I want to mention in passing an idea used in the excellent ‘Handbook For Space Pioneers‘ concerning what would happen on a planet orbiting one of the companions of α Centauri. Although there are close binaries around which habitable planets might have stable orbits, one would expect most of them to have a second companion at a distance from the first, i.e. the closest, and therefore there would be a period during which there were two suns in the daylight sky and another when the other sun lit the night sky. This would effectively provide conditions close to daylight around the clock when the planet was on the same side of the star as its companion, and since the stars are also orbiting each other this constant daylight condition would shift around the calendar, sometimes occurring in winter, sometimes in summer. In the book, this is almost as important to the ecosystem as the seasons, with some plants only growing when the night sky is also lit and animals emerging from eggs during this period alone, along with more complex animals using the period to feed their offspring to maturity more quickly. This raises the question of what would happen on a planet with two close binary companions within its orbit, such as the Trojan used for a series of stories including one by Asimov called ‘Sucker Bait’. A Trojan body is one orbiting in an equilateral triangle with two others, the most notable examples in this Solar System being the Greek and Trojan “camps” of asteroids sixty degrees behind and ahead of Jupiter in the same orbit. Two similar Trojan stars would provide 240° of daylight to a planet of this kind, meaning that if it had a twenty-four hour day it would average only eight hours of night. If the stars were of different luminosities and/or spectral types, the colour of sunlight would also vary throughout the day, and if there were a significant axial tilt, things would be even more complicated.

But we live on Earth, and sadly will probably never leave, so at least we won’t have to consider how to observe the Sabbath or Ramadan on other planets.

Happy Solstice!