Rivers in the Sky—USGS—6 facts
1. Atmospheric rivers transport water vapor from the tropics towards the poles. Streams of water, with water vapor indicated by color, move over the globe, with atmospheric river plumes streaming away from the equator.
The formation of an atmospheric river starts near the equator. The sun heats the earth most directly at the equator, and these warm temperatures cause water to evaporate and rise into the atmosphere.
Some of that water vapor is pulled away from the equator by atmospheric circulation, forming a narrow band that transports the water vapor to other regions like a conveyer belt. Atmospheric rivers flow in the lowest part of the atmosphere, only about half a mile to a mile above the ground. When they reach the coasts and flow inland over mountains, the atmospheric river is pushed upwards, causing much of that water vapor to condense and fall to the ground as rain or snow, creating an atmospheric river-driven storm.
https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/rivers-sky-6-facts-you-should-know-about-atmospheric-rivers
Rivers in the Sky—USGS—6 facts
2. Atmospheric rivers are the largest “rivers” of fresh water on Earth.
While atmospheric rivers are pretty different from rivers of liquid water down on the ground, they transport enough water to deserve their moniker as rivers. Studies of atmospheric rivers over the Pacific have found that they transport water vapor at a rate equal to 7–15 times the average daily discharge of the Mississippi River. They can be hundreds to thousands of miles long, and though they are narrow in the context of weather systems, "narrow” can mean up to 300 miles across!
Atmospheric rivers are always flowing somewhere on Earth, even though they don’t consistently stay in one place like rivers on the ground. At any given time, 90% of the water vapor moving toward the poles is concentrated in about 4-5 atmospheric rivers across the globe. Together, these narrow bands of flowing water vapor cover less than 10% of the circumference of the planet.
Rivers in the Sky—USGS—6 facts
3. There’s a rating system for atmospheric rivers like there is for hurricanes.
Like the scales for hurricanes and other hazards, the rating scale for atmospheric rivers is based both on its physical characteristics (wind speed for hurricanes, quantity of water vapor for atmospheric rivers) and on the level of destruction it causes.
While other rating systems are focused solely on the hazards of the event, the atmospheric river system incorporates the idea that these events can be beneficial, hazardous, or both. On the low end of the scale, AR Cat 1 events rated as primarily beneficial and at the high end, AR Cat 5 events primarily hazardous.
Rivers in the Sky—USGS—6 facts
4. Though an atmospheric river can help extinguish fall fires, they can increase the hazard of past and future wildfires.
When a severe wildfire burns on a hillside, little vegetation remains, and the slope is vulnerable to flash floods and debris flows. Fires can also make the top layer of soil non-absorbent for a short time after the fire, so that water runs right down.
As a result, the rain brought by atmospheric rivers, in combination with more localized weather patterns, can lead to especially hazardous conditions near burn scars.
Rivers in the Sky—USGS—6 facts
5. An atmospheric river mega-storm could be California's other “Big One.”
If you live on the West coast, you’ve likely heard about “the big one” or even “the really big one,” phrases that refer to potential major earthquake events along the faults of California and the Pacific Northwest. But there’s another “big one” you may not have heard of: according to USGS natural hazards scientists, an atmospheric river-driven mega-storm that could cause catastrophic damage is plausible, if not inevitable, for California.
Such a storm could cause extensive flooding across the state, raising environmental health concerns, causing thousands of landslides, disrupting critical infrastructure for days or weeks and causing 350 billion dollars in damages and 290 billion dollars in business interruption losses.
Rivers in the Sky—USGS—6 facts
6. Atmospheric rivers are expected to increase in intensity in California due to climate change.
Human-caused climate change is increasing the intensity of many extreme weather events, and atmospheric rivers are no exception, at least in California. Research by USGS scientists and partners has found that over the past 70 years, there is a pattern of increasing water vapor transport onto the West Coast associated with ocean surface warming. Atmospheric rivers aren’t predicted to become more frequent, but California’s precipitation will become more volatile, with more water concentrated into a smaller number of higher-intensity atmospheric river events.
High-intensity atmospheric river storms can cause a lot of damage, and there are likely to be more such storms in our future. But with the help of USGS science, we have the information and tools to prepare for even a “big one.” Unlike earthquakes or fires, scientists can predict the timing and strength of atmospheric rivers several days in advance, allowing people to stock up on emergency food and water, make preparations for shelter, and avoid high-risk areas.
Videos
PouredOver: Barnes and Noble (good)
The Conduit
Louisiana Channel
On Water Memory
Cast of characters
Ashurbanipal: the drop of water begins with him in the first chapter
King of Nineveh, who "reigns over an empire so immense that they hail him as “The Emperor of the Four Quarters of the World.” Someday he will also be remembered and renowned as “The Librarian King,” “The Educated Monarch,” “The Erudite Ruler of Mesopotamia”—titles that will make people forget that, whilst he may have been highly learned and cultured, he was no less cruel than his predecessors. (pp. 5-6)
As he walks through his palace, "bas-reliefs" . . . mounted on the walls—carved from gypsum and painted in the brightest colors include images of the king holding "a bow and shoot[ing] winged arrows, hunting wild animals or butchering his foes. In others, he drives two-wheeled ceremonial chariots, flogging horses harnessed with triple-tasseled decorations. Yet in others he pours libations over slain lions—offerings to the gods in return for their support and protection. All the pictures depict the splendor of the Assyrian Empire, the superiority of men and the grandeur of the emperor. There are almost no women to be seen.
Cast of characters
Ashurbanipal: the drop of water begins with him in the first chapter
His library contains "thousands of clay tablets, arranged in perfect order, organized by subject. They have been collected from near and far. Some were rescued from neglect; others were bought from their former owners for a pittance; but a considerable number were seized by force. They contain all kinds of information, from trade deals to medicinal remedies, from legal contracts to celestial charts, for the king knows that in order to dominate other cultures, you must capture not only their lands, crops and assets but also their collective imagination, their shared memories. (pp. 7-8)
Cast of characters
Ashurbanipal: the drop of water begins with him in the first chapter.
Although not a main character, he is a key figure in the novel because of his library, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and a symbol of many themes running throughout the novel.
Among the treasures in his library is The Epic of Gilgamesh. "The words have been incised not in red-brown clay but in a slab of lapis lazuli—an extraordinary stone that the gods reserved for themselves."
Some kings are fond of gold and rubies, some of silks and tapestries; still others of pleasures of the flesh. Ashurbanipal loves stories. He believes that, in order to succeed as a leader, you do not have to embark on a perilous journey like Gilgamesh. Nor do you have to become a conquering warrior of brawn and sinew. Nor do you have to traverse mountains, deserts and forests, from which few return. All you need is a memorable tale, one that frames you as the hero. Yet, as much as the king treasures stories, he does not trust storytellers. Their imagination, unable to settle in one place, like the Tigris in springtime, changes course in a manner most unpredictable, meandering in ever-widening curves and twisting in haphazard loops, wild and untamed to the end." (p. 11)
Cast of characters
Ashurbanipal: proud of his collection of tablets, but disturbed by a note at the end of this tablet:
"Now and always, Praise be to Nisaba."
Nisaba—the goddess of storytelling—is a numen from a bygone age, a name consigned to oblivion. Her days are over, even though she is still revered in remote corners of the empire by a few ignorant women who cling to the old lore. She was supplanted by another deity long ago. Nowadays all tablets in the kingdom are dedicated to the mighty and masculine Nabu instead of the ethereal and feminine Nisaba. That is the way it should be, the king believes. Writing is a manly task, and it requires a virile patron, a male god. Nabu has become the official custodian of scribes and the guardian of all knowledge worth preserving. Students in schools are instructed to complete their tablets with an appropriate inscription: Praise be to Nabu. (pp. 12-13)
He could have the tablet destroyed, but can't bear to do that, so he keeps it hidden.
Cast of characters
Ashurbanipal: the drop of water begins with him in the first chapter
Instead of dispatching him with a sword, Ashurbanipal lights him on fire. As he's dying, he remembers:
reclining on plump cushions discussing literature, reading the Epic of Gilgamesh and marveling at the beauties of the world—did he create a monster from that softly spoken boy with the gentle smile or was the monster within the boy all along? He will never know. Now his entire body is a furnace scorching words to cinders, turning all the verses he has studied to ash. (pp. 17-18).
Cast of characters
Ashurbanipal: the drop of water begins with him in the first chapter
At the end of the chapter, guards bring Ashurbanipal's former tutor, bound and beaten, accused of betraying the king, who asks "how could you," referring to the "little blasphemy" at the end of the tablet. To which, the man who taught him to read Gilgamesh replies:
“Water” murmurs the captive. For a moment they think he is asking for a drink, but then they hear him say, “It is a gift from the gods; it gives us life, joy and riches aplenty. But you, my lord, turned it into a deadly weapon. No more fish left in the River Ulai: you choked it with so many corpses that it flows the color of dyed-red wool. First the drought, then the famine. My king, your subjects are starving. The plains of Susa are strewn with the dead and the dying. Now, I hear, you will do the same in Castrum Kefa.”
“My people . . . You planted guards at every fountain to deny them water. You poisoned the wells. Families are slaughtering their animals and drinking their blood to quench their thirst. Mothers have no milk to give their babies. My king, there are no bounds to your cruelty.”
Instead of dispatching him with a sword, Ashurbanipal lights him on fire.
Cast of characters
Arthur Smyth: “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums!” And that is how the boy born on a secluded stretch of the Chelsea waterfront, under the low-lying branches of a bankside oak tree, will someday come to be known to all. A child of the river he is, and so he will remain all his life. (p. 29)
Just after he's born, a snowflake falls on his mouth; it tastes like mother's milk.
Arthur Smyth is gifted with an extraordinary memory—visual, verbal and sensory. Just as a drop of rain or a pellet of hail, water in whatever form, will always remember, he, too, will never forget. What he sees or what he hears or what he feels, even once, he retains forever. A remarkable talent, many will argue. A blessing from God, others may hasten to add. But also a terrible curse, as he will soon find out.
His mother is of frail health, his father unreliable. To make money for the family, Arthur leaves school at 14 and his father apprentices him to a publishing company, Bradbury and Evans, where he excels, and reads voraciously.
Fascinated by the artifacts at the British Museum, he turns a chance meeting with the Keeper of Oriental Antiquities, Dr. Samuel Birch, into a position studying cuneiform tablets. He successfully decodes the Flood Tablet.
Eventually he travels to Nineveh on an archaeological dig to discover the missing portion of this Flood tablet.
Cast of characters
Arthur Smyth:
There he meets Leila, a Yazidi, and a faqra—a diviner, a seer, who knows things others do not; she foresees a massacre. She is also Narin's great-great grandmother. Arthur is enchanted by her.
He returns to London a hero, marries, has twins, but longs to return to Nineveh, and Leila.
After 4 years, he does return, but only to find that the Yazidi village has been destroyed and its people slaughtered, as Leila predicted. He cannot work, troubled by the violence, and the "theft" of treasures from their native lands and cultures. He sets out to find Leila, snatching the lapis lazuli tablet from a scrap heap. But cholera plagues the country, and he succumbs (as did his brother), dying in a shepherd's cabin close to Nineveh where Leila waits for him. They bury him in the Castle of the Rock, "one of the oldest continuous settlements in history, in a cemetery bordering the Yazidi village. On his tombstone (which Nen and Zaleekhah visit) they will write:
King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums
Born by the River Thames 1840
Died by the River Tigris 1876
While Arthur is dying, a thief has snatched the lapis lazuli tablet from his pocket, the same tablet that ends up with Uncle Malek.
Cast of characters
Narin: Nine-year-old Yazidi girl living in 2014 Turkey and Iraq who is losing her hearing.
She is being baptized by her grandmother, Besma, along side the Tigris River when the ceremony is interrupted by a bulldozer digging to build a dam. They plan to travel to Iraq to complete the ceremony in the sacred valley of Lalish.
But the journey is dangerous because of rising violence in Iraq. ISIS, who plan to kill all Yazidi men and take the women and children captive, attack the village at night where the two women are staying, Narin is captured and taken to the house of a commander, who ultimately sells her off as part of his sex trafficking business. Her father and grandmother have been killed.
There Uncle Malek finds her, a perfect match for his granddaughter's kidney transplant. Zaleekhah finds out, aghast, and she and Nen travel to Turkey to buy Narin, for $3200, to bring her back to England and give her a decent life.
Cast of characters
Zaleekhah Clarke:
Scientist, specifically a hydrologist, who has just left her husband Brian and moved into a houseboat on the Thames in 2018.
She's an orphan, her parents died in a flash flood while they were camping by a river. She is taken in by her Uncle Malek, Aunt Malek, and their daughter, Helen, who has been "like a sister" to her.
Fascinated by the concept of water memory, she is drawn to the idea of rivers connecting different cultures and time periods, specifically the Tigris and the Thames, and has the symbol, a cuneiform, tattooed on her wrist. Narin recognizes it.
She becomes friends with Nen, a tattoo artist, who owns the boat Zaleekhah is renting.
Qanun
The qanun is a Middle Eastern string instrument. It is played either solo or more often as part of an ensemble in much of Iran, East Arabia and the Maghreb; it later spread to West Africa and Central Asia due to Arab migration. It was also common in Ancient Greece and Armenia. and its origin goes back to Mesopotamia.
Quotations
Water
In those days, in those far-off days,
In those nights, in those far-off nights,
In those years, in those far-off years,
In olden times . . . Did you see the sons of Sumer and Akkad?
I saw them. How do they fare?
They drink water from the place of a massacre. —
Tablet XII, Epic of Gilgamesh (Translated by Andrew George)
Water—the drop that fall on Ashurbanipal
Dangling from the edge of the storm cloud is a single drop of rain—no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously—small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth below opening like a lonely lotus flower. Not that this will be the first time: it has made the journey before—ascending to the sky, descending to terra firma and rising heavenwards again—and yet it still finds the fall terrifying.
Remember that drop, inconsequential though it may be compared with the magnitude of the universe. Inside its miniature orb, it holds the secret of infinity, a story uniquely its own. When it finally musters the courage, it leaps into the ether. It is falling now—fast, faster. Gravity always helps. From a height of 3,080 feet it races down. Only three minutes until it reaches the ground.
At the end of that chapter:
. . . the raindrop remains ensconced inside the king’s hair. Alone, small and terrified, it does not dare to move. It will never forget what it has witnessed today. It has been changed—forever. Even after centuries have passed, a trace of this moment will remain embedded in its elemental form. As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again . . . and again.
Water remembers. It is humans who forget. (p. 18).
Water
When Zaleekhah first moves into her new home, the boat, She Who Saw the Deep:
A tear falls on the back of her hand. Lacrimal fluid, composed of intricate patterns of crystallized salt invisible to the eye. This drop, water from her own body, containing a trace of her DNA, was a snowflake once upon a time or a wisp of steam, perhaps here or many kilometers away, repeatedly mutating from liquid to solid to vapor and back again, yet retaining its molecular essence. It remained hidden under the fossil-filled earth for tens if not thousands of years, climbed up to the skies and returned to earth in mist, fog, monsoon or hailstorm, perpetually displaced and relocated.
Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.
The tear has disappeared, but it will find a way to emerge again, in some other manifestation. It will take a while, though. Smaller droplets vaporize more slowly than their larger counterparts. Even after all these years of studying it, water never ceases to surprise her, astonishingly resilient but also acutely vulnerable—a drying, dying force. (pp. 77-78).
Water
Note, the name of the boat is a reference to lines from Gilgamesh:
He Who Saw the Deep . . .
He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden,
He brought us a tale of the days before the Flood.
Quote—water
The inhabitants of this region have always known that they rely on water for survival. Grateful for every drop of fresh water that graced their days, they thanked the rivers—and also feared them.
When the levees break and the banks burst, they leave trauma behind—a story to be told from one generation to the next.
Mesopotamian lore understands that water is the defining force of life. Trees are “rooted water,” streams are “flowing water,” birds are “flying water,” mountains are “rising water,” and, as for humans, they are, and will always be, “warring water,” never at peace.
Water has memory. Rivers are especially good at remembering. (p. 432)
Quote—water
Rivers are fluid bridges—channels of communication between separate worlds. They link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible, and, ultimately, the living to the dead.
They carry the spirits of the departed into the netherworld, and occasionally bring them back. In the sweeping currents and tidal pools shelter the secrets of foregone ages. The ripples on the surface of water are the scars of a river. There are wounds in its shadowy depths that even time cannot heal. (p. 432)
Quote—water
Besma, Narin's grandmother, tells her:
“some people are restless like rivers”; “women are expected to be like rivers – readjusting, reshaping”; “questions . . . set off a ripple of other questions, as a leaping carp leaves a trail of watery wreath in its wake”; a kiss is “two drops of water finding their way to each other.”
Quote—water memory
Toward the end of his life, the professor became preoccupied with a hypothesis he referred to in his notes as “aquatic memory.” He argued that, under certain circumstances, water—the universal solvent—retained evidence, or “memory,” of the solute particles that had dissolved in it, no matter how many times it was diluted or purified. Even if years passed, or centuries, and not a single original molecule remained, each droplet of water maintained a unique structure, distinguishable from the next, marked forever by what it once contained. Water, in other words, remembered. (p. 202)
Quote—stories, narratives, tales
Arthur prefers to bury himself in the folds of distant history, anywhere but in the here and now. He feels closer to the people of the past than those of the present, more at peace with the ghosts than the living.
It doesn’t occur to him that we are drawn to the kind of stories that are already present within us, germinating and pushing their way through to the surface, like seeds ready to sprout at the first hint of sun. (pp. 209-210)
Zaleekhah, on the boat:
As she closes her eyes, waiting to descend into a drugged sleep, she can hear a gentle lapping in the distance. They are all there. The lost rivers of time, out of sight and out of mind but notable in their absence, like phantom limbs that still have the power to cause pain. They are here and everywhere, eroding the solid structures on which we have built our careers, marriages, reputations and relationships, evermore flowing onwards—with or without us. (p. 206)
Quote—stories, narratives, tales
“Words are like birds,” says Mr. Bradbury. “When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in the mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and laborers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.” (p. 103)
Quote—stories, narratives, tales
As cuneiform, originating under the Sumerians, is inherited by the Babylonians and Assyrians, the scribes across the region discover that words, once impressed on stone, live longer than those who have imagined them.
Stories venture beyond city walls, traverse deserts and span ravines.
To write is to free yourself from the constraints of place and time. If the spoken word is a trick of the gods, the written word is the triumph of humans. Thus Nisaba’s fame grows. (p. 404)
Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time. They live in story-time. (p. 255)
“You tell me.” Nen sits back, her eyes hardening. “Why are women left out of history? Why do we have to piece their stories back together from fragments—like broken shards of pottery?” (p. 273)
Quote—stories, narratives, tales
Story Arthur hears, of Mesopotamia king's funeral. He's accompanied by his wife, friends, soldiers, musicians, servants, his barber, his storyteller, who align themselves at the gravesite.
That afternoon they all killed themselves (drank poison) as arranged, simply so that a man accustomed to power would not have to face his own mortality alone.
Arthur is beginning to suspect that civilization is the name we give to what little we have salvaged from a loss that no one wants to remember. Triumphs are erected upon the jerry-built scaffolding of brutalities untold, heroic legends spun from the thread of aggressions and atrocities.
The irrigation system was Nineveh’s glowing achievement—but how many lives were squandered in its construction? There is always another side, a forgotten side. Water was the city’s greatest asset and defining feature, yet it was also what undermined it in the end.
The large amounts of salt deposited by torrent and tide wrecked the soil. Rivers raised, rivers razed.
Sometimes your biggest strength becomes your worst weakness. (pp. 340-341)
Quote—stories, narratives, tales
Empires have a way of deceiving themselves into believing that, being superior to others, they will last forever. A shared expectation that tomorrow the sun will rise again, the earth will remain fertile, and the waters will never run dry. A comforting delusion that, though we will all die, the buildings we erect and the poems we compose and the civilizations we create will survive. (p. 340)
Questions for discussion
Water is of course a pervasive theme in this novel, specifically the rivers Thames and Tigris. What do they represent? Their symbolism may be more complex than simple.
Questions for discussion
End of first chapter on Ashurbanipal
. . . the raindrop remains ensconced inside the king’s hair. Alone, small and terrified, it does not dare to move. It will never forget what it has witnessed today.
It has been changed—forever. Even after centuries have passed, a trace of this moment will remain embedded in its elemental form.
As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies.
Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again . . . and again.
Water remembers. It is humans who forget. (p. 18)
In this novel, water is both literal and metaphoric. The concept of water memory has not been scientifically proven, although it is being studied. But here it's more metaphor or symbol than scientific fact. What do you think it represents?
Questions for discussion
In this novel, several characters are orphans. Why so many orphans. What does family represent in this novel? Is there another community that's equally or more important?
Questions for discussion
Did you notice at the beginning of each chapter that the character and date are defined, but also that each character is represented by a chemical symbol: H or O. Arthur is O and Narin and Zaleekhah are Hs; together they complete the H2O molecule.
The short chapter titled H2O says:
Water . . . the strangest chemical, the great mystery. With two hydrogen atoms at the tips, each bonded to a single oxygen at the center, it is a bent molecule, not linear. If it were linear, there would be no life on earth . . . no stories to tell.
Three atoms join to form water: H—O—H. Three characters connect across borders of time and place, and together they make this story . . . (p. 19).
Questions for discussion
At the end of the first chapter, when Ashurbanipal has set fire to his former tutor:
Once, it was poems and stories that brought joy into his life, reading as much a part of his being as the instinct to breathe. Nothing gave him more pleasure than mentoring the young prince, the two of them reclining on plump cushions discussing literature, reading the Epic of Gilgamesh and marveling at the beauties of the world—did he create a monster from that softly spoken boy with the gentle smile or was the monster within the boy all along? He will never know. Now his entire body is a furnace scorching words to cinders, turning all the verses he has studied to ash.
How do you interpret this passage?
Questions for discussion
"Remember, my heart. Story-time is different from clock-time," Narin's grandmother says (p. 236). How is this concept reflected in the interwoven narratives of this novel? Do the characters exist and communicate in the same "story-time," although they live in different "clock-times"? What allows this to happen?
Questions for discussion
Arthur thinks: "We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honor, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, 'Remember us'" (p. 418). What objects carry the characters' emotions throughout the book—and time? How are they passed on? What object would you want to leave to your descendants, or future generations, to share and express your humanity?
Questions for discussion
How does the final invocation of the book, declaring it the work of "a junior scribe" asking to be remembered, and offering praise to the forgotten goddess Nisaba, situate this novel in the history of storytelling that the book explores? What drops of water does Elif Shafak connect in her work?
Summer
Class on Zoom
4 Weeks in July
Thursdays, 9:00 a.m. to 10:15
Books:
Room Made with Leaves, Kate Grenville—Australian epic
Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese—India epic
Fall
Two 5-week sessions instead of the usual 11/13
No schedule as yet, but both online (Zoom) and inperson (Arsht)
First 5-week: NON-fiction
Second 5-week: Fiction