In recent years, much energy has been spent adjusting the language we use to speak about our destabilised climate. From “global warming” to “climate change", the politicisation of our collective responses and attributed responsibilities to extreme weather events has masked the role and materiality of planetary heat level rising. However, in the past year, several cities have created municipal level official positions to deal with heat: from Athens, Greece to Freetown, Sierra Leone and Phoenix, Miami, and Los Angeles in the US.1 Directly addressing the dangers of heat, the creation of these positions also acknowledges the thingness of heat.2 To react to something, to think with something, we need to question how we understand the materiality and force that the very thing enacts.
Meeting of three oceans, Kanyakumari, India, Christina Leigh Geros, 2017.
What is heat? If you had to draw heat, alone, how would you begin?
What is heat? If you had to draw heat, alone, how would you begin?
Heat is a form of energy; specifically, it is the thermal energy transferred from one thing to another. Socially and physically, human beings have evolved to have certain relationships—behaviours and expectations—within and about heat. As these relations break down, our ability to recognise the conventional role of heat, to place ourselves within it and design for it, becomes increasingly difficult. While our bodies do not recognise heat as a physical mass, heat has mass within weather systems and these masses of heat move like bodies. In order to relate ourselves to bodies of heat, or energy, we must learn how to visualise their existence and movement. To do so, I will briefly outline two land-sea conditions—in the ocean and along coastlines—wherein heat masses can be seen in the airborne re-actions to their movements.
While our bodies do not recognise heat as a physical mass, heat has mass within weather systems and these masses of heat move like bodies.
Heat, salt, and teleconnections, Monsoon Assemblages, Christina Leigh Geros, 2020.
The mixing, or stratification, of saltwater and freshwater is one of the most significant drivers of weather between sea, land, and air. Freshwater meets saltwater, or the sea, via two types of transfer—rainfall and river flow. However, the most significant points of contact occur along coastlines, where major rivers enter the sea. Because freshwater is lighter than saltwater, the warmer freshwater floats atop the cooler, saltier seawater. Just as the earth is becoming warmer, it is also becoming saltier.3 As the salt content of the oceans increases, the deep, cooler, saltier currents push upward and flatten the warmer, freshwater bodies at the surface. Shallower, these bodies absorb more heat from the sun, intensifying the exchange of heat energy, or evaporation, between sea and air. A direct relationship between shallower bodies of hot surface water in the Arabian Sea and the launch of the Indian summer monsoon has been detected in recent studies.4 In fact, scientists have located six well-defined pockets of sea-heat and salt whose interactions with the air above are significant in the determination of global weather patterns.5 Like the atmospheric teleconnections introduced in the previous instalment, these pockets of hyper-interactivity between sea and air are responsible for key movements of heat and moisture around the globe.
Just as the earth is becoming warmer, it is also becoming saltier.
The second land-sea condition for heat exchange, or the creation of thermal energy mass, is geographically more specific and geopolitically more explosive: the coastlines of the Maritime Continent—over 95,000 km—which include the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos, the Malay Peninsula, and the earth’s warmest seas. Everyday, these warm seas expel excess energy into the air above, forming tall, booming bodies of moisture—thunderstorm clouds. A certain portion of this excess energy will be expelled as rain along the coastlines; but the rest will rise into the global high-atmospheric winds. The amount of thermal energy produced by the Maritime Continent acts as the fuel house, or engine, of our global climate and is responsible for the strengthening of atmospheric teleconnections.6 Importantly, the heat bodies produced by these coastlines and distributed around the tropical belt, in and amongst the high-winds, are distinct enough for visualisation.7
How we deal with changing flows of freshwater into our oceans will govern oceanic development and the atmospheric delivery of weather around the globe.
Arabian Sea Warm Pool and the Indian summer monsoon, Monsoon Assemblages, Christina Leigh Geros, 2020.
While cities facing the challenges of extreme and rising heat must find ways to actively engage with heat, it is important to recognise that heat has material and geographic specificity as it enters our climate and political systems. How we deal with changing flows of freshwater into our oceans will govern oceanic development and the atmospheric delivery of weather around the globe. Recognising the impact of coastlines and estuaries as key players in the global heat production should highlight the need for collaborative governance focused on conserving atmospheric resources and mitigating extreme weather events.
Read the whole "The Architecture of Weather" column by Christina Geros.
Bio
Christina Leigh Geros is an architect, landscape architect and urban designer who specialises in conducting design-led research that critically engages the production of knowledge infrastructures related to climate- and neuro-ecologies. Currently based in London, she is a tutor in the Bartlett School of Architecture’s MA Landscape Architecture Programme and in the MA Environmental Architecture Programme at the Royal College of Art, leading RS2: The Orang-orang and the Hutan and RS4: ANEMOI. Previously, she was a research fellow with Monsoon Assemblages at the University of Westminster in London, the design director for Anexact Office, and the design research strategist for PetaBencana.id in Jakarta. In these various positions and since 2012, she has worked with local community groups, activists, artists, and researchers to engage with environmental and human rights violations across south and southeast Asia; which informs her current practice of designing engagements, implementations, and interfaces of investigation that bridge across platform, scope, and inquiry. Christina holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Tennessee and two graduate degrees from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design: a Masters of Architecture and Urban Design and a Masters of Landscape Architecture. As a research and design contributor, her work has been featured in publications and exhibitions around the globe.
Notes
1 See news articles online: Europe, Africa, and US cities.
2 See Bill Brown, “Thing Theory”, Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1-16; Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”, Poetry, Language, Thought (1971): 163-184.
3 Stephanie Olson, Malte F. Jansen, Dorian S. Abbot et al., “The Effect of Ocean Salinity on Climate and Its Implications for Earth’s Habitability”, Geophysical Research Letters 49 (2022), e2021GL095748.
4 Christina Leigh Geros, “The Ocean and the Monsoon”, Monsoon as Method: assembling monsoonal multiplicities ed. Lindsay Bremner, (London: Actar, 2021), pp. 248-50.
5 The Ocean and the Monsoon, pp. 250-51.
6 Suchul Kang, Eun-Soon Im, and Elfatih A.B. Eltahir, “Future climate change enhances rainfall seasonality in a regional model of western Maritime Continent”, Climate Dynamics52 (2019): 747-64.
7 See Christina Leigh Geros, “Storm: Conditionally Unstable,” The Work of Wind: Sea, eds. Christine Shaw and Etienne Turpin (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023), 422-45.
