Seven-Tenths Read Online Free

Over a plate of steak and kidney pie (the galley makes no concessions to the tropics) I presume this means that sometimes a ship has to go uphill and downhill.
    ‘Certainly. But the “hills” are so slight you’d never know. We’re talking a few tens of centimetres here, spread out over kilometres. Sure, a ship often has to go uphill, though it won’t be using any more energy. All points on the hillock’s surface have the same gravitational potential, obviously.’
    This is not obvious to me, and nor is it any more so after Roger has explained it several times in different ways. I tell myself that physics is humiliating not when it defeats the intellect but when it confounds the imagination. This makes me feel better. Giving up on me, he reverts to a sort of ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ mode suitable for lay company. Roger is himself a geologist and in describing the planet gives the impression of talking about a beach ball under-inflated with water: labile, plastic, sagging and crinkling and bulging. It is not only the oceans which respond tidally to the Sun and the Moon; the Earth’s surface does as well, rising and falling twice a day. When the Moon is directly overhead it is pulled up by half a metre. * What is more, this elastic crust seems to have a frequency of its own at which it resonates. A Russian geologist, S. L. Soloviev of the Moscow Institute of Oceanology, recently made seismograms of micro-earthquakes under the Tyrrhenian Sea. Using bottom seismographs (developed from nuclear explosion detectors originally designed to enforce the Test Ban Treaty), Soloviev began picking up a distinct, ultra-low frequency oscillation which hethought was most likely the fundamental frequency of the Earth’s crust itself.
    That night I go to bed with my head full of marvels. In the course of the evening I had also learned that the sea levels at either end of the Panama Canal were different by nearly half a metre, and the same went for the sea on either side of the Florida Peninsula. This was caused by things such as the heaping effect of wind and the Coriolis force. But I am most captivated by the idea of the Earth’s crust vibrating at an ascertainable frequency since it would theoretically be possible to calculate the precise note. True, it would probably not be a pure tone because there would be all sorts of harmonic interference from irregularities such as mountain ranges. Yet it ought to be possible to determine the fundamental note of the planet, the music of our spheroid.
    I also wonder at the notion of the sea’s surface modelling the plains and mountains, chasms and basins beneath the keel. It is not hard to believe this at the moment since we are all being thrown about our bunks by the Farnella ’s plungings as if she were ploughing across rough country. We have reached the foothills of the Necker Ridge. More than 2 miles below us a mountain chain thrusts steeply upwards. I bang about in my wooden trough and tell myself this is just ‘noise’.
    Next morning the sea is quieter. The ship heaves to and a certain tension comes over the scientists as one by one the precious instruments are carefully deployed. Launchings and retrievals are the moments when damage is most likely and although there are several workshops aboard for mechanical and electronic repairs our sailing patterns are planned to the nearest nautical mile for the next several days. Worries revolve around personal responsibility for the correct functioning of machines. The spectre of disgrace and delay flits about the ship until everything is safely in the water and the test readings are monitored. In the end these anxieties are probably rooted less in codes of professionalism than in the huge expense of modern oceanography. Great sums of money are being lowered delicately into the ocean. Any delays would be tantamount to damage, chunks of money becoming dislodged and drifting down to theseabed where they would dissolve and be lost for