LAWRENCE WESCHLER - Published 1995 in The New Yorker magazine
He grew up in Southern Cal and became as writer for the New Yorker. This was published in that magazine in 1995. In this article, Weschler examines the question of the light and air quality in LA, which is famous for smog. First he gets opinions at Cal Tech.
Page 668) Hal Zirin at Caltech speaking
"Well, it's all thanks to the incredible stability, the uncanny stillness, of the air around L.A. It goes back to that business people are always talking about - a desert thrusting up against the ocean, and, specifically, against the eastern shore of a northern ocean, with its cold, clockwise, southward-moving current. And the other crucial element in the mix is these high mountain ranges girdling the basin - so that what happens here is that ocean-cooled air drifts in over the coastal plain and it's trapped beneath the warmer desert air floating in over the mountains to the east. That's the famous thermal inversion, and the opposite of the usual arrangement, where warm surge air progressively cools as it rises. And the atmosphere below the inversion layer is incredibly stable. You must have noticed, for instance, how, if you're on a transcontinental jet coming in for a landing at LAX, once you pass over the mountains on your final approach, no matter how turbulent the flight may heave been prior to that, suddenly the plane becomes completely silent and steady and still."... "That's the stable air of L.A."
Pages 669-670)
Angelenos tend to take perverse credit for the uncanny light of the place, as if they themselves were the ones who made it all happen; and, in fact, according to at least one way of looking at things, they may have a point. Someone told me that if it was air pollution I wanted to consider I should go talk to Glen Cass, at Caltech, a jovial, rotund, clear-eyed, and short-cropped professor of environmental engineering with very specific interest in smog....
So I asked Cass,what, exactly, was all that white stuff chocking the view of his beloved mountains?
"Well, it turns out that there are all sorts of different sizes of particles floating in the air - from absolutely minuscule to relatively large and coarse, he explained. "Some of those - and especially the larger ones - simply get in the way of the line of vision between you and, say, that mountain over there. They blot out or diffract the beams of reflected sunlight emanating from the mountain that would otherwise be conveying visual detail to your eyes. Contrary to what you might think, though, it's not so much the large, coarse particles that pose the biggest problem, Instead, it's those of a specific intermediate size - about half a micrometer, to be exact - those constitute the jokers in the deck when it comes to visibility."
from
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002
