The Waves Of Life Hypothesis

I have come to a startling conclusion that I have never heard of before. Any life on earth that is dependent on oxygen in the atmosphere is also dependent on the waves in the ocean. Let me explain why.

Not far from where I live, there is a tall smokestack that is visible for a great distance. There are also other factory smokestacks along my drive to and from work. One day, I realized something. The days when the air is perfectly still so that the smoke from these smokestacks rises straight up are very few and far between. In other words, the air is almost always moving hundreds of feet up, even if wind is not noticable on the surface.

This got me thinking. Water is a molecule, there is a chemical bond between the one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms making up a water molecule. Air, in contrast, is merely a mixture. There is no such thing as a molecule of air. It is a mix of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and, about 1% carbon dioxide, argon, etc. In times of high humidity on a warm day, the air may include several percent water vapor. Wet air is actually lighter than dry air, which is how a barometer can predict storms.

These component gases of the air have different weights. Carbon dioxide is the heaviest. Oxygen is just a little bit heavier than nitrogen. We do not notice this because air holds together except when occasionally carbon dioxide can become concentrated in low areas.

I realized that air, as a mixture, must be considerably less stable than it seems to us. There has never been a time in earth's history when the air was still for long. This is simply because the earth heats unevenly, causing weather. This constant turbulence has kept the components of air well-mixed and thus hid the instability that I believe air would have if it were still for an extended period of time.

Suppose a child got a jar and went through the kitchen mixing all kinds of things together in the jar. Now suppose the child put the jar aside for some time. The components would eventually settle by weight and stratify back into the components of the mix, with the heaviest on the bottom and the lightest on top. This stratification by weight would happen only if the mixture was not stirred. Stirring would keep the mixture intact.

I am convinced that this is what would happen to the air around the earth if it were not constantly "stirred" by weather. All kinds of atmospheric turbulence contribute to this stirring necessary to keep the air intact. Warm and cold fronts create wind and weather as do high and low pressure centers. On warm days, there is an updraft under those fluffy cumulus clouds and a downdraft between the clouds. In towering cumulonimbus clouds, the friction between updraft and downdraft is enough to create lightning.

Near the earth's surface, wind colliding with hills and mountains contributes greatly to keeping the air intact by "stirring". If the air were too still or even if it's surface were too smooth, the air would begin to come apart, to stratify into it's component gases. There is really nothing else holding it together.

Carbon dioxide, being the heaviest component, would settle to the surface. There would be luxuriant plant life, which takes in carbon dioxide, but no animal or human life either on the surface or in the water because the oxygen that plants produce would rise above the heavier carbon dioxide to it's own level.

Mountains and hills contribute a lot to stirring the air mixture when struck by wind and thus holding it together. However, the earth's surface is 72% water. Air over the smooth oceans may begin to come apart because there is no fixed objects like hills and mountains to stir it.

I realized that our existence is made secure by the waves in the oceans. Whenever wind crosses water, waves result. Water at sea level weighs eight hundred times as much as air. This means that the waves created by the wind cannot possibly move as fast as the wind that produced them. So, the following wind collides with the wave, creating turbulence as the airflow is directed upward along the surface of the wave, thus colliding with the air above it.

In fact, the shape of a wavy surfave seems especially designed to create turbulence when crossed by wind. And, of course, the cross-section of the wave is always perpendicular to the direction of the wind. Waves, in effect, act as temporary "hills" that emerge wherever there is wind over water to stir the air and thus keep it from separating by gravity into it's components.

This separation would not occur in a small, isolated sample of air because heat also contributes to the stirring. But on a planetary scale, I do not believe that heat would be enough without something to collide against to foster turbulence and thus, stirring. Mountains and hills are very helpful but the earth's surface is only 28% land.

Thus, I maintain that the existence of air, as we know it, is dependent on the fact that wind creates, and then collides with, waves in water. If the consistency of water were different so that this was not so, the air would begin to come apart and carbon dioxide would settle down to cover at least the lower areas of the surface.