Radiation fogs usually type in sheltered valleys, exactly where cold air drains off the hills and there is little wind to stir up the atmosphere. In mountain places, you frequently see a fog on the valley floor, while mountain tops are clearly visible. Dense and persistent radiation fogs can happen in urban and industrial places, where there are plenty of aerosols to act as condensation nuclei. Fogs can also type when warm, moist oxygen flows over a cold surface.

The cold surface cools the air to its dew point so that big numbers of water droplets condense, forming an advection fog. Advection fogs are more widespread than radiation fogs and, though they too could be burned off through the morning sun, are much more likely to persist until the wind changes direction. Advection fogs tend to type over land in the winter months, when cosy air from the tropics flows more than frozen ground. Typical winter advection fogs occur within the snow-covered upper Mississippi valley from the USA, when warm air from the Gulf of Mexico flows over it.

In the summer, when the land is warm, advection fogs form instead over large lakes for example Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. They also type over oceans, particularly where cosy air flows over cold currents. The sea off Maine and Newfoundland within the American northeast is often blanketed in thick advection fogs. These are formed by moist oxygen warmed through the Gulf Stream present flowing north over the icy Labrador Current, which sweeps south of the Arctic.

One more typical kind of fog, called steam fog, occurs when cold air flows over water that’s several degrees warmer. The water’s warmth causes it to evaporate, but the cold oxygen makes it condense, producing fog. This kind of fog frequently appears over quiet rivers or small lakes. A specific type of steam fog, arctic sea smoke, forms more than cracks in the ice around the Poles.

A fourth kind of fog is upslope fog. This happens when warm, moist air is forced up into cold air through the presence of mountains in its path. The vapour it contains then condenses to type mist around the tops from the mountains.

The atmosphere contains water nearly all of the time. But most of this is within the form of drinking water vapour – that is, water which has completely evaporated to form a gas. Like most gases, drinking water vapour is invisible. For the moisture to become visible, it should be in liquid form, as water drops. Drinking water vapour turns to liquid (condenses) when the air cools and contracts to the point where there is not sufficient room between the oxygen molecules for all of the vapour. This is called the dew point. High within the oxygen, moisture condensing into drinking water types clouds. Near the ground, it forms fog and mist.

Aerosols

Water vapour can only condense into drinking water droplets if there are surfaces for it to condense on to. In mid-air, the only surfaces obtainable are minute particles, known as aerosols. A litre of air might contain hundreds of these, in the form of grains of dust and sea salt. They form tiny surfaces, known as condensation nuclei, around which the vapour liquefies. Occasionally, the air is so clean and free of aerosols that there are no nuclei for water to condense on to, even when it is below the dew point.

Clean oxygen produces good visibility. It is water drops in air that make distant hills look hazy – when you will find few, distant objects are clear and sharp. By contrast, when the air is dirty and full of aerosols, there are so numerous condensation nuclei that the drinking water vapour condenses readily, and may type drinking water drops before the dew point is reached. As a result, visibility in dirty oxygen is poor, and places with dirty air, such as large cities, are prone to fog and mist. However, visibility over even the most polluted cities may be quite good. If the oxygen is filthy but contains little moisture, fog and mist aren’t able to type.

As various counties explored the continent, each claimed areas of land as their own. After years of political bickering more than land claims, a group of international scientists achieved what the politicians couldn’t – a peaceful treaty. In 1959, 12 nations signed the Antarctic Treaty – an agreement to permit all counties totally free access to Antarctica for scientific research or other peaceful activities. Since then, more nations have signed the treaty, and further amendments have incorporated conservation and mining Issues.

Combating the weather

You will find over 40 scientific investigation stations dotted close to Antarctica’s terrain. Within the summer, they are manned by more than 2000 individuals, most of these living within the two largest bases: America’s McMurdo base and Russia’s Molodezhnaya base. The scientists carry out investigation about the upper atmosphere, the geology and geography from the land, the methods in which animals and plants survive such low temperatures, and how the tidal waters and ice fields close to Antarctica affect the Earth’s climate.

As the days draw in and the temperature drops with the coming of winter, most from the scientists migrate back to their warmer countries of origin. Even the most adventuresome tourists are forced to bow towards the overwhelming power of Antarctica’s weather as they sail away to warmer ports.

In the winter, Antarctica’s interior is cloaked in constant darkness. Freezing winds rage at up to 320km/h and also the temperature has been known to drop as low as -89.6°C. It is no wonder that Antarctica has no permanent residents, no government and hardly any wildlife. But dive into the surrounding ocean and it is a different story. Krill and fish graze within the algaerich waters. Minke, fin and blue whales feed on the krill, and many species of seals and penguins hunt fish. A whole ecosystem exists where it is difficult to imagine any life could survive.

Finding a frozen continent

Antarctica lies 965km from its nearest neighbour, South America. Australia is some 2500km away, and Africa 4000km. Simply because of its isolation and inhospitable surroundings, the frozen continent of Antarctica wasn’t discovered until the early 19th century, even though the Ancient Greeks predicted its existence when they theorized that the southern hemisphere must have big continents to balance those within the northern hemisphere.

With its winter ice cap, Antarctica is roughly circular and covers just over 14 million sq km – twice the area of the USA. If its covering of ice was removed, its area would halve in size, and a rocky land mass surrounded by many islands would be revealed. The continent has two main areas separated by the Transantarctic mountain range. The Antarctic Peninsula lies in west Antarctica in the western hemisphere, and the larger region, east Antarctica, lies within the eastern hemisphere.

The friendship in between the CPR and also the Soviet Union had long been under strain, but in 1960 it turned into outright hostility as Soviet engineers and scientists were recalled to the USSR and Soviet aid dried up. The fiasco from the Excellent Leap Forward seriously damaged Mao’s prestige. In 1959, he gave up his position as chairman of the CPR to Liu Shaoqi and, though he remained chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), real energy was slipping away from him.

In 1966, Mao struck back. Suspending all secondary schools and universities, he summoned millions of students to Beijing. In a series of six giant rallies staged between August and November he told them that the revolution was in danger and that it was their duty to save it. The campaign that followed was known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Brandishing copies from the Little Red Book of Collected Thoughts of Chairman Mao, groups of so-called Red Guards rampaged through cities and countryside insulting, torturing or killing anybody suspected of ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity.

No-one, not even leading politicians, was safe from the witch-hunt. Liu Shaoqi and the general secretary from the CCP, Deng Xiaoping, were both denounced as traitors and banished to remote provinces. Deng would later resume his political career and go on to turn out to be Chinese leader, but Liu died in exile. By 1968, the country was sliding towards civil war as gangs of Red Guards clashed with their opponents and with each other. Mao was forced to do an about-face. He utilized the army to restore order, and some 18 million Guards were packed off into the countryside to be re-educated’ at hard labour. The worst of the violence was over, but the political reverberations from the Cultural Revolution would rumble on for many years.

At the same time, the hostility in between China and also the Soviet Union was increasing. In 1969, the swapping of insults gave method to clashes near the Ussuri River on the Sino- Soviet border. Alarmed by the possibility of an all-out war with the USSR, Mao decided to enhance relations using the United States. The very first fruits of Mao’s new policy were Communist China’s entry into the United Nations. The Chinese People’s Republic was admitted in October 1971 in place of the Nationalist Chinese regime in Taiwan.

A few months later, US President Richard Nixon created his historic visit to China. When Mao died in 1976, a group of extremist politicians, known as the Gang of Four, tried to seize energy. They had been led by Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, and their aim was to carry about the strict policies of the Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But the moderates within the party had been too strong for them and they had been arrested and charged with several crimes. ‘1 was Chairman Mao’s dog,’ Jiang blurted out at her trial. ‘Whoever he told me to bite, I bit.’

His solution was to organize the peasants into co-operatives, where all land, animals and machinery had been held in common. Even though there was some resistance, the new scheme was widely accepted. Indeed, after less than a decade of Communism in China, the nation began to enter a new age of peace and prosperity.

But resentment seethed just below the surface. It burst into the open in 1956 when Mao encouraged individuals to speak out against incompetent or corrupt officials. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and let a hundred schools of thought contend,’ he declared. Soon the government was facing a storm of criticism – mainly from students, writers and intellectuals. When some went so far as to advocate a multi-party democracy, Mao abruptly ended the debate. Numerous of the critics lost their jobs; others had been dubbed ‘enemies of the people’ and sent to labour camps.

The upheaval of the Hundred Flowers Campaign had barely died away when one more wave of political turbulence swept across China. Officially known as the Great Leap Forward, the new policy aimed to bring about a huge improves in industrial and agricultural production. This was to become achieved not by technical expertise but by the military-style mobilization from the peasants. The key element within the scheme was the amalgamation from the agricultural co-operatives into huge, self-contained units known as communes. Each commune, about 40,000 strong, was to turn out to be a ‘centre of production’, growing its own food and running its personal industries.

In October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the Chinese People’s Republic (CPR). The difficulties faced by the new government were enormous. The years of civil war and Japanese occupation had left the nation a shambles. The economy was bankrupt, and agriculture and industry had been in ruins.

Moreover, around 90% of China’s 600 million people were illiterate, and disease and malnutrition had been widespread. The very first priority was to revive the shattered economy. Industry and commerce were nationalized, and farmland was seized from the rural gentry and provided to poor peasants. But the process involved much brutality and, by the time it was completed in 1952, an estimated two million landlords had been killed.

The government introduced far-reaching social reforms. Gambling, prostitution and drug trafficking, which had once been endemic, had been largely stamped out. Women were provided equality with men, schools were set up, and housing and medical services were provided. The CPR was supported, politically and financially, by its powerful Communist neighbour, the Soviet Union.

When Chinese ‘volunteers’ helped the Communist regime in North Korea in its war with South Korea and also the mainly American forces of the United Nations (1950-53), the Soviet Union supplied the CPR with substantial military aid. Much more importantly, the fear of Soviet retaliation deterred the United States from mounting a direct attack on China.

Balla’s painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Lead, a light-hearted study of a whirry-Iegged mutt, was influenced by Bragaglia’s work. Futurists had been eager to design the city of tomorrow; Marinetti enrolled Antonio Sant’Elia (1888-1916) to be the movement’s official architect. Sant’Elia’s New City was full of soaring towers and straight, forceful lines – but it was never built, and remained a science fiction vision. Futurists thought that each generation should build its own environment, and that buildings should last no longer than a single lifetime.

War artists

Within the months before World War I, Futurists took up the interventionist cause. Their anarchic fieriness became a strident patriotism, as they urged Italy to rise up against the old enemies; Austria and Germany. Futurist Evenings had been now war rallies – Marinetti waved Italy’s flag and burned Austria’s. Carra’s Interventionist Manifesto is the key image of the era. The Futurists glorified war.

Most of them enlisted; for Boccioni, the fighting was ‘wonderful, marvellous, terrible, immense, life and death’ – and at the front, he proclaimed ‘I am happy.’ The war combined modern technology and old-fashioned violence, but weapons such as the machine gun offered no grand passion; just death on a huge, industrial scale. The movement lost its momentum; Boccioni and Sant’Elia had been killed, and the survivors went their separate ways.

Like an old soldier, Futurism didn’t die; when the fighting was over, bits and pieces of it had been picked up by other individuals. Many European artists fiddled with Futurist ideals, and some Italians pursued them into the 1930s. Immediately after the war, Marinetti took part in political campaigns alongside Benito Mussolini, who was to become Italy’s Fascist dictator.

Many individuals have condemned the Futurist movement for this flirtation with Mussolini’s repressive ideas, but the men seem to have had little in common politically; every may have been merely using the other’s notoriety to drum up publicity for his own schemes. Futurism was chaotic and impulsive; Fascism, to say the least, was not! Mussolini, the square-jawed Emperor of Earnestness, soon distanced himself from the Futurists and their embarrassing taste for riotous disruption.

Their main principle was universal dynamism. For the Futurists, everything moved and changed rapidly, and nothing remained static and isolated. Their globe was a constant flow of interaction – an object gained its identity only in relation to the things around it. Universal dynamism complemented their passion for city life, with all its speedy technology – trains, cars and, overhead, aeroplanes. They urged other artists to abandon conventional subjects, and to concentrate on the energetic whizz of urban existence.

Boccioni’s The City Rises conveys all the energy from the city and its workers. A swirl of movement rushes through the figures; it peaks in the centre, where a large rearing horse symbolizes the energy from the crowd. The Futurist enthusiasm for bold, shimmering colours adds further vibrancy towards the work.

In Russolo’s Music, colour expresses the sounds made by a pianist. Noises surge in a blue spiral, and also the melody coils around the rapt musician. Strong lines of colour dart into the pianist’s globe – notes, perhaps, charged with emotion. Futurist painters frequently utilized sharp, forceful lines to suggest thrusting movement, or pent-up tensions.

The Futurists had big ideas and chose odd subjects, but their techniques were not wholly original. Severini lived in Paris, and introduced the others towards the latest artistic breakthroughs. In Armoured Train, he utilized the same Cubist technique as Picasso, breaking up the surface of the scene. Boccioni frequently adopted an Impressionistic style with his brush strokes.

The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876- 1944) despised the major artists of the day. These sensitive Parisian types, with their paintings of fruit bowls and farmers – they were just hiding from the modern globe! Marinetti was the driving force behind a brand new artistic movement, which he called Futurism. He was so eager to wrestle with modernity that he took a back to front approach – he began by writing down the Futurist movement’s ideals, and challenged other individuals to find a way of expressing them in images.

In 1908, Marinetti published the first of his many manifestos, declaring these ideas and plans. Although he lived in Milan, he managed to have his grand claims printed on the front page of Le Figaro, the well-known French newspaper; he wanted to reach the whole globe, not just a few Italian intellectuals. This energetic man led Futurism like a frenzied political campaign; he was often known as ‘the caffeine of Europe’!

Marinetti enthused about the speed and energy of new technology – he had toyed using the idea of calling his movement Dynamism, or Electricity. As a firm patriot, he was frustrated by the stagnation in Italian culture – it seemed that the Futurists would have to destroy the establishment before a brand new art could emerge, and he tried to spur individuals into action by stirring up a mood of aggression and confrontation. He held Futurist Evenings (Serata Futurista) in European theatres, antagonizing audiences by hurling abuse at them. Riots frequently ensued using the police in attendance.