Radical Meteorology (2013)
Video. 5’53”, 3’46’’ and 4’12’’
Solar energy raises the temperature of the tropical ocean to 26 degrees Celsius. Heat passes into the air above through conduction. Warm, moist rising air creates a centre of depression intensifying the trade winds that blow diagonally towards the equator from the northeast and southeast. Portuguese explorers had unlocked the trade winds and planetary currents in the tropics as far back as the fifteenth century. Like a conveyor belt, they made possible the fast movement of ships from Europe to Africa and Asia, a colonial technology which for hundreds of years enabled the exploitation of resources, as well as the enslavement and slaughter of local populations. Released from the evaporated warm water of the tropical seas, massive amounts of energy are stored in water vapour, which transforms into terrifying columns of clouds and rain as it condenses. Warm air caused by the release of heat energy further decreases the pressure; more warm water from the sea is drawn up, creating a positive feedback loop—a heat engine always moving clockwise in the Southern hemisphere.
A tropical cyclone in the Indian Ocean was captured in the iconic “Blue Marble” image of the Earth. The unnamed storm struck the city of Cuddalore on the coast of the Bay of Bengal the same week of the launch of the Apollo mission in December 1972. Chennai, almost 200 kilometres away, was also flooded. Combined in the cyclone are the violence of the wind, sun, and the spinning of the earth, their continual variation captured in a single, striated image and calculated in the coldness of space. Icy, deep water summoned from phantom depths, spellbound, foaming, murderous wind and sea. The cyclone in this image is from the same tropical storm system that produced Bhola, which devastated the coast of East Pakistan in November 1970. In its aftermath followed a genocide and war of national liberation for present-day Bangladesh. After Bhola, looking at a cyclone will never be the same; the potential for political violence and an ever-circling wind are united as one.
Radical Meteorology takes as a point of departure the cyclone captured in the “Blue Marble” image to emphasize the entanglement between natural and political violence in Bangladesh in 1970-71. In the following year the US launched its Landsat program, which first used satellite images to map earth’s resources. It technically facilitated the Green Revolution, a form of neo-colonial system of agriculture imposed on the planet’s hungry and poor, including a war-ravaged Bangladesh. The agricultural and hydraulic interventions in agrarian ecology dramatically increased the fledgling state’s rice production and population. It also provided laboratory conditions for the ushering in of neoliberal policies and practices of international development and debt finance. Several decades on, Bangladesh, along with other southern states of the megadelta, is a frontier zone facing the hostile effects of climate change in the Anthropocene. In 2012, I interviewed two members of the Cyclone Preparedness Program (CPP) in the coastal Cox’s Bazaar region, who warn the most vulnerable populations of incoming storms and bring them to the safety of cyclone shelters. In the interview one of the volunteers, Hossain M., told me how he senses depressions in the Bay of Bengal through his body. The cyclone returns as affect.