The Man Who Ivented Florida

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The northern latitudinal line known as the 26th parallel bisects cities and countryside and rolling open ocean. It parallels the Tropic of Cancer in the Atlantic; it touches the Midway Islands of the Pacific. It joins unsuspecting villages such as the mangrove hamlet of Mango on Florida's west coast with uncaring cities such as the concrete tumult of Miami on Florida's east coast. The 26th parallel loops the earth, binding all sorts of things, linking the familiar with the exotic. As the earth spins, west to east, the line tracks the sun, creating a heat channel along the equator, so it is always hot and bright somewhere along its band.

The 26th parallel is no more important than any of the other latitudinal lines created by navigators, but it was of particular interest to meteorologists that autumn because of a strange thing that occurred in one of the parallel's regions, the Sahara Desert of North Africa. In September, a great wind began to blow over the desert. The wind was created by tropical air drawn to North Africa that sank, absorbed moisture, then shot skyward-a phenomena known as a Sahara High. A Sahara High is not unusual, but one that blows for more than a month is. The wind blew hot over Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco, gathering strength. It gusted, swirled, and grew into a withering gale that lifted sand-thousands of tons of sand-into the air. When the superheated wind, saturated with sand, collided with cooler air over the Canary Islands, there was a sustained explosion. The sand was blasted through the stratosphere into the mesosphere and was suspended there, fifty miles above the earth's surface. There, the sand granules attracted fugitive traces of vapor, creating noctilucent clouds-luminous formations that drifted seaward.

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