Following UK Science Communicator and Science Poetry blogger Professor Sam Illingworth, I’m inspired by his blog The Poetry of Science, his pedagogy philosophy and love participating in some of his science-poetry challenges. We first connected via a Skyku project to raise awareness about the health of our atmosphere. This resulted in my audio recording of a Haiku about how thin the Earth’s layer of air is being broadcast on a radio show in USA!
Since the online journal CONSILIENCE began in 2020, I have been submitting Science Rhymes to this peer-review science-poetry-arts initiative. This year, I submitted Flowing Into Indigo for issue #16, themed COLOUR. At the height of my COVID-19 confinement and brain-fogged state, I learnt that this poem had been accepted for publication on the provision that I also submitted an adequate scientific explanation for the poem, written in my own words (and not via reference links). That was harder to do than writing the actual poem!
Flowing Into Indigo features in my next book SCIENCE RHYMES IN THE SEA. I hope to publish it in 2025 as an Amazon print-on-demand book and Kindle eBook. Elijah Roby has completed all the insightful monochromatic illustrations, cleverly pacing the light-down-to-darkness ambience while revealing highlights for each poem as we descend through every layer of the ocean. Dr Jordan Pitt has provided a wonderful Foreword, connecting with his research on ocean waves and sea ice. Another author I admire, Dr Blake Chapman has generously shared her words for the book’s back cover.
The Consilience Journal is something I hope older readers of this website may appreciate. Regardless of how a poem affects you on reading (be it inspired & amazed or befuddled but curious), after each poem, all is revealed in the author’s best attempt to explain their work. With 80 academic volunteers to help with the reviewing process, this is a beautiful way to dive into a pot-luck of poems and scientific revelation.
Flowing into Indigo by Celia Berrell
A rainbow of light-waves
can power right through
the top layers of water
to brighten our view
of colourful coral
and cute fishes too
in dazzling hues
of red, yellow, blue.
But these pigments get drowned
as we dive further down.
Yellows turn grey
and reds turn to brown
as part of that rainbow
abandons dive’s quest
‘til only the indigo
blues dive the best.
This Sunlight Zone goes
for two hundred metres.
By then all those colours
are losing their features.
An indigo world
of deep monochrome
then welcomes us to
the Twilight Zone.
The Science
Sunlight can generate rainbows whenever its white light is refracted or spread out into its various light wave frequencies. The electromagnetic energy we identify as red has the longest wave frequency of the rainbow colours (ROYGBIV). Blues and violets have the shortest. (Light waves which are either shorter or longer than these certainly exist, but we can’t actually see them with our own eyes). When sunlight travels down through increasingly deepening water, we can liken the longer red wavelengths to long-legged adults, powerfully striding down into the water. In contrast, the blue-violet wavelengths are more like little kids, happily running round, bumping into molecules. They’re taking lots of tiny steps as though they have energy to spare. Red wavelengths are the first to falter. When every stride needs to be enormous, they quickly run out of impetus.
Pigments and surfaces we identify as red are absorbing the other wavelengths of visible light and predominantly reflect only the red ones. As red frequency light waves diminish, this colour begins to dull, turning brown and eventually appearing black, since all other colour frequencies were already being absorbed. A bright yellow fish could still be reflecting a proportion of white light, along with specific yellow frequency light waves. Still, as the number of yellow-frequency light waves become less, and the intensity of light in general fades, that yellow colour dulls and begins to appear grey. It too would eventually darken to black, far enough down the water column. Even in bright sunshine and clear waters, we don’t expect to detect natural colours from sunlight past 200 metre depths. There is either a faint glimpse of light from those remaining short-frequency blue-violet light waves (also known as indigo) or complete darkness. We refer to this monochromatic region as the Twilight Zone.
The Poet
Celia Berrell’s Science Rhymes regularly feature in CSIRO’s Double Helix magazine & Australian Children’s Poetry. They have been published in school textbooks around the world. The Science Rhymes Book (Jabiru 2018) has 70 scientifically accurate poems relevant to the primary science curriculum. The Science Rhymes website shares student poems, promoting Australia’s National Science Week each August. Poems in anthologies include Penguin DK’s A World Full of Poems for ‘Peace by Piece’ and The Emma Press’s The Bee is not Afraid of Me for ‘True Bugs are Suckers’.
For those still reading, I particularly enjoyed Vaishnavi Shridhar’s Flying Kaleidoscope about butterfly wings from this issue of CONSILIENCE.