14 Jan 1998, The Daily Telegraph

Readers need some stick

Steve Jones, our distinguished columnist, reveals the secrets of his trade.

By Steve Jones

THE Science Editor has asked me to do a striptease. As part of the essay competition, why not, he asks, write a piece on writing science pieces - what is it like to produce one every couple of weeks, essay inexorably following essay? Many of last year's competition entries were more than good enough to appear in place of this column, so I will not presume to talk about style. Instead, it's content: what to write about, 20 times a year?

The first line of the US Army Mule Training Manual was, it is said: "First attract the animal's attention by hitting it smartly across the head with a stout stick." That applies to newspapers. All stories, scientific or not, need a stout stick: something to attract a reader and, with luck, to persuade him to read on. In other words, the main thing about science journalism is that it is journalism, not science.

Any scientist is baffled by most of the scientific literature. Each article is aimed only at a few, and if others cannot comprehend it, too bad. All newspaper readers, though, their interest tickled by a blow between the ears, should be able to understand every word on every page. So, what to write about and how to make it simple? The obvious stories - cloning, the ozone hole and the rest - run out alarmingly soon. For me, it's all to do with hints in unlikely places.

One of the joys of science is that it never ends: like politics, there is something new every week. I am an obsessive reader of newspapers and magazines. Nature, Science and Genetics can be read in the same spirit as Autocar, The Spectator and Marxism Today; for amusement. Most (Science on physics, or The Spectator on politics) passes straight over one's head, but enough sinks in to spark off the occasional idea.

The first columnar rule is that to write about science - or for that matter politics - for profit, you must read it for pleasure. Before the editor's order to disrobe I was planning to make waves. The idea came from an obituary in last week's Guardian of Henry Charnock, a pioneer of marine science. There must, I thought, be a story in that. But where to find out? Check Charnock's name on the giant computer database - The Science Citation Index - in which all references to previous work are listed. Lots of hits, but most to papers too technical to understand.

One leads to a new textbook of oceanography. Not in the college library of course (new books are so unfashionable), but a judicious investment at Dillon's does the job. It's a goldmine.

As Charnock showed, every ocean wave starts as a wind-induced ripple. As it grows, it moves into faster air and gets taller. How tall depends on how hard the wind blows, for how long, and over what distance. A 60mph gale, blowing across 1,000 miles of sea for three days will give seas averaging 50ft high. One wave in 300,000 will be four times the average height. The largest ever recorded was from a US Navy tanker in the Pacific in the 1930s, at 112 feet; but there may be plenty bigger (including the one that almost capsized the Queen Mary in 1942).

In the deep sea, waves move not water, but energy. Once they break, though, water is displaced. That happens near the shore. Once the water is a 20th as deep as the distance between crests, it cannot move forward and backwards as it does in deeper seas, and its energy goes towards steepening the wave. When the water is only one and a half times as deep as the inter-crest interval there is a crisis. The wave breaks.

THE height of waves is increasing - by an average of a quarter in the North Sea since the 1960s. Why, nobody knows. It may be the dread global warming (warm water is lighter and builds higher). It could, though, be a side-effect of pollution control. The oil that used freely to be dumped around the British Isles stopped the wind from making ripples and damped the seas.

Even the drop in plankton levels (global warming again?) may play a part as they, too, make an oily substance. And that's another stout stick: Selsey was battered by waves over the New Year. That has happened often before.

The line of boulders that makes up the shoreline has moved hundreds of yards as the ocean beats upon it. The place where Aella, the first King of all England, landed is now far out at sea. The physics of how that happens is difficult but fascinating What, surely that can't be 800 words already? Steve Jones is the bestselling author of In the Blood and Professor of Genetics at UCL.