The Morning Glory…2
Often stretching longer than Britain itself, the Morning Glory forms in a waver of air that travels at speeds of up to 60km/h
Paul Poole and his girlfriend Amanda also operate the Savannah Lodge, one of the few places to stay in Burketown. Before bed, they tell me that the cloud passed over this very morning before sunrise and that there is a strong possibility there will be another tomorrow. ‘It tends to work in a cycle,’ Poole says. ‘When the Glory comes, it’s usually for a few mornings in a row at around daybreak. The glider pilots get up at 4.30 or 5am to be ready.’ I am exhausted from my 42-hour journey, but a lie-in is clearly out of the question. Having come all this way, I’m not about to sleep though what might be the Morning Glory’s only appearance during my stay. So I drag myself out of bed at 5am, drive in the dark to the salt flats north of the town, and there I stand, surrounded by a swarm of bush flies and an endless expanse of flood plains, staring expectantly towards the brightening sky. The cloud normally approaches Burketown from the north-east, first appearing as a dark line on the distant dawn sky. But the orange, lilac and indigo hues of the sunrise stretch out over a completely cloudless vista. And so, with no cloud on the horizon today, I return to town.
Later in the day, I meet Frankie Wylie in the Burketown Pub, the town’s one and only bar. Wylie is such a regular fixture that he has his meals-on-wheels delivered to him there. He appears to be used to cheering up cloud-watchers. ‘With this cloud you can’t say when the time will be,’ he says. ‘Usually they say end of September it’ll come, but then maybe it won’t do till sometime in January. They don’t know for sure, no one does.’ He is sitting at the bar in a chair marked ‘No parking’ and he holds his can of beer in a leather-clad cooler with his name on it. ‘I first saw the Morning Glory when I moved here in 1979,’ he remembers. ‘You see clouds coming in everywhere around the world. But these fellas go upside down.’ He makes a rolling movement with his hands to show how the tube of cloud rotates backwards away from its direction of travel. ‘It’s something I’ll never fully believe,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘As it comes, it stirs all the dust and leaves and God knows what, but when it’s over you the air will stop dead - no wind, no nothing. It’s a weird experience. Why would it stop the wind like that?’
Dr Doug Christie, from the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra, knows the answer to questions like Wylie’s. Christie is an expert in large amplitude atmospheric wave disturbances, and is considered to be the world authority on the formation of the Morning Glory cloud. Back in the 1970s, he became interested in some readings he’d picked up on the ultra-sensitive micro-barometer array at the university’s research station in Warramunga, central Australia. These he determined to be caused by very large individual waves of air. He eventually traced these all the way back to the Gulf of Carpentaria region, 400 miles to the north. Since he first visited Burketown in 1980, Christie has conducted numerous experiments in this region of Australia and determined that the Morning Glory clouds passing over Burketown are visible manifestations of enormous individual waves of rising and falling air, many of which appear to originate over the Cape York Peninsula across the Gulf to the northeast. ‘These are almost certainly the result of a collision of opposing sea-breeze currents over Cape York.’ Christie explains. ‘But I’m not sure that we really understand the details of these disturbances. Why, for instance, you get such a variety of Morning Glories - some of just one or two solitary waves, others an extensive succession of waves, some propagating over huge distances, others hardly propagating at all. There are a lot of puzzling features to this disturbance. It is both important and highly unique.’
