This paper proposes an analytic attention to the charged atmospheres of everyday life. It asks how circulating forces are generated as atmospheres per se, how they spawn worlds, animate forms of attachment and detachment, and become the live background of living in and living through things. Writing through several small cases selected out of countless potentially describable moments and scenes in which the sense of something happening becomes tactile, I try to open a proliferative list of questions about how forces come to reside in experiences, conditions, things, dreams, landscapes, imaginaries, and lived sensory moments. How do people dwelling in them become attuned to the sense of something coming into existence or something waning, sagging, dissipating, enduring, or resonating with what is lost or promising? I suggest that atmospheric attunements are palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract. They have rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans. They can pull the senses into alert or incite distraction or denial.
Most previous workers have regarded the insoluble residues of high-purity Quaternary limestones (coral reefs and oolites) as the most important parent material for well-developed, clay-rich soils on Caribbean and western Atlantic islands, but this genetic mechanism requires unreasonable amounts of limestone solution in Quaternary time. Other possible parent materials from external sources are volcanic ash from the Lesser Antilles island arc and Saharan dust carried across the Atlantic Ocean on the northeast trade winds. Soils on Quaternary coral terraces and carbonate eolianites on Barbados, Jamaica, the Florida Keys (United States), and New Providence Island (Bahamas) were studied to determine which, if either, external source was important. Caribbean volcanic ashes and Saharan dust can be clearly distinguished using ratios of relatively immobile elements (Al2O3/TiO2, Ti/Y, Ti/Zr, and Ti/Th). Comparison of these ratios in 25 soils, where estimated ages range from 125,000 to about 870,000 yr, shows that Saharan dust is the most important parent material for soils on all islands. These results indicate that the northeast trade winds have been an important component of the regional climatology for much of the Quaterary. Saharan dust may also be an important parent material for Caribbean island bauxites of much greater age.
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