THE WANDERER: An albatross in effortless flightCOURTESY OF PHIL RICHARDSON
Albatrosses, the largest birds able to achieve sustained flight, can soar thousands of kilometers through horrendous winds, all without flapping their wings. “It’s quite impressive to see—even with the strongest winds that you might see out in the ocean, you’re wondering if you’re going to survive, and the albatrosses just seem to be gliding by at ease,” says Rob Suryan, a seabird researcher at Oregon State University.
The birds manage flapless flight through a looping maneuver called dynamic soaring. Lord Rayleigh—Nobel Prize–winning physicist and discoverer of argon—first proposed an explanation of the mechanism in a letter to Nature in 1883. Albatrosses, he wrote, take advantage of a vertical gradient in wind velocity to gain energy. Wind speed is typically slowest near the ocean’s surface and ...
