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Gyre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A gyre is any manner of swirling vortex. It is often used to describe wind or ocean currents, for example the North Pacific Gyre. In bodies of water, organisms use gyres for movement from areas of depleted nutrients to areas of higher nutrients.[1] Gyres are caused by Coriolis effect.
Lewis Carroll used the word as a verb in the opening stanza of his poem "Jabberwocky", defining it as "to go round and round like a gyroscope."
The word was also used by William Butler Yeats for an occult historical concept presented in his book A Vision (a book whose ideas Yeats claimed to receive from spirits of the dead). The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the phases of an individual's psychological development). Yeats uses the word in many of his poems, including "The Second Coming (poem)."
- ^ Lecture by Kristine Brenneman, in the Fisheries Biology department at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California