Gyre
A
gyre is any manner of swirling
vortex. It is often used to describe
wind or
ocean currents, for example the
North Pacific Gyre.
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 words in many of his poems, including
The Second Coming.
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."
In
bodies of water,
organisms use gyres for movement from areas of depleted
nutrients to areas of higher nutrients. Gyres are caused by
Coriolis force.
* Lake reference derived from lecture by Kristine Brenneman, in the Fisheries Biology department at
Humboldt State University in
Arcata, California.
