Jay W. Jacobs - The Widow Wave: A True Courtroom Drama of Tragedy at Sea

I N THE entire case, the only fact that everyone involved agreed on was this: at some point during his long flight from Manila to San Francisco, H. Tho Ang flew right over the beginnings of the storm that, a few days later, would take his life. It would be the worst recreational fishing boat accident ever to happen in San Franciscos long maritime history.

If Mr. Ang had looked out through his window to the ocean below, nothing would have aroused a premonition of danger. The winds churning the oceans surface into a mass of white-capped waves scarcely seem ominous when viewed from 39,000 feet.

As the plane flew eastward across the Pacific, a meteorological reaction of major proportion was rapidly evolving. Two different and very dangerous air masses had converged and were interacting. A fast moving accumulation of frigid air, which originated in the Siberian Arctic, was hurtling toward a swirling mass of unusually warm tropical air that had been hovering over the Central Pacific for weeks. The two weather fronts collided 1,500 miles northeast of Hawaii... a ticking meteorological time bomb that would explode a few days later.

Acting like Davids sling, the storms violently spinning epicenter would hurl the thirty and forty foot waves it created toward the California coast, two thousand miles away.

Cruising in the calm air of the upper atmosphere, the airliner was completely unaffected by the events taking place on the oceans surface. For all the effect it had on the plane, the storm brewing below could just as easily have been occurring on another planet.

Omiyakon is a remote village located in the vast drainage basin of the Lena River in far eastern Siberia. Winter begins in September, and does not relinquish its icy grip until May, nine long months later. The brief summer is from June to August. There is no spring or fall .

Despite its tiny size and isolated location near the Arctic Circle, Omiyakon has a unique characteristic differentiating it from any other place: it is the coldest inhabited place on earth. One year the thermometer dropped to a world record low temperature of minus 90 degrees below zero.

The extreme cold makes the Lena basin one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. In the dead of winter, the words below and zero always seem to be used together.

Omiyakons residents seldom venture out alone; a breakdown on a deserted track could be fatal. At zero degrees Fahrenheit, frostbite attacks exposed skin in fifteen minutes. At minus 40, water begins to freeze in a matter of seconds, and at minus 60, steel can shatter like glass.

In this brutally cold environment there is one unexpected element of beauty: at exceptionally low temperatures a deep breath expelled into the bone dry arctic air freezes instantly, forming miniature ice crystals that make a tinkling sound as they float downwards.

The Lena basin has one other distinction not noted in any record book. Despite its unbelievable frigidness, the basin is the birthplace of some of the earths most catastrophic storms; not the arctic blizzards one would expect... but major tropical storms.

Every winter the mountain ranges surrounding the basin trap huge masses of bitterly cold arctic air. The impounded air builds to a point where the mountains can no longer contain it. Propelled by the arctic jet stream, the massed air begins to flow over the mountain crests, taking it thousands of miles southeastwards toward the tropical air in the mid-Pacific. This phenomenon of fast moving arctic air is referred to by meteorologists as the Siberian Express.

When a significant drop in temperature occurs in an area the size of the Lena basin, the collected weight of billions of compacted air molecules results in a substantial increase in barometric pressure.

Two weeks before Mr. Angs flight, masses of cold arctic air had blanketed the Lena basin, raising the barometric pressure to an unusually high 30.59 pounds per square inch. North of Hawaii, just the opposite effect was taking place. The heat of the sun expanded the air molecules, dropping the barometric pressure to 28.99 psi. When the icy arctic air converged with the mass of swirling tropical air, its warmth pulled the cold air into its vortex like a spiders mating dance.