National Geographic - Severe Weather

A tornado-like waterspout dances with lightning in a deadly pas de deux over Floridas Lake Okeechobee.

(Fred K. Smith)

Blasts From the Past

M erciless, inconvenient, dangerous, unforgiving, deadly: Although only a few natural disasters in U.S. history can compare with the Katrina catastrophe or Sandys costly damage, those cataclysms are just two in an endless string of global weather-related rampages. History, myth, folklore, and literature are littered with extreme events that have changed the course of history. In an instant, hurricanes, rainstorms, windstorms, lightning strikes, floods, tornadoes, and blizzards can irreversibly alter the shape of our planet and the lives of millions of people. And yet, unlike volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, which can ravage with no warning whatsoever, storms are visible and evolving, emerging from a string of clues that offer the tantalizing promise of predictabilitya promise, alas, that across the ages goes unheeded or unrealized, often with catastrophic results.

Wayward weather has forever plagued humankind, from biblical floods to the 17th-century dry spell that fueled Londons Great Fire in 1666every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, as Samuel Pepys noted. In 1846, wet conditions wiped out all of the potatoes in Ireland, a blight leading to devastating famines that killed thousands. Archaeologists have speculated that a drought from 1276 to 1299 forced the Anasazi Indians of the American Southwest to abandon their homes in search of water.

In 1566, Bishop Diego de Landa documented in vivid detail a deadly stormperhaps the earliest reported hurricane in the New Worldthat had wracked Mexicos Yucatn Peninsula generations before his arrival. During a winters night, about six oclock in the evening, there arose a wind which kept increasing and soon changed into a hurricane of four winds. This wind overthrew all the large trees causing a great destruction of every kind of game; and it destroyed also all the tall houses which, since they were covered with straw and contained fire on account of the cold, they burned up a large part of the people.

Wet and dry, fire and rain, gale-force winds and ominous hushesthe ancients frequently interpreted weather as a divine reward or punishment. Egyptian communities appeased Set, the god of storms, to withhold desert storms. The ancient Greeks, ruled by a thunderbolt-wielding Zeus, identified four chief winds called Anemoi and ascribed their power to breezy gods. Boreas, the north wind, sent a cyclone to destroy King Xerxes attacking navy in 480 B.C . The word zephyr, or gentle breeze, comes from Zephyrus, the west wind, who was said to have sired the immortal horses of Achilles from Homers Iliad. To the Greeks, Notus was the south wind and Eurus was the east wind.

In Greco-Roman myth, Aeolus was the ruler of all winds; his name survives in the aeolian harp, which produces musical chords when breezes caress its strings. The Greeks believed that Aeolus kept the winds in a cave with a dozen holes, all blocked by stones. When he wanted a wind to blow from a certain direction, he rolled away the stone controlling that wind. To create a hurricane, Aeolus opened all 12 holes. On his return to Ithaca from the Trojan War, Odysseus lands at Aeoluss island kingdom and collects all the winds in an ox-skin bag, except for the west wind, which he requires for his return voyage. In sight of home, Odysseuss greedy men tear open the bagimagining it filled with silver and goldunleashing howling winds that blow them back to Aeoluss home.

Ancient Chinese worshipped the soil god Yu, who harnessed rivers and tamed floods. Securing Yus blessing was a deadly serious mission in a land where deluges along the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers have killed millions over the centuries. Gods and monsters with the power to control the forces of nature took many forms in ancient China.

A stormy disaster stopped self-appointed deity Kublai Khan dead in his tracks in 1274 when he sent a massive force of 900 ships bearing 40,000 warriors to invade Japan. The Mongol cavalry had begun an island-hopping campaign of terror that seemed destined to defeat the Japanese, but legend tells of a storm that destroyed more than a quarter of the Khans vessels in the harbor, forcing a retreat to the mainland. Yet, as a god himself, Kublai Khan had good reason to believe that the failure was a fluke, writes weather historian Jeffrey Rosenfeld. So he gave the weather, and his warriors, another chance. The Khan ordered whole forests cleared in China to build new fleets. They set sail from Korea and China and arrived at Hakata Bay, Kyushu, in Augustthe height of the typhoon season. This time history is unambiguous: on August 15, two days of ferocious rains began. Furious winds and towering waves dashed the Mongol ships to pieces; the storm-stirred surge of water into the harbor made escape impossible. More than 100,000 Mongol warriors and their sailors were killed in the storm or abandoned to certain death at the hands of the Japanese. It was said that the wreckage of ships was so dense that a person could walk across Hakata Bay after the storm. The typhoon gave birth to a legend of invincibility in Japan: a divine wind, kamikaze, was said to protect its shores from invasion.