Meteorology

The sun as seen through the SOHO Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT)

The remarkable cold lingered in Europe for weeks. Lakes, rivers, and the sea froze over, and the soil solidified a meter deep. The cold cracked open trees, crushed the life out of livestock huddling in stables, and made travel a treacherous undertaking. It was the coldest winter in the past 500 years, and one of the coldest moments in a larger global phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age. Likely causes include volcanic activity, oceanic currents, and/or reforestation due to Black-Death-induced population decline. It is nearly certain, however, that it has something to do with the unusually low number of sunspots that appeared at that time, a phenomenon referred to as the Maunder minimum.

We now know that such solar minima correlate quite closely with colder-than-normal temperatures on Earth, but science has yet to ascertain exactly why. Solar maximums, on the other hand, have historically had little noteworthy impact on the Earth apart from extra-splendid auroral displays. But thanks to our modern, electrified, interconnected society these previously innocuous events could cause catastrophic economic and social damage in the coming decades.

A Schleicher ASK 21

At 1609 hours a fearsome force suddenly and violently shredded large sections of the glider. The instructor later recalled a “very loud bang” and a distressingly “draughty” cockpit. Dazed and briefly unconscious, he realised that “something was seriously amiss... requiring unpleasant and decisive action.”

By the time he vacated the wreckage--noting on his way out that there was no need to eject the canopy, nor any canopy--his student had arrived at the same conclusion. Witnesses on the ground observed a bright flash and heard a loud crack, and craned their necks to see a ball of smoke and fine debris hanging in the space where the glider had been. Below this, the remnant of a fuselage plummeted earthwards at high speed, with larger sailplane fragments fluttering behind. Thankfully two open parachutes were among them, with deafened and soot-blackened aviators swinging underneath. They were the fortunate survivors of a curious and powerful phenomenon known as positive lightning.

Mere minutes before they were scheduled to begin their descent towards Beaufort, William Rankin heard a decreasingly reassuring series of grinding sounds coming from his aircraft's engine. The airframe shuddered, and most of the indicator needles on his array of cockpit instruments flopped into their fluorescent orange “something is horribly wrong” regions. The engine had stopped cold. As the unpowered aircraft dipped earthward, Lt Col Rankin switched on his Crusader's emergency generator to electrify his radio. “Power failure,” Rankin transmitted matter-of-factly to Nolan. “May have to eject.”

Unable to restart his engine, and struggling to keep his craft from entering a near-supersonic nose dive, Rankin grasped the two emergency eject handles. He was mindful of his extreme altitude, and of the serious discomfort that would accompany the sudden decompression of an ejection; but although he lacked a pressure suit, he knew that his oxygen mask should keep him breathing in the rarefied atmosphere nine miles up. He was also wary of the ominous gray soup of a storm that lurked below; but having previously experienced a bail out amidst enemy fire in Korea, a bit of inclement weather didn't seem all that off-putting. At approximately 6:00 pm, Lt Col Rankin concluded that his aircraft was unrecoverable and pulled hard on his eject handles. An explosive charge propelled him from the cockpit into the atmosphere with sufficient force to rip his left glove from his hand, scattering his canopy, pilot seat, and other plane-related debris into the sky. Bill Rankin had spent a fair amount of time skydiving in his career—both premeditated and otherwise—but this particular dive would be unlike any that he or any living person had experienced before.

There is one school of thought that does not buy any of these explanations. Instead, it points towards a much simpler idea - the South is warmer than the rest of the country. Could it be that hot weather can lead people to anger easily, become violent quickly, and more readily kill each other? Supporters of the heat hypothesis think so. The heat hypothesis is a simple yet powerful idea: the more uncomfortably hot the temperature, the more likely people become aggressive.

Some scientists believe that there is a larger, more sinister type of ice-chunk precipitation which can form outside of storms, making even the largest hailstones look puny in comparison. There is a great deal of disagreement in the scientific community regarding the origin of these falling slabs of ice, but it is certain that something is causing massive frozen chunks to occasionally drop from seemingly empty skies. The objects are called megacryometeors.

The exact date that Mount Tambora erupted is lost to obscurity since the populace of the area was mostly killed. Those who were far enough for safety yet near enough to note the event didn’t make a priority of recording the date. Best estimates of modern science make the date for 10 April 1815.

The eruption event blew 100 cubic kilometers of pyroclastic trachyandesite into the air, and ripped about 4,000 feet off the top of the caldera—leaving the once 13,000 foot hight peak at about 9,000 feet. The explosion threw enough debris into the air that a mild volcanic winter resulted; it caused crop-killing frosts in North America in June, and dubbed 1816 to be The Year Without a Summer.

In 1992 Alex Gurevich proposed that lightning is the spawn of interstellar radiation. The theory was widely dismissed by the scientific community, but in the time since it has come more and more into favor. Partly because there has been no suitable scientific theory, and partly because new observations fit correctly into the theory.