• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 381 0

had retired for the night—the Grand Lounge windows, 72 feet above the water, were smashed by a breaking wave. Ten minutes later, the bridge crew saw a wave dead ahead that looked, they reported later before the publicity-spooked owners told them to zip it, as though they were heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover. The wave seemed to take ages to arrive, but it was probably less than a minute before it broke over the bow. A second wave, immediately behind the first, crashed over the foredeck, carrying away the forward whistle mast. The captain, R. W Warwick, admitted in a report later that it can be difficult to gauge the height of a wave from a vessel, but declared that the crest was more or less level with the line of sight for those on the bridge, about 95 feet above the surface. The officers declared that it was not a swell but a true wave; and Canadian weather buoy number 44141 moored in the area recorded a maximum wave height of 98 feet at that time.6

High-latitude waves tend to be bigger and more ferocious than tropical ones, because cold air, which is denser and heavier, can raise higher seas at a set speed than warm air can.7 Around Cape Horn, the winds lift the waves to awesome heights. Francis Drake's nephew, who was with his eminent uncle on one of his voyages, described "the seas, which by nature are of themselves heavy, and of a weigh tie substance [were] rowled up from the depths, even from the roots of the rocks . . . exceeding the tops of high and loftie mountains."8

Where ocean and shore intersect, so-called storm surges are caused in high winds. Much of the damage done by hurricanes is not through the wind itself but by surge-related flooding. I know this from my own property. When Hurricane Juan hit Halifax in 2003, it did massive damage to that relatively unprepared city. A mere hundred miles away at our house the winds were only a gale, but the ocean reared up like a beast, tearing at the shoreline. It thundered over our protective rocky beach and tore up our boardwalk, hurling it into the forest a full hundred yards away; the breakers were thirty-five feet tall, the storm surge almost eight feet, and the tide was high, another six feet or so . . . We get winter storms pretty well every year with hurricane-strength winds, but they seldom cause storm surges. One reason is that North Atlantic winter storms are bigger than most hurricanes—not in intensity, but in sheer spread. Their effects are therefore more diffused. The analogy is that a man with size-thirteen shoes leaves a shallower imprint in the ground than a woman with stiletto heels, which dig deep into soft earth. Snowshoes have the same spreading effect.9

The meteorologist's definition of a storm surge is "a complex deformation of the sea surface induced by the cyclonic winds on coastal waters, which surge as a sudden tide against the coast. The level of the sea can be raised by up to 10 feet for several hours. Depending on the characteristics and relative positions of the cyclone and the coast, the level of the sea can go up a further 3 feet by the low pressure."10

For many years scientists believed that the reduced atmospheric pressure alone could account for surges. But most of it is really wind-caused. A 35 millibar decline in pressure will raise the sea surface no more than a foot, and pressure-related surges seldom exceed three feet. By contrast, the storm that rolled through Galveston in 1900 raised the water level over fifteen feet; and Hurricane Camille raised the waters of the Gulf more than 25 feet.11

Even lakes can be affected. The Great Lakes of course, but one of the worst surges in memory was when Lake Okeechobee in Florida surged eighteen feet in 1926, drowning almost two thousand people. In the 1950s in Russia, Lake Baikal, the largest lake in the world in terms of volume, reared up in a storm surge and carried away an entire lumber mill.

On a greater scale still, as already noted, winds affect the oceans themselves. The great ocean currents, the earth's temperature regulators, are themselves caused by winds. Winds