Natural Disasters Blog

I started reading The Invention of Air the story of Joseph Priestly, who author Steven Johnson claims to be one of his times greatest scientist, political and forward thinkers along side Benjamin Franklin. You might guess that I did not expect this book to have any relevance to this weeks topic, but the opening chapter talks a lot about an unusual natural sight, waterspouts. This uncommon disaster is like a small tornado on water that can spin up to 150 miles per hour. However before modern technology little was known about these unusual disasters, in the first century B.C. Lucretius described it as "a kind of column that lets down from the sky into the sea, around which the waters boil, stirred up by the heavy blast of the winds, and if any ships are caught in that tumult, they are tossed about and come into great peril." Joseph Priestly was traveling across the Atlantic ocean on his way to newly founded America, when he spotted four different water spouts drifting across the sea. For him it was a stroke of extraordinary good luck, his good friend Benjamin Franklin had been conducting a debate over whether the spouts descended from the clouds or from the sea. He took vigorous notes and took statements from other witnesses around him. Today we have a lot of scientific knowledge about the natural world around us and many warning systems and drills to keep us safe in a sudden fury of mother nature. It is difficult to imagine living in a world where natural disasters and odd weather patterns were unexplained and came out of the blue. Especially rare disaster that only last a short while like water spouts would be extremely difficult to describe and conduct scientific research. In a huge changing and unexpected world, we can really feel small and helpless in the wrath of mother nature.
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.