by Bill McLain
Some simple advice will keep you from getting heat-related illnesses: stay cool!
What was the “year without a summer”? (Sunsets and Frankenstein.)
The year 1816 was known as the “year without a summer.” There was no summer at all in New England that year. There was snow and ice in April, ice half an inch thick on lakes and ponds in May, snow up to 10 inches deep in June, and more ice in July and August. The frost and ice continued through September, October, and November. The weather didn’t become mild until December, but by then it was too late. Although a few warm summer days lulled farmers into planting crops, frost came a few days later and killed the plants before they could grow into maturity. Because most crops were destroyed, people later called the year “eighteen hundred and starve to death.”
In the United States, New England was the hardest hit. Because of the lack of feed, livestock died and farmers were forced to eat what they could find, including pigeons and mackerel purchased from coastal fishermen. What grain was available cost 10 times as much as usual. Crops were also small in the Midwest and farmers had to pay up to $5 a bushel for seed for planting in the spring.
The severe winter wasn’t limited to this country. It circled the globe and affected Western Europe and the Scandinavian countries. Famine was widespread and riots broke out everywhere. Looters emptied grain warehouses and many people searched the streets for stray animals to eat.
Many blamed Ben Franklin for the severe weather. They claimed that his experiments with lightning rods had funneled off heat from the sun. However, the culprit was not Ben Franklin, but Tambora.
Mount Tambora, a volcano on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, erupted in April 1815. It was the largest volcanic eruption since the beginning of recorded history. The explosion was heard almost 1,000 miles away, smoke could be seen from a distance of over 300 miles, and volcanic ash fell on areas as far away as 800 miles.
Falling rock and poisonous gas killed 10,000 people on the island of Sumbawa. In the ensuing weeks, an estimated 80,000 people on neighboring islands died from starvation due to crop damage from the volcanic ash.
The volcano threw over a million and a half tons of dust and debris into the sky, which spread over a million square miles. The clouds of dust blocked out light and heat from the sun and caused the year without a summer.
The only good thing about the eruption of Mount Tambora was that it created spectacularly brilliant and beautiful sunsets throughout the world for several years.
FACTOIDS
When Mount Tambora erupted, it reduced the mountain from over 13,000 feet to 9,255 feet and created the world’s largest volcanic cone.
Today, Sumbawa Island is a tourist attraction and hosts such events as buffalo races over newly planted rice fields. The eastern capital of Bima is home to strong ponies exported all over Indonesia to pull carts. Bima also exhibits ntubu, a traditional game of head fighting, in which opponents pound their heads against each other. It is so dangerous that a priest performs an immunity ceremony before the game.
Just to the east of Sumbawa is Komodo Island, famous for its dreadful Komodo dragons. Because of the reputation of these monitor lizards, there are few visitors to the island and even fewer inhabitants.
Bungin Island is not too far from Sumbawa and is known as the world’s most densely populated island. About two thousand five hundred people live on 37 acres. When someone wants to build a house, they simply import coral rubble and pile it on the edge of the island as a foundation to build on.
DID YOU KNOW?
The year without a summer produced more than cold weather and beautiful sunsets. Mary Shelley spent the summer of 1816 in Switzerland. She and her poet husband, Percy Bysse Shelley, had been visiting Lord Byron and some friends at the Villa Diodati. Because of the eruption of Mount Tambora, the tempestuous weather produced torrential rains and incredible lightning storms that June night. The Shelleys decided it was too stormy to risk traveling home so they spent the night.
For entertainment the group read ghost stories to one another. This gave Byron an idea and he challenged everyone to write a ghost story of their own. This went on for a few nights but Mary Shelley didn’t feel inspired and wrote nothing. Six days later, when the others had abandoned their stories, Mary Shelley had an inspiration and wrote, “It was on a dreary night of November.”
She completed her novel a year later. It was called Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
Why is a rainbow curved? (Straight up and down would look silly.)
A rainbow is created when sunlight is refracted through drops of water. In other words, the water bends the sunlight, and each color frequency bends at a slightly different angle. The water acts like a prism, breaking the sunlight up into different colors. The colors are always the same. Starting from the outside, or top, of the rainbow, the colors are always red, orange, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The larger the drops of water, the brighter the rainbow will be.
A rainbow is curved because of the way light is refracted in water. For example, consider a single, round drop of water. As light enters the drop, it is refracted, or bent, toward the center of the drop. When it hits the inside wall of the drop, it is again refracted and starts a return path, but it hits the other side of the drop and is once again bent as it leaves the drop. To understand how this works, imagine a large glass bowl standing on a table. If you dropped a small ball into one side of the bowl with enough force, it would roll down toward the center of the bowl and then up the other side in a semicircular path. The ball follows the curvature of the bowl, which is a half circle. That’s just what happens when light hits a drop of water—it follows the curvature of the drop and forms a half circle, or bow.
It really doesn’t matter what causes a rainbow to be curved. It is always a joy to see such a wonderful and colorful creation of nature.
FACTOIDS
Because a rainbow is a distribution of colors with reference to the eye of the person looking at it, no two people ever see the same rainbow (except in a photograph). In fact, each eye actually sees a different rainbow.
In ancient times, many people were afraid of rainbows. They thought a rainbow was a group of snakes rising in the sky to drink water. They believed that if you pointed at a rainbow, you would lose your finger.
Although extremely rare, it’s possible for a rainbow to appear at night if there is a full moon and rain. Because moonlight is much weaker than sunlight, the rainbow will be very faint.
In some cultures in Indonesia and Africa, a rainbow is believed to be a heavenly bridge that connects the world of humans with the world of the gods. To many Arabs, it is the bow of God, and to the Masai it is the robe of God.
An old German creation myth says that the rainbow is the bowl that holds the paint God uses when coloring the birds.
Because rainbows are so distant, they are hard to observe closely. To solve that problem, scientists in the Middle Ages filled large glass globes with water and let light shine through them so they could study rainbows.
DID YOU KNOW?
You’ve probably heard the expression “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” The question is “Who put the pot of gold there?”
According to Irish folklore, the pot of gold belongs to a leprechaun, an Irish fairy. The typical leprechaun is only about two feet tall and looks like an old man. He tends to be very unfriendly, even nasty, and lives alone. He spends most of his time making shoes and wears a leather apron. It’s said that he has a hidden pot of gold.
If you want to find the pot of gold and you don’t want to chase rainbows, you will have to find a leprechaun. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the tapping of his hammer while he’s making shoes. Should you manage to catch a leprechaun, hold on tight and don’t let him get away. If you threaten to hurt him, he’ll probably tell you where his gold is hidden. However, never, never, take your eyes off him, because if you do he will vanish. The leprechaun will use every trick he can to make you look away so he ca
n escape.
Whether it’s capturing a leprechaun or looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, finding treasure is not easy. Even if there were a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow you’d never be able to get it. As you walk toward the rainbow, it will always move away from you.
People who are seeking easy riches, or dreamers, are often accused of “chasing rainbows.” Perhaps the way to wealth requires hard work and people should be more practical about it.
However, the dreamers in our society have created wonderful art, buildings, and inventions. It might not be a bad idea after all to search for that wonderful land somewhere over the rainbow.
More questions? Try these Web sites.
BALL LIGHTNING
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/tesla/bailgtn.html
This has a great deal of information about ball lightning, including research reports and personal encounters. There is also a section on how to create your own ball lightning, and a list of other Web sites about ball lightning.
RAINBOW
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/blynds/rnbw.html
A very informative site that describes what a rainbow is, what makes it curve, what makes the different colors, what causes a double rainbow, and more.
HEAT INDEX CALCULATOR
http://www.Web100.com/~sib/heatindex.html
If you enter the current temperature and the relative humidity, this calculator automatically computes and displays the heat index.
TIDAL WAVES
http://tqjunior.advanced.org/5818/tidalwaves.html
Did you know that a tidal wave can travel as fast as 200 mph and can be up to 1,000 feet high? These and other interesting facts about tidal waves are covered in this site.
If you get bored with tidal waves, you can also find information about avalanches, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, thunderstorms, and other weather-related topics.
YOUR WEATHER
http://www.weatherforyou.com/
This is an excellent weather site. It has national weather information, and you can also enter your city and state for a local weather forecast. It includes a weather computer that lets you convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa. This site also has calculators for determining the wind chill and the heat index.
16
World
Is it true that the only man-made object on earth that you can see from outer space is the Great Wall of China? (It’s amazing what you can see from outer space.)
There is a popular misconception that you can see the Great Wall of China with the naked eye if you’re in outer space. It’s not true. When astronaut William Pouge orbited 300 miles above the earth in the Skylab space station, he could not see the Great Wall of China without binoculars. Space shuttle astronaut Jay Apt said that his team looked for the Great Wall of China but could not find it, even though they could see things as small as airport runways. He deduced that the wall’s material was the same color as the ground and blended into the surrounding soil, making it impossible to see. At the time, the space shuttle was only 180 miles above the earth.
Many man-made objects on earth can be seen from outer space with the naked eye. Astronauts have been able to see the rocket-sled test site in New Mexico, the aircraft carrier that was scheduled to pick them up, and highways, railroads, and canals.
The building of the Great Wall was one of the world’s largest construction projects. Construction started in the 7th century B.C., when various feudal states each built their own walls for defense. When China was unified in 221 B.C., all of the existing walls were joined to ward off invaders from the North. After that, the wall was renovated many times. When the Ming Dynasty was founded in 1368, a major renovation of the wall was begun. It took 200 years to finish the work and resulted in the wall that can be seen today. The wall was used to stave off nomadic invaders and to communicate with the capital. Messages (smoke by day, fire by night) were relayed from tower to tower.
FACTOIDS
The wall is an average of 25 feet high, 15 to 30 feet wide at its base, and about 12 feet wide at the top. Its watchtowers are about 40 feet high.
An imaging radar on the Endeavor Space Shuttle produced images that not only clearly showed the Great Wall but also showed remnants of an older version of the wall.
According to ancient records, at least one million people worked on building the Great Wall. Many laborers died from starvation and exhaustion. Rather than being buried properly, their bodies were added to the wall’s building material to save time. Today, archeologists have discovered tombs within the Great Wall, which has often been called “the longest cemetery in the world.”
The wall is 3,976 miles long, as long as a wall built to extend from San Francisco, California, to Caracas, Venezuela.
Because the Great Wall is actually a series of different walls, different sources give different lengths for the wall. Most authorities agree that it is 3,976 miles long. However, Richard Nixon said that it was 2,484 miles long, and Time magazine once reported that it was 1,684 miles long.
DID YOU KNOW?
Evidence of the Romans in northern Europe is also a wall. The Roman emperor Hadrian ordered a wall to be built in northern England to protect Rome’s possessions from marauding tribes. Built by Roman troops, it was 73 miles long and was called Hadrian’s Wall.
Unlike the Great Wall, Hadrian’s Wall was built entirely from stone. It took over 15 years to build the wall, which was 8 to 10 feet thick and 12 to 16 feet high. Towers were located approximately one-third of a mile apart with small forts every mile. In spite of the towers and forts, the Romans never intended to fight from the top of the wall. Soldiers were trained to meet the invaders on open ground. The wall was primarily intended to control the movement of people across the frontier.
The main invaders were the Picts, who always seemed to be at war with the Romans. Because they had a custom of painting their bodies, the Romans used the Latin word picti, which means “painted,” to describe them. The Picts breached the wall three times and it was finally abandoned.
Many parts of Hadrian’s Wall can still be seen today and are quite impressive. Although the wall does not separate Scotland from England, many local Englishmen refer to Scotland as “the other side of Hadrian’s Wall.”
There have been many famous walls, including the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, the Berlin Wall, and others. They were all designed to keep people out, or keep them in.
It’s a good thing that we aren’t building great walls today.
What are the seven seas? (A lucky number for sailors?)
An ocean is a large area of salt water unobstructed by continents, such as the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. A sea, on the other hand, is usually partially or completely enclosed by land, such as the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
Sometimes oceans are referred to as seas. When someone talks about the “seven seas,” they are referring to the seven oceans, which are: the Arctic, Indian, North Pacific, South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and the Southern oceans, the last lying below Australia and the southern end of South America.
Years ago, when sailors had sailed all of the seven seas, they were considered to have sailed around the world.
FACTOIDS
Each of the seven seas, or oceans, is different from the others and presents unique challenges to sailors.
Arctic Ocean: This sea is the smallest and is nearly landlocked. For most of the year it is covered with ice, forcing sailors to face subfreezing temperatures. There is little marine life beneath the ice, although it is abundant in areas of open waters. This sea is the shortest route from Russia to North America.
Indian Ocean: This is the third largest after the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It includes both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Because it is an important trade route between Asia and Africa, it has been the scene of many conflicts. Sailors often must contend with monsoons and occasional typhoons.
North Pacific Ocean: This sea contains the low
est point anywhere on earth, the Mariana Trench, over 30,000 feet below sea level. Sailors often face persistent and hazardous fog for seven months out of the year.
South Pacific Ocean: When sailing this ocean, sailors may encounter dangerous and often deadly typhoons and must dodge icebergs when sailing the most southerly routes. Most of the world’s islands, about 25,000 of them, are in this ocean.
North Atlantic Ocean: This ocean has large areas of continental shelves and is relatively shallow compared to other oceans. It is known for its violent and often fatal storms. Sailors must fight icing of their ship’s superstructure for eight months, from October through May.
South Atlantic Ocean: When sailing this ocean, sailors must watch for hurricanes. If they sail too far south, they will encounter icebergs and icing of their ships.
Southern Ocean: This is the only ocean that encircles the entire earth without being blocked by some land mass. Sailors have to contend with huge icebergs, some of which tower 10 stories above the water. They must also face 12-foot swells and waves often as high as a 7-story building. Fierce gales, often reaching speeds of over 70 mph, occur 20 percent of the time. It is not a hospitable ocean at all.
DID YOU KNOW?
Long ago, people managed to divide the world’s water surface into seven oceans. Why seven? Perhaps it’s because many cultures find seven to be a mystical number.
