Cold (23 page)

For the most part, the flight path, at thirty thousand feet, took me through the troposphere. Puffy white cumulus clouds call
the lower troposphere home. Cumulonimbus clouds can start down at the level of cumulus clouds, but they tower skyward as much
as six miles, with updrafts that send pellets of water screaming toward space, turning to ice or snow as the air cools, then
plummeting back down — not drifting down with gravity, but flushing down in rushed gusts. They roller-coaster up and down,
sometimes freezing and thawing repeatedly, maybe eventually breaking loose to parachute to the ground as rain or snow or ice
or undecided sleet. A cumulonimbus cloud can hold five hundred thousand tons of water.

For every mile upward in the troposphere, for every mile farther from the earth’s surface, the temperature drops seventeen
degrees, plummeting to 65 below. But then it rises again in the stratosphere, warming up to the freezing point in the blanket
of ozone that drifts around between nine and twenty-five miles up. Beyond, it cools back down. Around the fifty-mile mark,
near what most would consider the edge of space, the thermometer drops to 180 below. At this temperature, carbon dioxide freezes
solid. A few miles farther up, where the northern lights dance but still well below the realm of weather satellites and space
shuttle orbits, the temperature rises. It exceeds 1,000 degrees, hot enough to melt lead and zinc, but in air so thin that
it does not matter, in air so thin that it is not worthy of the name.

A hundred and fifty years ago, in England, not far from Westminster Abbey and Windsor Palace, a man named James Glaisher amused
himself by sketching snowflakes. Not satisfied with what he found on the ground, he strapped a basket to the bottom of a balloon,
loaded the basket with a drawing pad and an assistant, and rode it upward. In warmer clouds, reasonably close to the earth
and ripe with humidity, Glaisher sketched the star-shaped flakes of Christmas cards. As he went higher, the air cooled. His
assistant grew cold. The assistant’s hands, in particular, were chilled. Glaisher pressed on. The assistant, his loyalty guaranteed
by the absence of any reasonable alternative to staying in the basket, stood by his side. Glaisher sketched hexagonal crystals
of snow at five degrees above zero and column-shaped flakes at fifteen below. At twenty-nine thousand feet, in very thin air,
Glaisher collapsed. The basket swung wildly beneath the balloon. Glaisher’s assistant tried to release gas from the balloon,
but his freezing hands were too stiff to pull the dump cord. He gripped it in his teeth and pulled. Gas flowed out of the
balloon, and both men survived.

Glaisher wrote of the snowflakes he had seen: “Their forms are so varied that it seemed scarcely possible for continuous observations
to exhaust them all.”

I amuse myself on the airplane with a collection of quotations about weather lore:

A bad winter is betide,

If hair grows thick on a bear’s hide.

If onions are more abundant than bears, there is this:

Onion skins very thin,

Midwinter coming in;

Onion skins very tough,

Winter’s coming, cold and rough.

Or this gem about February second, Candlemas Day, still three weeks off:

If Candlemas Day be fair and bright

Winter will have another fight.

If Candlemas Day brings cloud and rain,

Winter won’t come again
.

In 1776, a son of the parish clerk of Bampton in Devon, England, was killed by an icicle that plummeted from the church tower
and speared him. His memorial:

Bless my eyes

Here he lies

In a sad pickle

Kill’d by an icicle

On August 16, 1970, a chunk of ice fell from an airplane and crashed through the roof of a home just outside London. On March
25, 1974, ice eighteen inches across slammed into the hood of a woman’s car, again near London. She was later compensated
by an airline. In March 1978, Chicago police sealed off roads around the city’s tallest buildings while ice, accumulated during
a storm, crashed to the sidewalks.

On March 7, 1976, in Virginia, a basketball-size chunk of ice crashed into a roof, but this time there were neither airplanes
nor skyscrapers anywhere in the vicinity. On June 4, 1953, in southern California, fifty lumps of ice fell, weighing in total
about a ton and with individual pieces as heavy as an adult man. Farther back, on August 13, 1849, a block of ice nearly seven
feet in diameter fell in Scotland. According to an 1849 issue of the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal,

a curious phenomenon occurred at the farm of Balvullich, on the estate of Ord, occupied by Mr. Moffat, on the evening of Monday
last. Immediately after one of the loudest peals of thunder heard there, a large and irregular-shaped mass of ice, reckoned
to be nearly 20 feet in circumference, and of a proportionate thickness, fell near the farm-house. It had a beautiful crystalline
appearance, being nearly all quite transparent, if we except a small portion of it which consisted of hailstones of uncommon
size, fixed together. It was principally composed of small, square, diamond-shaped stones, of from 1 to 3 inches in size,
all firmly congealed together. The weight of this large piece of ice could not be ascertained; but it is a most fortunate
circumstance, that it did not fall on Mr. Moffat’s house, or it would have crushed it, and undoubtedly have caused the death
of some of the inmates. No appearance whatever of either hail or snow was discernible in the surrounding district.

The May 1894
Monthly Weather Review
reported an ice-encased gopher turtle falling during a hailstorm in Bovina, Mississippi, and in December 1973, a newspaper
reported frozen ducks falling in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

And then there is snow. The journal
Nature
reported three-and-a-half-inch flakes from a 1997 storm. In January 1915, snowflakes three and four inches across fell on
Berlin. According to the
Monthly Weather Review
of February 1915, the flakes “resembled a round or oval dish with its edges bent upward.” And on January 28, 1887, a report
from Montana described flakes — “flakes” in this case perhaps an odd choice of word — fifteen inches across and eight inches
thick.

The chaos of weather spills over with freakish events. But it is usually the merely unusual ones, not the freakish, that make
history. There is, for example, nothing freakish about hail. It forms regularly in cumulonimbus clouds, with little balls
of water and ice riding winds skyward, reaching altitudes beyond the realm of jet planes and temperatures of one hundred degrees
below zero, often falling and rising many times, buffeted by the internal chaotic gales of cumulonimbus thunderheads, but
finally falling from the sky.

There are records of freakishly big hailstones: A 1697 hailstorm in England dropped four-inch hailstones that killed at least
one person. A hailstone in Kansas weighed just under two pounds. The largest recorded hailstone, weighing more than two pounds,
fell in 1896 in Bangladesh. But it is the lesser hailstorms that leave historical footnotes: A hailstorm in April 1888 killed
246 people in India. In April 1977, a hailstorm took out the engine of an airplane and smashed its cockpit window, killing
68 people after a crash landing on a Georgia highway. And in 1984, a hailstorm caused well over a billion dollars’ worth of
damage in Munich.

As for snow, the School Children’s Blizzard of 1888 was somewhat unusual with its sudden brutality, but it was hardly freakish.
Two years earlier, a blizzard hit the western Texas Panhandle, Indian territory that became Oklahoma, and Kansas. Afterward,
dead cattle littered the land. In 1887, another blizzard hit ranching country, this time in the Dakota Badlands. Thereafter,
ranching changed forever, featuring smaller herds of higher-quality animals that were more tightly controlled. And just after
the School Children’s Blizzard, also in 1888, a low-pressure system moved into New York City from the Atlantic, dumping snow
and pushing winds to seventy miles per hour. Greely’s team of weather forecasters missed the call again, predicting rain and
“colder fresh to brisk westerly winds, fair weather.” The storm surprised the city, and more than two hundred people died.
From the
New York Evening Sun:

The streets were littered with blown down signs, tops of fancy lamps, and all the wreck and debris of projections, ornaments,
and moveables. Everywhere horse cars were lying on their sides, entrenched in deep snow, lying across the tracks, jammed together
and in every conceivable position. The city’s surface was like a wreck-strewn battlefield.

From the
New York Tribune:
“The city was left to run itself, chaos reigned, and the proud boastful metropolis was reduced to the condition of a primitive
settlement.” And from the
New York Times:

In looking back on the events of yesterday, the most amazing thing to the residents of this great city must be the ease with
which the elements were able to overcome the boasted triumph of civilization, particularly in those respects which philosophers
and statesmen have contended permanently marked our civilization and distinguished it from the civilization of the old world
— our superior means of intercommunication.

Ice falls on people and airplanes, snowstorms seize cities, and cold snaps win and lose wars. Snow stopped Alexander the Great’s
eastward march into India three centuries before the birth of Christ, and it blocked the Moors’ invasion of France in the
thirteenth century. It added to the suffering of George Washington’s twelve thousand ill-prepared Continental soldiers at
Valley Forge, prompting Gouverneur Morris of New York to describe the men as “an army of skeletons.” In yet another conflict,
Napoleon’s soldiers reached Moscow in mid-September 1812, a year rendered somewhat colder than normal by an atmosphere laced
with volcanic dust. By early November, temperatures were below zero, and by early December the French were retreating at thirty-five
degrees below zero. Still later, during World War I, Italian and Austrian soldiers used avalanches as weapons, killing an
estimated sixty thousand enemy troops. Bodies were still turning up as late as 1952.

Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia faced snow in October. German land mines failed because of snow and ice. Russian artillery
troops used lubricants suited for low temperatures, while German soldiers had to warm their artillery with campfires. The
Russians used ponies acclimated to winter, and many of the Russian soldiers knew how to ski. German tanks bogged down in the
snow. At temperatures of forty-nine degrees below zero, the German soldiers awaited winter clothes. It is said that a quarter
of a million German soldiers died of frostbite and hypothermia. Cold was an ally of the Russians.

Superimposed on cold weather and its freak events, on all of the difficulties of prediction and the dreams of solving unsolvable
equations and on the beating of a butterfly’s chaotic wings, discernible patterns remain. Air moves irrevocably from areas
of high pressure to areas of low pressure. It is easy enough to predict the weather a day or two out by plotting the motion
of fronts and knowing, more or less, how one will interact with another. In more general terms, there are Hadley cells and
trade winds. There is the Coriolis effect shifting air to the right and left as wind moves across the rotating earth. There
is El Niño. In the north, there is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, shifting phases every twenty years or so. During its positive
phase, the western Pacific becomes cool, and part of the eastern ocean warms. During its negative phase, the western Pacific
warms, and the eastern ocean cools. Farther north, there is the Arctic Oscillation. In its negative phase, counterclockwise
winds blowing in the stratosphere weaken, and high pressure stands over the Arctic, pushing frigid winter air farther south,
generating rain in the western United States and the Mediterranean, and weakening trade winds. In its positive phase — the
phase in which we have been stuck more on than off for the past twenty years — the stratospheric winds blowing counterclockwise
above the pole strengthen, middle America stays warmer, and California and Spain dry out.

And there is the most basic pattern of all: polar regions are cold, and tropical regions are hot. The sun is spread out across
the polar regions, its light and heat striking at an angle. Most of the energy that reaches a polar surface bounces back,
reflected by snow and ice back up into space. In the tropics, the light and heat hit head-on. The ground absorbs the heat.
Leaves absorb the heat. Water absorbs the heat. And then the polar and equatorial regions interact. On a global scale, seen
from a distance, it might be said that the polar regions suck in the heat of the tropics, swallowing the world’s warmth. The
equatorial regions shed heat south and north, like a Weddell seal steaming as it lies on the Antarctic ice, or like a moose
panting, overheated and uncomfortable, its hot breath projecting vaporous shadows against the snow.