NP - Stormy Weather

[David Morris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/25/science/25FLOO.html

Four times since the last ice age, at intervals roughly 3,000 years apart, the
Northeast has been struck by cycles of storms far more powerful than any in
recent times, according to a new study. The region appears to have entered a
fifth era in which such superstorms are more likely, the researchers say.

No one should necessarily start building dikes right away, say the researchers,
who reported their work yesterday in the journal Nature. The stormy periods
they identified each lasted a millennium or more, and giant floods occurred
only sporadically in those stretches. 

Still, the work illustrates that natural extremes of weather — what one
researcher, Paul R. Bierman, a geologist at the University of Vermont, called a
"drumbeat of storminess" — are many times greater than those experienced in the
modern era.



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