Old shipwrecks tell hurricane tales

摘要

Using records of ships wrecked by Atlantic hurricanes dating as far back as the days of Christopher Columbus, researchers have extended the hurricane record by hundreds of years. The researchers estimate that hurricane frequency was one-fourth the long-term average in 1645 to 1715 -a period known as the Maunder Minimum, when the sun dimmed to its lowest recorded brightness. "We didn't go looking for the Maunder Minimum; it just popped out of the data,"says study coauthor Valerie Trouet, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.