It’s been a tough few days for many of my compatriots. In the words of Auckland’s largest newspaper, last Friday “a moisture-packed, slow-moving subtropical low-pressure system bearing a long band of squeezed thunderstorms … unloaded torrents of water in the space of hours” upon the good people of New Zealand’s most populous city.
To date, four people are known to have died in the flooding that followed. Others have been displaced and even lost their homes, motorways were impassable, and major roads in and out of the city remain closed three days later.
Early reports are that it was Auckland’s wettest day in recorded history, which for a city renowned for sudden, torrential downpours, is really saying something.
While not on the scale of Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, and barely a blip on the radar compared to the recent devastating floods in Pakistan, it’s still a sobering reminder of nature’s indifference to human happiness.
The word weather comes from the Old English weder. Its source can be traced further back to Old Saxon and Old High German, but not as far as Latin.
Instead, the Romans called all weather tempestas - a word that could also mean “season” or “time”. By the thirteenth century, the Romance languages had restricted the sense of that word to its current meaning, so another word was needed for weather in its full range of guises.
As for the Ancient Greeks, they didn’t even have a word for weather. They did have words for good weather (aithria, eudia) and for storms, but no word for weather itself. Which makes you wonder what they talked about when the conversation hit a flat spot. By Byzantime times the word for time, kairos, had been enlisted for the purpose and has continued in that role ever since.
(By the way, I’m only half joking about the Greeks lacking a subject for rescuing flagging conversations. Berlitz, the world’s best known new-language teacher, offers a page on its website offering 165 conversation starters based on the weather. That, surely, tells you something.)
But back to tempest’s meaning becoming restricted to wild weather. That’s when weder rolled up its sleeves and got to work. Whereas its original sense veered decidedly towards the bumpier end of the spectrum, encompassing “air, sky, breeze, storm, tempest”, over time that sense expanded to include fair days as well as foul.
You can still hear the bumpier sense of weather in phrases like weather the storm. Likewise, when a geologist talks about weathering, they’re referring to the breaking down or dissolving of rocks and minerals, not their basking in the sun on a pleasant day to develop an attractive tan. (As an aside, erosion is the carrying away of material from its original location, making weathering and erosion distinct phenomena.)
According to National Geographic, “no rock on Earth is hard enough to resist the forces of weathering and erosion.” Isn’t that an amazing statement? If you ever want to ponder the Impermanence of Everything, you could do worse than start there.
And they surely have a point. The Grand Canyon is the result of little more than the effect of wind and water acting in tandem on soft rock over many millennia.
Similarly, the Himalayas - which stretch 2400 kilometres across five countries - pale in comparison to the long worn-away Transgondwanan Supermountain (8,000 kilometres, and actually a mountain range despite its name) and the earlier Nuna supermountains, which stretched across a similar distance. Try to find those mountain ranges today and you’ll search in vain. Evidence of their existence is now found only in such things as the sedimentary deposits they left behind and what geologists jauntily refer to as “post-collisional granitoids”.
Once the forces that build a mountain have stopped, it’s only a matter of time - albeit millions of years - before the weather, with a little help sometimes from other forces, wears it down to a nub. On a geological timescale, the Himalayas are but a blip on the radar.
And that’s the thing about the weather. One way or another, it sooner or later strips, abrades or washes away everything. The Whole Damn Lot. In some cases it may take millennia, and in others it’ll do its work in a few short, frightening hours. Either way, it’s a sobering reminder that while humans may have the wherewithal to mess with the planet, one thing we’ll almost certainly never do is rule it.
Aucklanders (and others in nearby areas) have just received a painful reminder of that. While nature itself may be indifferent to what they’re now dealing with, the rest of the country has swung into action to begin putting things back together.
It’s one of the things New Zealand does well, and thank heavens for that.
Bits and specious
The average raindrop falls at about 10 metres a second or 35 km/hr. If you’re a piece of silt lying loosely on the ground, that’s easily enough to knock you from your perch.
The world’s first published weather forecast was in - you guessed it - Britain. In 1861, Admiral Robert FitzRoy had barometer, wind and temperature readings sent to him from various spots along the coast. History doesn’t record whether, in time honoured fashion, the weather turned about to be the opposite of what he predicted.
My older readers will remember the wonderful Fred Dagg, the iconic Kiwi bloke of the 1970s. Here he is delivering the nightly weather report. Dagg was the creation of John Clarke, a comic genius who did his greatest work after moving to Australia. If you ever get the chance to see the mockumentary television series The Games (recorded in 1998 and 2000), grab it.
Quote of the week
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Mark Twain
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