title: Skies of Fury: Weather Weirdness Around the World
author: Patricia Barnes-Svarney
description: Ever used a cricket as a thermometer? It's pretty easy, really: when it's 60 degrees F, crickets apparently chirp 72 times a minute. For every 4 chirps over that, add a degree; for every four under, subtract a degree. That's just one of the many bizarre facts that veteran science writer Patricia Barnes-Svarney and her naturalist husband Thomas Svarney managed to uncover, verify ("relatively speaking," in the case of the crickets), and report in their sweeping survey of the "power and weirdness" of weather. With more or less equal coverage of basic meteorological principles and the more showy, sensational side of weather, <i>Skies of Fury</i> serves as an entertaining and approachable primer on the subject for everybody from aspiring young scientists to Weather Channel-watching armchair meteorologists.
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  * * *
  
  # THE OCEAN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Leonid Andreyev
  
  
  This page copyright © 2002 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
    
  CHAPTER I
  
  
    
  CHAPTER II
  
  
    
  CHAPTER III
  
  
    
  CHAPTER IV
  
  
    
  CHAPTER V
  
  
    
  CHAPTER VI
  
  
    
  CHAPTER VII
  
  
  ## THE OCEAN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER I
  
  
  
  
  
    
  A misty February twilight is descending over the ocean. The newly
  
  
  fallen snow has melted and the warm air is heavy and damp. The
  
  
  northwestern wind from the sea is driving it silently toward the
  
  
  mainland, bringing in its wake a sharply fragrant mixture of brine,
  
  
  of boundless space, of undisturbed, free and mysterious distances.
  
  
    
  In the sky, where the sun is setting, a noiseless destruction of an
  
  
  unknown city, of an unknown land, is taking place; structures,
  
  
  magnificent palaces with towers, are crumbling; mountains are
  
  
  silently splitting asunder and, bending slowly, are tumbling down.
  
  
  But no cry, no moan, no crash of the fall reaches the earth—the
  
  
  mo