Research Stories

What do the following events have in common: the extinction of the dinosaurs, the disappearance of the Mayans, the parting of the Red Sea, and the Great American Dust Bowl?

According to Randall Cerveny, all of these phenomena are directly related to weather. Cerveny is the President’s Professor of climatology at Arizona State University. In his latest book, Weather’s Greatest Mysteries Solved! (Prometheus Books, 2009), Cerveny explains the science of weather through a series of mysteries.

“Climatology is one of the youngest academic fields, and new discoveries are made every day,” says Cerveny. “My point in the book is that we’re still learning a whole lot.”

For example, prevailing wisdom holds that Europeans brought smallpox to the New World, which decimated the native population.

“But we think climate helped,” says Cerveny. “Tree-ring records show there was an 80- to 100-year period of lower-than-usual rainfall—a ‘mega-drought.’ This may have allowed for the spread of a disease like the Hantavirus. Eighty percent of the indigenous people died off during that time. Smallpox no doubt helped, but we think there was also something indigenous to this area.”

Each chapter of the book tells a personal story about research on a particular weather “mystery.”

“This book contains a lot of my research,” says Cerveny. “It also involves a lot of research from my students and former students. I’ve had the good fortune to work with some really brilliant people.”

One of these people is former ASU geography professor Ray Henkel. Henkel’s weather mystery centers around a theme common to many modern-day thrillers—the illegal drug trade. In the 1960s, Henkel did some work in Bolivia for a government agency. While traveling through the country, he heard a story that when it rains a lot, production of coca—the plant used to make cocaine—decreases. This goes against common sense, which tells us that more rain should lead to more crops.

Like tobacco, however, coca leaves must be dried before they are processed. Heavy rains can interfere with the drying process and reduce the quality of a harvest.

Henkel obtained weather records from the Bolivian government. He also obtained coca production values from farmers—not an easy feat. The numbers confirmed the stories—years with more rain produced a lower coca harvest.

When you think of factors that might influence the world’s drug trade, you might not think about weather. But Henkel’s data showed that 64 percent of the annual variability in coca production could be attributed to the number of rainy days in the area.

In his book, Cerveny explains the wide variety of ways that scientists learn about climate, from befriending cocaine farmers to digging up ice in Antarctica to coring trees in northern Arizona.

The book follows on the heels of Freaks of the Storm (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), a collection of some of the weirdest weather phenomena in the world. Fish falling from the sky, hailstones shaped like crosses, and snow that turns blood-red when stepped on are a few of the strange tales found in Freaks.

“The title is a phrase that was used in the early part of the last century to describe strange phenomena that occurred during storms,” Cerveny explains. “For example, when chickens would lose their feathers during a tornado, that would be called a freak of the storm.”

He adds, “Freaks of the Storm was fun stuff. Weather’s Greatest Mysteries Solved! is a little more serious. I tried to show what weather science is all about.”

Randall Cerveny's New Book from Keith Jennings on Vimeo.