¶ The Paragraph

31 cargo ships and barges stranded, twelve ships sunk with crew, 253 sailors drowned — that was the the toll of the most disastrous storm ever to hit the Great Lakes. The first November gale of 1913 started on western Lake Superior when warm southwest winds sped up on Thursday the 6th. On Friday morning […]

“Water! Water! Water!” wrote an early surveyor of northwestern Ohio, “tall timber! deep water! Not a blade of grass growing or a bird to be seen50.” The surveyor was traveling in the Great Black Swamp, a forty mile (64 km) swath stretching from the western end of Lake Erie nearly to Fort Wayne – an […]

Wind sweeps the North American High Plains, drying up the scant rain water30×31. But there is water enough for short grasses to flourish, and over the ages they have fed the hardy buffalo, whose massive herds “darkened the plains32“. “[The High Plains is] almost wholly unfit for cultivation,” wrote Major Stephen H. Long in 1819, […]

Clayton Hall, 14, was bringing the baseball bat for a game in Minneola, Kansas, on “Black Sunday”, April 14, 1935, when the dust storm hit61: “I just got in the middle of the road, … and all of a sudden, I couldn’t see. I thought, well I just got some dust in my eyes. I […]

Two Greenpeace explorers are now trekking across the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole – the first ever such trip during summertime1. The trip is harder and riskier in the summertime, when the seasonal melting of the ice sheet leaves large gaps of ocean water, shaky ice, dense fog and deep slush. The explorers, Eric […]