Text: Northern Autumn
Edited by Beiqiu
Tornadoes and waterspouts have long captivated humans in mythological and popular belief ways, and were initially thought to have supernatural causes. And the ancient Greek natural philosophers came up with the first theory to explain weather phenomena as having natural causes. Aristotle was one of the first natural philosophers to speculate on the formation of tornadoes and waterspouts.
Aristotle believed that tornadoes and waterspouts were related to winds trapped inside clouds and moving in a circle. When the wind escapes from the clouds, its descending motion carries the clouds, resulting in the formation of a typhoon. His theories were adopted by other Greek philosophers and further nuanced. Aristotle's ideas also influenced Roman philosophers such as Lucretius, Seneca and Pliny the Elder, who further developed his ideas and added their own speculations.
Almost overlooked, Meteorologica was later translated into Latin, initially from the Arabic version, and had a greater impact in the following centuries and the Renaissance.
In the seventeenth century, the first books on tornadoes and waterspouts were published in Italy and France, marking the beginning of theoretical and observational research on these phenomena in Europe. Even the speculations about tornadoes and waterspouts put forward by Greek and Roman writers have seen a resurgence in recent years in the study of tornadoes and their effects in Europe.
This revival took place after the period that began at the end of the Second World War and was characterized by a relative lack of interest in the subject by European researchers and meteorologists. Although tornadoes are an important and relevant research topic, there is no history of tornadoes in Europe, except for some partial attempts.
1. From Myth to Natural Theory
Weather phenomena have long been the object of human fascination, curiosity, and threat. Because ancient farmers and hunters were strongly dependent on the weather, the ability to predict future weather conditions based on signs from nature would be beneficial for their survival.
Before discussing how the ancient world perceived two specific types of weather phenomena, namely tornadoes and waterspouts, we need to understand the intellectual environment that led to the theories that explain their formation.
There is a need to study how weather phenomena appear in cultural traditions, as well as the first hypotheses about the formation of weather phenomena in general. In the mythological works of ancient writers, meteorological phenomena are the result of divine intervention.
Both Homer and Hesiod mentioned many of the weather in their poems, which were later cited by other writers who wrote meteorology. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer describes Zeus as capable of producing rain, thunder, and storms, and Poseidon is also capable of controlling the weather.
So he spoke, and he gathered the storm clouds, stirred the sea channel, and waved his trident with both hands; In all the winds, he awakened all the strong winds, the sea and the continent were covered and hidden in the clouds, and the night fell from the sky.
In the Theogony, Hesiod describes the battle between Zeus and Typhon as a serpentine giant associated with a destructive storm. When the lord rushed forward, the great Mount Olympus trembled at his immortal feet, and the earth groaned. The violet sea was shrouded in fire from both of them, the flames of thunder, typhoon and wind monsters, and blazing thunder and lightning.
Not only did the ancient Greeks attribute meteorological phenomena to the gods (i.e., unnatural explanations), but they were probably also the first to make regular meteorological observations and come up with theories about the formation of meteorological phenomena.
Meteorological phenomena have matured, and natural philosophers have put forward hypotheses. The school was founded around 650 BC in the ancient Greek city of Miletus on the west coast of Anatolia and is located in Turkey today. Thales, a Greek philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer, linked weather to the motion of stars and planets. Two of his followers, Anaximander and Anaximenes, also tried to explain meteorological phenomena with natural causes.
Anaximander was the first to define wind as the movement of air, when "the finest vapors are separated from the air and are pushed together".
He also speculated that thunder was the result of air hitting the clouds, while lightning was caused by the wind violently separating the clouds. Centuries later, these explanations of nature still seem to be considered contrary to the general view that weather phenomena are related to the gods, as this dialogue from the comedy "Clouds" shows. The dialogue written by Aristophanes in 423 BC takes place between his compatriot Strepsiades, who lived in Athens, and the rationalist philosopher Socrates.
At the beginning of the fourth century BC, meteorology was in a period of decline. Wilson points out that philosophers from the Myers School simply rejected unnatural explanations as causes of weather phenomena, thus making further study of meteorology unnecessary.
Their speculations were later accepted by other thinkers, who believed that providing all the explanations for the formation of weather phenomena, so the Myersians focused their speculations on other topics rather than meteorology.
2. Aristotle's Meteorology and the first theories about the formation of tornadoes and waterspouts
Meteorology was reborn around 340 BC thanks to Aristotle's Meteorology. Meteorology was the first "systematic discussion of meteorology".
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was the founder of the Peripatetic school, and based on the main theories of weather phenomena of the time, he proposed new theories about rain, clouds, and fog, dew, hoarfrost, rain, snow, and hail related to hoarfrost, wind, and thunder and lightning. Aristotle's theory of "hurricanes, typhoons, firestorms, and thunderbolts" is described in the Meteorology. In establishing these theories, Aristotle did not discuss any actual events.
As far as we know, there are no surviving accounts of tornadoes and waterspouts that occurred in ancient Greece. The earliest descriptions of tornadoes and waterspouts in Greece are from the 1st century. The concept of a tornado or waterspout was developed by Aristotle without reference to or refutation of previous theories, in contrast to Aristotle's theory of wind, which refuted Anaximander's ideas. Aristotle was probably the first natural philosopher to discuss the concept of a tornado or waterspout and speculate on its formation.
In order to understand Aristotle's theories about tornadoes and waterspouts, we need to introduce some of the concepts he used to explain the formation of general weather phenomena. We will then discuss the terminology used by Aristotle and later ancient thinkers who wrote about tornadoes and waterspouts.
Aristotle described two types of processes, which he called "exhalation" within the Earth's area, the area below the Moon's orbit is made up of four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, arranged in concentric spheres, with the Earth as the center.
According to Aristotle, these elements are in a constant process of transformation from one element to another. Therefore, when the heat from the sun reaches the earth's surface, it mixes with cold and moist water to form a clammy exhale, which is associated with clouds and rain.
The moist and cool exhalation sinks, while the dry and warm exhale rises. Two exhalations coexist, and when Aristotle mentions one of them, he is referring to the exhalation that is dominant in a certain weather phenomenon. As the sun dries and heats the earth, dry and warm exhalations produce wind. As the dry and warm exhalation increases, only the vertical component of the wind is produced. The horizontal component of the wind is produced by the interaction between dry and warm exhalation and celestial motion.
Aristotle also noted that dry exhalation causes lightning when produced in small amounts, but when "the exhalation volume is abundant and flows continuously", εχνεφíαζ is produced.
In the English dictionary of Greek, εχνεφíαζ is translated as "a hurricane caused by the meeting and bursting of clouds." Before the beginning of the twentieth century, the word "hurricane" was used in official weather reports to denote storms, and also to describe tornadoes and waterspouts,
Therefore, given Aristotle's description of εχνεφíαζ, we believe that the term can be translated as universal storm, which is the definition used in this article. Aristotle also distinguishes between storms and Typhon, both of which are related to the wind descending from the clouds, but in Typhon's case, the clouds are behind the wind.
While the modern definition of a typhoon is a strong tropical cyclone in the western North Pacific, Aristotle may have referred to a tornado or waterspout, which is the definition used throughout the rest of this article.
According to Aristotle, storms occur due to the deflection of the wind in the surrounding clouds. During this period, Aristotle used the analogy of winds striking in narrow spaces of alleys and portals, or encountering winds from opposite directions. In this case, the wind is "pushed aside by the resistance of the narrow inlet of the upwind, resulting in the formation of a circular wind vortex".
The formation of a tornado or waterspout also has the same mechanism in the clouds, but combined with downward motion. As Wilson says, Meteorologica isn't particularly clear about what caused the decline.
A tornado or waterspout cyclone, in the original translation] is produced when a storm that has already been created cannot be extricated from the clouds: it is caused by the resistance of the vortex, which occurs when the spiral sinks into the earth and carries the clouds, which cannot get rid of itself. Its explosions will topple anything that stands in its way, and its circular motion will spin and forcibly take anything it comes across.
Ancient Greek philosophy had a strong influence on ancient Roman philosophy, especially after the Roman conquest of Greece began in 200 BC. Titus Lucretius Calus was one of the first Roman natural philosophers to write about meteorology, known simply as Lucretius, and his views on tornadoes and waterspouts will be described in the next section.
3. The impact of early theories on tornadoes and waterspouts
Between the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages, Aristotle's writings were virtually unknown in Western Europe. During this period, as Latin grew, knowledge of Greek declined in Western Europe. Also during this time, Isidore of Seville in Spain, Venerable Bede in England, and Rabanus Morus Magnumtius in Germany were among the first medieval scholars to include the subject of meteorology in their writings.
In etymology, Isidore of Seville gives an explanation of air, clouds, thunder and lightning, rainbows and rain. He also mentioned that tornadoes and waterspouts are produced by "distortions of the wind".
Meteorology was rediscovered in the twelfth century, when Gerald of Cremona translated the Arabic version of Ibn Birek into Latin. Wilhelm van Morbeek completed a new translation from Greek to Latin in the second half of the 2008th century.
In the thirteenth century and throughout the Renaissance, Aristotle's writings had a strong influence on the physical sciences because of the "overwhelming explanatory power of philosophical and scientific systems".
In addition, Aristotle's views on nature and divinity were adopted by Christian philosophers and theologians in the Middle Ages. There are also comments on meteorology, such as those of Roger Bacon in 2011, which criticized Aristotle's theory, which at the time was considered close to blasphemy.
From the end of the 1636th century to the beginning of the 1711th century, the study of tornadoes and waterspouts in Europe entered a new period. French theologian François Lamy, astronomer and mathematician Jemignano Montanari, and Jesuit polymath Roger Joseph Boskovich published books on waterspouts and tornadoes in Italy for length studies.
Not only did these natural philosophers simply repeat previous speculations about tornado formation, but they also focused on providing detailed observations of tornadoes and waterspouts and their effects as they tried to understand this weather phenomenon.
By the end of the eighteenth century, new theories began to emerge about the formation of tornadoes and waterspouts. A theory was popularized by French physicist Jean-Charles Atanasse Pertier, who also published the first pan-European tornado climatology, showing that tornadoes are an electrical phenomenon.
In the nineteenth century, the theory of tornado and waterspout formation proposed by Greek and Roman natural philosophers was cited only for its historical value. By the nineteenth century in the United States, these speculations about the formation of tornadoes and thunderstorms do not seem to have been considered by researchers in the field of severe storms.