"How bad will hurricanes get? Scientists look for answers in mud."

Paleotempestology, it's the only thing anyone seems to want to talk about.

From the Washington Post, July 1:

Their work suggests oceans are capable producing hurricane seasons far more relentless than anything modern society has seen so far.

CAMPBELL LAKE, Fla. — Emily Elliott was searching the water for something precious.
Mud. 

Elliott, a University of Alabama scientist who studies ancient hurricanes, came to this lake on the Gulf Coast for sediment that can unlock the secrets of the violent storms of the past — and offer a glimpse of future tempests as Earth’s climate warms.

Aboard a tiny pontoon, Elliott got low to guide a rigid plastic tube vertically underwater as her colleague Josh Bregy heaved a metal post driver up and down above her hardhat-covered head — ding! ding! ding! — to embed the tube deep into the bottom of the lake.

After hours on the water, they winched up a 1½-foot cylinder of lake bed. Sandwiched between sections of mud was what Elliott was looking for: a layer of sand, the potential remnants of a deadly storm that had hit the Florida Panhandle.

“It’s a beautiful example of a hurricane layer,” she said, running her finger down the clear tube.

This soggy, dirty work is part of a field of research called paleotempestology, the study of ancient hurricanes. The growing and relatively new science seeks to understand the storms that struck this and other coastlines before humans started recording the weather with modern instruments.

What researchers have found so far in that ancient mud offers a warning. Sifting through the sediment, paleotempestologists have spotted periods in which intense storms struck coastlines more frequently than current records show. Their work suggests oceans are capable of producing hurricane seasons far more relentless than anything modern society has seen so far.

Now, by burning fossil fuels and pumping heat-trapping gases into the air, the world risks re-creating those stormier conditions. Forecasters have already predicted that this year’s hurricane season, which started June 1, may be among the worst in decades. Hurricane Beryl, which exploded into a dangerous Category 4 hurricane Sunday, is forecast to charge across the Caribbean this week.

If the past is “any indication of what we’ll see,” Elliott said, “our coastal zones are really vulnerable.”

The hunt for ancient hurricanes

In 1989, Louisiana State University professor Kam-biu Liu was giving a lecture about the layers of ash left at the bottom of lakes by volcanic eruptions. A student, Miriam Fearn, asked if scientists can also see the marks left by hurricanes.

“That got me thinking. I said, ‘Of course, that should be doable,’” Liu said. That summer, he and Fearn found a layer of sand deep under an Alabama lake left by a 1979 storm.

Paleotempestology was supercharged after Category 5 Hurricane Andrew struck the Bahamas, Florida and Louisiana in 1992, killing dozens and causing billions of dollars in damage. The reinsurance industry, which financially backs home insurers and other insurance companies, pumped money into prehistoric hurricane research to better understand the risk of major storms.

“They really put their money where their mouth was, and really kick-started the field,” said Jeff Donnelly, another early ancient hurricane researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

To predict how hurricane patterns will change in response to rising temperatures, climate scientists don’t have much to go on: roughly 170 years of instrumental data, a blink of an eye in Earth’s history. Paleotempestology holds the promise of extending the storm record by thousands of years and painting a more complete picture of how bad hurricanes can get.

When an intense hurricane makes landfall, the water crashes into beaches and carries waves of sand inland. If a lake is positioned just right along the coast, that material washes into it and settles on the bottom. By measuring radioactive carbon in those layers, paleotempestologists can figure out when a storm struck.

Other Gulf Coast sediment cores reveal a period of intense hurricane activity in the region — worse than what we see today. It lasted for centuries before abruptly ending around 600 to 800 years ago.....

....MORE

Previously:

"The Secret Messages in Ancient Storms"

Like many other blogs and websites we've looked at paleotempestology a couple times, so here's hoping we don't bore you. If interested, the problems we run into are after the jump.

*****

From a 2022 post, "Blue Holes Show Hurricane Activity in the Bahamas Is at a Centuries-Long Low":

This research is all well and good and in fact is pretty darn creative but what I would like to know is what the action was like during previous warm periods. Unfortunately we run into what is almost an event-horizon, beyond which, like the black hole's event-horizon, we can't observe

As noted in the outro from "How Wall Street Is Gaming ESG Scores":

When a business/finance researcher uses language like "With supercharged hurricanes, massive floods and unprecedented wildfires sweeping the globe" you can tell he's a newbie to the science.

Just yesterday I was looking for hurricane data from the Roman Climatic Optimum and the Minoan Warm Period and the so-called paleotempestology gets pretty sparse at even 1200 years ago, much less 2000 and 3500.

And that's just a moment ago in time. If we are looking back to previous interglacial periods what were the hurricanes like in the Eemian interglacial, 125,000 years ago? Or the one a quarter-million years ago? Or the interglacial a million years ago. And 50 million years ago? 500 million?

Just what are we comparing the present to when we make these sweeping statements?

We just went through an 11-year period 2006 - 2016 with zero cat. 3 and above landfalling hurricanes hitting the U.S. Is that our baseline?

None of the coupled climate models had that happening. (Sandy wasn't much more than a giant tropical storm when it made its New Jersey landfall but throw in a landing at daily high tide and the full moon monthly high tide and Chris Christie walks President Obama to re-election)

The thing is, we just don't know what is "normal" and all we can do is hope that our recency bias doesn't lead us into some very dark (literally and politically) places as we feel our way forward.