Please forgive the lengthiness of this quote from my currrent reading.
. . .Earth has seen five major extinction episodes in its time … In the Permian [extinction], at least 95 percent of animals known from the fossil record check out, never to return. … In betweeen the big kill-offs, there also have been many smaller, less well-known extinction episodes … . . .In nearly every case, for both big extinctions and more modest ones, we have bewilderingly little idea of what the cause was. Even after stripping out the more crackpot notions … [a]t least two dozen potential culprits have been identified … : global warming, global cooling, changing sea levels, oxygen depletion of the seas (a condition known as anoxia), epidemics, giant leaks of methane gas from the seafloor, meteor and comet impacts, runaway hurricanes of a type known as hypercanes, huge volcanic upwellings, catastrophic solar flares. – Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Never heard of hypercanes before, and the wikipedia article doesn't say much. I suppose I could research it further, but why deprive others of the fun?
Boy, Wordnerd, I sure didn't find much. Of all the online dicationaries, including the OED, it was only cited in Wikipedia. Then there were only some 500 Google hits, with nothing there that looked all that good to me, though I didn't read all 569.
Hypercanes are theoretical "super hurricanes" that can only form if the water temperature is 100 degrees or higher. Their cloud tops would reach 20 miles into the stratosphere (whereas a normal hurricane only goes 8 miles at most), and they would have sustaines winds of roughly 500 mph(compared to Hurricane Camile of 1969, the one considered to have the most powerful winds ever measured in a hurricane, at nearly 190 mph). I got this info from a special on the History Channel, with the man who invented the "hypercane" theory basically running the show.
Yah. I'd heard of the theory, although I've no idea where I came across it. It's purely theoretical at the moment: present-day conditions aren't bad enough to enable them to form.
BTW, welcome, gatormadman13! I hope you enjoy yourself here.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
