Scientists today released evidence of historically unprecedented hurricane activity along the northeast coast of what would become the United States between about 800 to 1700 years ago, which was associated with warmer ocean temperatures similar to levels we may expect in coming centuries with climate change and ocean warming.
Geoscientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) say new evidence they analyzed in sediment deposits from Cape Cod show that intense hurricanes, possibly more powerful than any storms New England has experienced in recorded history, frequently pounded the region from around 250 A.D. to about 1150.
Jon Woodruff and WHOI researcher Dana MacDonald, currently a visiting scholar at UMass Amherst, with lead author Jeff Donnelly of WHOI, say a warmer climate was associated with more intensity and frequent hurricanes on the U.S. East and Gulf coasts hundreds of years ago. They present a new record of sediment deposits in the current issue of Earth's Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Woodruff, MacDonald, Donnelly and colleagues report that 23 severe hurricanes hit the New England area between the years 250 A.D. and 1150, the equivalent of a severe storm on average about once every 40 years. Many were likely category 3 storms like Hurricane Katrina or category 4 storms like Hugo that would be catastrophic if they hit the region today, the authors add.
The study, the first to find evidence of historically unprecedented hurricane activity along the northeast coast, extends the hurricane record for the region by hundreds of years. Donnelly says the historical interval was "unlike what we've seen in the last few hundred years."
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