Great storms of the four winds; Scientists in a new field are studying hurricanes of prehistory to uncover clues that may help predict future patterns and probabilities.

• Author: Werner, Louis

Even before the Greek scientist Anaximander succinctly described wind as "the flowing of air" in the sixth century B.C., man has been fascinated by changes in the weather. Rich or poor, tall or short, we all live under the same sun and clouds, rain and snow, high pressure systems and low. But violent storms, as always, are what most intrigue the weatherwise.

Today, we all know what hurricanes are and how they are classified, from category one to category five. Since 1953, when the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) changed over from its "Able, Baker, Charlie" military designations, we have even humanized them, calling them by proper names. Agnes, Camille, David, Fifi, Hilda, and Mitch are only some of the best remembered by those who live in Central America, the Caribbean, and along the Gulf Coast.

The word hurricane, Carib in origin, is itself a person, the name of the Maya god Hurakan, who, according to the Popol Vuh, was present at the earth's creation.

But what of the hurricanes of times long past? Were they as fierce and fearsome as those of the twentieth century? Were they as common as today and as concentrated when and where they made landfall? Is it possible to recover the most notorious of them from their now-forgotten histories, to reconstruct their storm paths, and recount their toll of death and destruction?

There are thousands of storm watchers out there now with their eyes to the sky, working for the meteorological services of every country affected by severe weather. In 1870, the College of Belem in Havana, Cuba, was the first to offer the general public warnings of hurricanes, which in those days traveled faster than human communications. Not until 1909 did the first ship-to-shore report of an approaching hurricane--in the Yucatan channel--help to save lives.

Alerts can help coastal ships as well as communities. By one estimate, 98 percent of the ships lost in hurricanes before 1825 sank in water less than thirty feet deep. Warnings in 1992 of Hurricane Andrew's approach could not avoid the loss of thousands of boats--at a value of a half-billion dollars, but only two deaths on board were reported.

Today, alerts and updates travel at the speed of light. Sirens sound their warnings, police conduct door-to-door evacuations, and news bulletins interrupt our favorite shows. The website (www.nhc.noaa.gov) for the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, established because President William McKinley feared hurricanes more than the Spanish navy during the Spanish-American War, will even e-mail you a personal hurricane advisory.

However, in spite of all the attention paid to hurricanes somewhere over the horizon, historians of hurricanes past are few, and even fewer are those who study the hurricanes of prehistory, in a new scientific field called paleotempestology. By looking into old written records and digging deep into the earth, a new appreciation of the great storms of yesterday is slowly emerging.

It is not surprising that there should be few hurricane records from earlier centuries, because the weather back then, unlike today with our twenty-four hour weather channels on television, rarely became news. And when it did, the news-maker was likely to have drowned the newsman. Maritime logs were usually the most detailed and accurate records of weather, but in a hurricane they most likely went down with the ship. Lloyd's List, from the London insurance companies, compiled annual reports of maritime disasters based on survivors' oral reports.

These sources, even when they did survive, often told a flowery tale that is less than useful to historians. However, some ship logs with better details have survived, and historians have used them to piece back together the path and intensity of a storm. Even with anecdotal information, storm paths call be charted. The NHC's deputy director Edward Rappaport recently mapped the paths of hurricanes in the year 1775, one of which killed up to four thousand people in Newfoundland and wiped out 20 percent of the male population on the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon who had been at sea.

One storm was first reported on August 25, 1775, in the log of the sloop Adventure: "Light airs of wind and variable. Looks black and dirty all around at ten a.m. ... The weather increases from heavy squalls to a fever gale of wind, hauled all the sail and sent to the westward under the...