What Tempests Can Teach Us

Can you see clearly when the rain is gone?

People have been singing about storms for years. Lena Horne was famous for her song “Stormy Weather.” The Doors sang about “Riders on the Storm,” and Creedence Clearwater Revival asked us, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”

More recently, we’ve heard “Here Comes the Rain Again” by Eurythmics, “Raining on Sunday” by Keith Urban, “Thunder” by Imagine Dragons, and “After the Storm” by Mumford & Sons.

We live on a stormy planet.

Emily Elliott is a University of Alabama scientist who studies ancient hurricanes. Not storms from last year or from the last decade, but from hundreds and even thousands of years ago, long before Lena Horne offered her sultry rendition of “Stormy Weather.”

Driving tubes into the bottoms of lakes, she and her colleagues pull up sediment that contains evidence of deadly storms from the past. They have discovered that there were periods when intense storms...