Hurricane researchers: Stormy Renaissance

Compared with the period of offical  records, of hurricane activity along the U.S. East Coast was far friskier in the era of Michelangelo and da Vinci, before the waves of European settlements populated the New World.

That's the conclusion of a team of researchers who pored through sedimentary evidence from Salt Pond on Cape Cod to reconstruct a hurricane climatology for the last two millennia.

You can read how they went about it here, but to simplify, they pored through layers of sand deposits upon which hurricanes leave distinct signatures.

"The period from 1400 to 1675 A.D. received more hurricane strikes on the East Coast at a frequency higher than has been observed during the last 150 years," said Peter van Hengstum, of Texas A&M University, co-author of the paper.

The paper appeared in "Earth's Future,"  a publication of the American Geophysical Union, and was released Monday.

Van Hengstum said some storms could have hit Cape Cod with more force than Hurricane Bob in 1991, which generated winds up to 125 m.p.h., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The team said it is possible that the heightened hurricane activity was related to elevated sea-surface temperatures along the Atlantic coast and that might have worldwide-warming implications.

In any event, with an estimated $10 trillion in insured property along the U.S. coasts, we can safely predict that a land-falling Category 1 hurricane these days will cause a whole lot more damage than a Category 5 making U.S. landfall when Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.