Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 58

Islands in the middle of the sea are less exposed to earthquakes than those near land. First, the volume of the sea cools the evaporations and overpowers them by its weight and so crushes them. Then, currents and not shocks are produced in the sea by the action of the winds. Again, it is so extensive that evaporations do not collect in it but issue from it, and these draw the evaporations from the earth after them. Islands near the continent really form part of it: the intervening sea is not enough to make any difference; but those in the open sea can only be shaken if the whole of the sea that surrounds them is shaken too.

We have now explained earthquakes, their nature and cause, and the most important of the circumstances attendant on their appearance.

Part 9

Let us go on to explain lightning and thunder, and further whirlwind, fire-wind, and thunderbolts: for the cause of them all is the same.

As we have said, there are two kinds of exhalation, moist and dry, and the atmosphere contains them both potentially. It, as we have said before, condenses into cloud, and the density of the clouds is highest at their upper limit. (For they must be denser and colder on the side where the heat escapes to the upper region and leaves them. This explains why hurricanes and thunderbolts and all analogous phenomena move downwards in spite of the fact that everything hot has a natural tendency upwards. Just as the pips that we squeeze between our fingers are heavy but often jump upwards: so these things are necessarily squeezed out away from the densest part of the cloud.) Now the heat that escapes disperses to the up region. But if any of the dry exhalation is caught in the process as the air cools, it is squeezed out as the clouds contract, and collides in its rapid course with the neighbouring clouds, and the sound of this collision is what we call thunder. This collision is analogous, to compare small with great, to the sound we hear in a flame which men call the laughter or the threat of Hephaestus or of Hestia. This occurs when the wood dries and cracks and the exhalation rushes on the flame in a body. So in the clouds, the exhalation is projected and its impact on dense clouds causes thunder: the variety of the sound is due to the irregularity of the clouds and the hollows that intervene where their density is interrupted. This then, is thunder, and this its cause.

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