Mother Nature's Extremes A hurricane is not the biggest storm the atmosphere can whip up. In 1993, a storm rampaged up the eastern seaboard of North America for more than 48 hours, breaking weather records as it went, tearing apart homes and farms, dumping snow so deep it trapped hundreds of hikers in the mountains, sinking yachts and bulk carriers in mountainous seas. Forty years earlier, low pressure, a high tide and onshore winds led to storm surges along the coasts of Holland and England.
Survivors recall a night spent clinging to disintegrating houses in icy darkness.
More than 2,000 people died. In 1991, professional diver John Chatterton discovered a sunken World War II German U-boat, lying undetected only 60 miles off the New Jersey shore, its unexploded torpedoes and the bodies of its crew still aboard. The U-boat's history involves unusual coincidences and a startling twist of fate. Trekking over the mountains in torrential storms, Michael Wood considers how a small band of Spanish adventurers could overthrow an empire of millions, and why the Aztec ruler Montezuma could have believed the Spanish were gods. In modern Mexico City, Wood pieces together the climax of the tale, using dramatic and little-known Aztec eyewitness accounts of the final battle between the Spanish and Aztec armies, a battle that changed the course of history. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .