2025-07-30
9 分钟For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.
With summer heat domes slamming down on parts of the US and hurricane season ramping up,
you've no doubt seen plenty of extreme weather stories in your feed over the last few weeks.
Joining me today to demystify a few of those headlines is Andrea Thompson,
a senior news editor for sustainability at Scientific American.
Thanks so much for coming on to chat with us.
Thanks for having me.
So let's go over some of the topics that people might see trending in the headlines a lot,
you know, during this time of year.
We'll start with flash flooding.
Could you tell us a little bit about what happened in Texas and how it was possible for these floods to becomes so dangerous so quickly.
Yeah, so flash flood, it's, you know,
sort of in the name, it happens really quickly and often takes people by surprise.
It happens when you have really intense rains over a fairly small area,
usually over a relatively short time span.
And that's basically what happened in Texas.
There's between six to 10 inches of rain in three hours, which is a lot of rain.
And basically the ground just.
can't absorb that much water that quickly, and it can be exacerbated by other aspects.
In cities, you have a lot of pavement, a lot of asphalt,