Weathering the weather

Tank, Brookfield Zoo's 120-pound African spur-thigh tortoise, has been doing something very odd this summer.

He has been running.

"Imagine a 120-pound bowling ball coming at you at 6 to 8 mph," explained Jeff Mitchell, who is in charge of the zoo's aquatics and reptiles.

Mitchell attributes Tank's freakish behavior to the weird, stormy-hot weather we've had in Chicago — it's messing with the reptile's metabolism.

Just how weird has it been here this summer?

On June 30, golf ball-sized hail shattered the glass at Garfield Park Conservatory — the first time that has happened in the building's 100-plus-year history.

The July 11 windstorm that smashed the Chicago area is now considered the worst storm on record — disrupting service for about 900,000 customers, ComEd said last week.

And then there was the record 11.15 inches of rain we got in July — more than half of it on one day,

There's been so much banging and rumbling and flashing in the skies that even meteorologists are having a hard time keeping track of it all.

"That kind of speaks to the volume of severe weather, severe thunderstorm events, we've had in and around Chicago recently," said Mike Doll, a meteorologist with Murray & Trettel in Palatine. "It's hard to even think back and remember them individually. They all blend together."

By now, you've probably heard about the "heat dome," the term meteorologists use to describe the great compressed mound of hot, moist air that has covered a great swath of the Midwest and stubbornly refused to move for weeks on end. Our city has been on the northern edge of the dome, the perfect place for thunderstorms to develop.

But if you think this summer has been weird, spare a thought for what some of your ancestors had to endure.

On April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian Island of Sumbawa, burying an entire civilization under searing ash, gas and rock. The eruption shot 400 million tons of sulfuric gases into the atmosphere, causing global cooling and creating what historians call "The Year Without a Summer." Farms in Maine suffered crop-killing frosts in July.

If you aren't keen on bugs, you probably wouldn't have wanted to be around in the summer of 1874, when millions upon millions of grasshoppers swarmed across the prairies from the Dakotas to Texas.

"The insects arrived in swarms so large they blocked out the sun and sounded like a rainstorm," according to the Kansas Historical Society. "Crops were eaten out of the ground, as well as the wool from live sheep and clothing off people's backs . . . Hoppers were reported to have been several inches deep on the ground and locomotives could not get traction because the insects made the rails too slippery."

Closer to home, many folks remember the heat wave of 1995, which caused more than 700 heat-related deaths.

While the vast majority of us have survived this year's ferocious weather, don't overlook what it can do to your head.

Being awakened night after night by what sounds like boulders crashing together in the heavens can lead to sleep deprivation.

"It can exacerbate mania in people who are bipolar," said Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. "Lots of sleep deprivation can definitely bring on depression."

Contributing: Associated Press

A Yorkville resident photographs lightning during an intense storm on Tuesday. | Steven buyansky~sun-times mediaSteven BuyanskyBrookfield Zoo's 120-pound tortoise "Tank" has started running because the weather has messed up his metabolism. | courtesy brookfield zoo