In describing the sea voyage of the Jaredites, mention is made of "tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind" (Ether 6:6). According to Randall Spackman, despite the tremendous destruction that wind and rain can cause on land, the principal danger of heavy weather at sea is normally from the seas produced by the wind. . . . Captain Harding, U.S.N., emphasized that a wind increases its force upon a solid object in proportion to the square of the wind velocity. "A wind that doubles its speed increases its force four times. A 60-mph wind exerts 15 pounds per square foot pressure; a 125-mph wind exerts 78 pounds. . . . [Randall P. Spackman, The Jaredite Journey to America, pp. 138-139, unpublished]
“Great and Terrible Tempests”
According to Randall Spackman, when the Lord described the conditions to be faced, the word "floods" was used (Ether 2:24), but when the actual conditions were described, the words used were "great and terrible tempests" (Ether 6:6). The Jaredites, who may have viewed their voyage in a sense as a re-creation of Noah's voyage, knew of the great flood as a violent downpour of rain which resulted in the inundation. Similarly, the word tempest refers to a windstorm that is usually accompanied by rain, hail, snow, or thunder. In Hebrew, a Semitic language like Akkadian, the word zerem means a gush of water, a flood, or a tempest; indeed, in Isaiah 28:2, zerem appears in both senses as a tempest and a flood. Hence, it is not surprising that the storm conditions are referred to both as tempests and floods.
Heyerdahl described this mixture of sea, wind, and rain: "The crests blew away as they broke, and the spray stood like salt rain over the sea. When the tropical rain poured over us in horizontal squalls and whipped the surface of the sea, making invisible all around us, . . . we crawled about the deck, naked and frozen, seeing that all the gear was in order to weather the storm." Knoble wrote: "the storm is mixing salt and water, water and air into a new element that makes breathing difficult." [Randall P. Spackman, The Jaredite Journey to America, pp. 136,139, unpublished]