Fire Tornado vs Sharknado

flaming debris out in front of it. And then we also have the sharknado, a a tornado, a more or less traditional tornado, but instead of having a bunch of you know, bits of houses and broken trees and garbage and dirt caught up in it, it has great white sharks throwing them all over the place. Uh, you know, You're trying to just go about your daily life and then bam, white shark it's you, starts eating your leg. Then a hammerhead shark falls on you and crushes Yeah.

I mean it's pretty exciting, and we are bringing you both or all of earth, wind, fire, rain and sharks. Yeah spoiler. One of these is a little more sciences than the other. But by the end of it, we will we will put the question to you, because right now you don't have enough information to really say what would win in a fight sharpnado or or or fire tornado. But by the end of this podcast, you will know and you'll have an informed opinion you can share with

your friends. All right, let's get to it. We'll start off with the idea of the fire tornado. Now, just the idea again of a pillar or column of fire, uh, swirling up into the sky is a pretty old image, I mean for starters is we'll discuss it is a natural phenomenon. So in all likelihood, people have been seeing this sort of thing occur or and then hearing about it since time out of mind. But it's also factored into this symbol of its factored into into our our

religious views and our spiritual views of the world. For instance, if you go digging around in the Old Testament, you will find accounts of Yahweh taking on the form of a pillar of fire. Exodus one and the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud to leave them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light to go by day and night. I mean, this is really impressive, right,

This is an impressive talisman to have at your disposal. Yeah. Yeah, and this is yeah, this is the you know, the the old school uh God here, this is the pretty terrifying one that it does things like appear as a pillar of fire. And then there's another really cool account of of a deity as a pillar of fire that you'll find in Hinduism and according to one Hindu narrative, and you'll you'll see this reflected in sculpture and painting as well. UH, Brahma and Vishnu are arguing over who's

the most powerful of the gods. Uh. Now, Brahma and Vishnu, they are part of this uh a form of kind of the comal kind of trinity with Shiva. Um. They stand for world creation in the form of Brahma, world maintenance in the form of Vishnu, and then a world destruction in the form of Shiva. So Brahma vision near. They're standing around who's the most powerful to gods? I

don't know, it's it's an argument. But then this huge column of fire appeared right between them, burning straight down into the earth and searing up through the clouds high up. So they decided to investigate. Right, they're curious, so Vishnu, in his boar incarnation, digs down into the earth and attempt to find the column's base. Meanwhile, Brahma flies into the sky on his vehicle, the Hamsa bird to seek the columns top show off. Yeah, well the other one

turned into a boar. Yeah that's pretty cool too. So yeah, they both take on their their godly bowers and they seek the the end or beginning to this column of fire. Neither can find anything, so they fly back down to where they started and they say, I don't know, I can't figure this out. And then the column of fire opens up and Shiva uh steps forth, and then they both have to agree, Yeah, she is probably the most powerful of the three of us. That's right, because Shiva

is the great destroyer, particularly of the ego. Yes, so it would make sense that Shiva would roll it out like that. So there you go. There's a little religious, mythical spiritual fluff to sort of flavor uh, this idea

of the fire tornado, which does exist in real luck. Now, to talk about what a fire tornado is, we need to also discuss what tornadoes are and what what a tornado isn't I also want to mention before we go into fire tornadoes that this was something that was a standout at of course, the Burning Man Festival, Yes, just put on in the in the desert in California to search for two thousand twelve fire tornadoes. Burning Man mesmerizing videos of the smoke devils just marching out one by

one in front of the audience. Yeah, with some it was hard to tell from those videos to what extent they have fire in them, because they're clearly the gleaming of the of the flat of the fire, of the huge blaze is is illuminating them as they roll outward. I think the I think they're mostly smokes actually, yeah, but they are impressive nonetheless. So these are also known as fire whirls or even fire devils. Uh. Again, they're swirling columns of fire and they surge forward to consume

new fuel, sometimes heaving flaming logs through the air. That's been reported now, to a lay person, any funnel shaped column of air is a tornado, right, it's a twister or whatever. But meteorologists tend to be a little more discriminating about this kind of thing, and they classify twisters into two broad categories. Their super cell and their non super cell and it's it's all based on how they form and how much DAMA they inflict. Uh. For a storm to be called a supercell tornado, it must have

had it must have three characteristics. Okay, it must form within a massive thunderstorm and be penned it or suspended from that storm. Okay. Number two, it must come in contact with the surface of the Earth. And number three, it must have winds in excess of sixty five or a hundred and five kilometers per hour. Any other tornado that fails to meet these standards would fall into the non super cell category. And that includes, for instance, water spouts.

Water spouts they look like they might just be like a tornado in the ocean, but they're not. They form a different way, arising from cumulus clouds that haven't become thunderstorms that may never become thunderstorms. And then it's sucking up water and you know, marching across the ocean looking like some sort of giant Titanic water creature. Uh. Then you have land spouts, you have gust nadoes, and Uh. Finally, whether scientists recognize a third class of tornado like storms

known as whirlwinds Okay, now this is key. Um. These common types of atmospheric systems occur when the sun heats dry terrain and causes a column of warm air to rise rapidly. As it does, the column of air will whirl rotate around a vertical access, much like water draining down in the bathtub, you know, becomes visible when they pick up debris from the ground, and are often named to reflect the nature of the debris. So you have this little little vortex and picking up some dust. That's

a dust devil. It's picking up sand. You call it a sand world, picking up snow, snow whirls. If it were to pick up sharks, you would be more uh, you know, accurate in calling it a shirk a shark whirl, I guess. But then they're also even have a worlds where it's picking up Hey. So again, wind doesn't look like anything, but when it picks up these things, then it takes. That's the thing that we associate with it. So fire tornadoes have They are not operating exactly alike.

Tornadoes are probably closer to worlds, but even then they're not specifically like you can't say, hey, that's that's actually like a whirlwind um. But they do have again some of the same things that play like vortices, uh, intense up drafts, they've got rotation, and of course the conditions have to be met in order for a fire tornado to be created. Thing about fire tornadoes, just to remember

that you gotta you gotta have a fire. And when you have a fire going, and it could be a house fire, it could be a burning city, it could be a forest fire. But when you have a blaze of this magnitude, you essentially have a microclimate. You have a different set of air temperature, air pressure um going on. And as we've discussed before, I mean those are the that's that's how wind moves, that's how most of our weather patterns that we observe. It boils down to temperature differentials,

pressure deferentials, et cetera. Yeah, no one describes them as forming when superheated air near the surface of a large fire zone like a wildfire. By the way, I just head an NPR today. There are fifty wildfires going on in the US right now. Um And anyway, so if you have one of these conditions, it's very rare, but this can occur. You've got that surface of large fire zone, and it rises rapidly in an air mass where sufficient horizontal or vertical vorticity that's the spin in the atmosphere

is also present. So like a dust double or whirlwind, the rapidly rising air abubble wildfire can accelerate and turn the local vorticity into a tight vertical vortex made out of fire instead of dust and dust devils will peter out pretty quickly, but the sustained heat of a wildfire zone can help maintain a fairly long lived fire whirl

and that can last for several minutes or more. Yeah, it is to appear to dance around through the fire and in some cases can fit out from the fire and and spread the wildfire into an area that it may have been already moving towards. Anyway, So you have a specific example to share with us. We're talking in generalities here, but you have a specific story of a fire tornage. Yeah. This is basically like an anatomy of

a whorl from a weather perspective. And this is according to a Langdon North Dakota meteorological team reporting on a fire tornado that reached the base of developing cumuliform clouds and it stretched feet that's about into the air and

it lasted for about ten minutes. Was pretty impressive. So um, what the London North Dakota meteorologists said is that the fire zone heating produced the rapidly rising air, and then you have the lower level winds that had enough environmental share to induce a vertical vorticity near the surface and get the fire a world going and then sustain it.

And then two other factors where at play um, they have a low level moist sure that was sufficient to rise, cool condense and form the pyro cumulus cloud deck that it was built upon. And then the other factor was the lifted condensation level was close enough to the level of free convection so that the developing pyrocumulus quickly became

a towering cumulus. And that may have increased the overall updraft speed and vertical verticity to such an extent that the near surface fire world stretched into then drum mold a fire tornado. So we got upgraded in this sense. Alright, well, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna discuss fire tornadoes a little more. They were gonna move on to sharknadoes and then we are going to attend to call it shardonado versus fire tornado would

be right back. All right, we're back. We're discussing fire tornadoes. Um. There are a few other examples we have about wheel life fired mornadoes when they form. Uh. And some of these examples are drawing for a much more tragic circumstances. UM. The for instance, the great uh Suchtigo fire one in Prestigo, Wisconsin, UH and apparently also in sections of Michigan. And this is ablaze that consumed booming Milltown on the same day as the Chicago fire. And there's a result of the

same conditions. You had a dry summer, slashing bird farming practice in a powerful cold front that swooped in from the western US, bringing strong winds that turned h just a few small prairie fires into a raging inferno. So this town, which Cannain, also contained hundreds of wooden structures and lumber yards overflowing with all of this, uh, you know, delicious fodder for ablaze right in the in the in

the middle of everything. So when a fire reached the town, it found a ready supply of fuel and in a matter of minutes, a massive fire tornado swirled around the town, generating a hundred mile one kilometer winds and ambient temperatures topping out at seven degrees fahrenheit or three seventy degrees celsius. So sadly, the people who didn't make it into the river died in the flames, and it still ranks as one of the worst US fire disasters. Final death toll

of about a two thousand. Here's another one in three, the Great Canto earthquake in Japan ignited a firestorm that raged through the city and produced a gigantic fire tornado that killed thirty eight thousand people in fifteen minutes. And this was in the Hifaku Shu Auto region of Tokyo.

And then you have the San Luis Obispo fire April seven, uh is during a moderate thunderstorm over the area there in California, lightning struck oil reserves at a Union Oil Company tank farm located uh just about two and a half miles south of the city center, and the discharge ignited the oil itself or vapors above the oil, leading

to a five day fire. They consumed roughly six million barrels of patrolling and over the course of it is after eyewitnesses observed apparently hundreds of fire tornadoes erupting as a result of the blaze. So yeah, I mean it's it is amazing stuff a scene, and there's tons of videos also, um, not just of a naturally occurring but of people trying to create their own uh fire tornadoes

and team to them. Some of them are professionals, uh, are merely enthusiasts, right right, But it gives you a really good idea of all the different things that are at play here in directing the wind and the rotation. Yeah, because it's what discussed before. Wildfires, you know, of themselves are natural occurrences. Uh. The environments where they frequently occur, you often have have organisms that depend on that cycle of fire and regrowth in order to continue and uh.

And then you have these artificial environments that we create and then when they catch fire, you end up with artificial blazes. That's true. Uh. And those are all amazing sites. But but nothing is more amazing than seeing a terror read rise from the ashes of her own career and starring Sharknado. But also to see sharks just coming at you from from a storm in the sky. Yeah, now this is this has kind of been the summer of Sharknado.

It's really been something that everyone has rallied around. That's, of course, the the Sci Fi Channel original picture that came out that had a pretty strong viral marketing campaign behind it, and it's just goofy enough two enrapture everyone on some level or another, basically the whole the whole idea here is that a tornado spins off from the ocean, picks up all of these uh, these these sharks, all of them like massive sharks, and it comes in and

just throwing them everywhere. So it's dropping sharks into pools and two flooded houses into the street onto people, and hilarious ridiculousness ensues. And you actually he sent me a two minute clip that sort of encapsulates the whole movie. Yeah, it just boils it down to dumblines and and kills, and it was kind of wonderful and awful. In my favorite part and I'm sure for people who have seen it or have seen the clip is the guy Ian someone from nine O two one. Oh, I don't know

some show. He like, I'm pretending like I don't know what show that is. He's in Sharknado. You don't have to know this, okay, Yeah, he falls from rescue helicopter. Yes, And and then of course into the jaws of a great white. And did I mention that as he's falling, he actually has a chainsaw with him, so as he's gulped up by the great white. Uh, they both fall to the ground and and he emerges, of course from from the great White, cutting himself out of it. And

it's it's a fabulous, disgusting, ridiculous scene. And I'm sure O when everyone sees these trailers or God help him, watches the whole movie, asked themselves, could this actually happen? Could a sharponado actually hit my tent and hound my city and drop sharks on me? Well, we know there have been fish events, that's the thing. Yeah, and plenty of accounts of of of weather patterns picking up strange things, often living things, and dropping them. Suddenly it'll rain fish somewhere. Yeah.

Water spouts, as he had mentioned before, um one of the types of twisters and tornadoes that are carron in the ocean. One in two and ten sucked up hundreds of fish into the vortex before they bombarded the small town of La jam Hope. I've said that correctly. I'm

sure our Australian listeners will let me know. But that was hundreds of miles from the coast and then from my favorite ones a downpour of golf balls, not golf sized hail, um, but we're talking about actual golf balls descended upon Punta Gorda, Florida, after tornado struck the golf course. It's like golf ballonnado. Yeah. Yeah, So that sounds pretty terrifying.

That could that could hurt, doesn't it. But just I wanted to cover water spouts really quickly because again, as we said, these are essentially tornadoes over water, and there are two types. There's a fair weather on a tornadic one. And the tornadic water spouts begin as tornadoes over land and then they move over water. And they also form in severe thunderstorms over a body of water, and they can re really a ton of havoc. We're talking about

high winds, hail, and dangerous lightning. Now, fair weather water spouts developed in calmer weather and they form over open water and they developed this surface and then they climbed skyward towards the clouds so as we've seen again these these are natural occurring events that can dump um golf balls or sea creatures onto the land. Yeah, but the sea creatures that they dumped were generally talking stuff like like a large mouth bath nine and a fourth inches long.

That's according to Dr Jeff Masters over the Weather Underground, that's one of the heaviest uh like for instance, six pound fish all in India. That's the kind of the level of fish we're talking about, not a two thousand pounds great white shark, much less hundreds of them. That's right. And Bill pats Aert, a chomatologist with the Jet Propulsion Lab, he was given the what if question, like what what

if it could happen, what would it take? And he said it would take a massive water spout to deliver these great whites, like an e F five spinning at speeds of more than two fifty miles per hour to journey the updraft needed to suck these great whites out of the Pacific and then dumped them onto l ah And that he said, is just probably not ever going

to occur. Now, having heard from an expert that it is on some level feasible, I can't help but imagine, what have you had a planet where this type of weather, we're strong enough, winds and and and vortices were possible. What have you had a breed of shark like creature that depended on this like it was for this creature, this was like the salmon swimming stream to breed. To breed, they have to enter one of these water spouts and get thrown out on land, and then they have to

eat terror read in order to reproduce. Well, first of all, you're saying, there's a planet people with just terror reads. Yeah, maybe their clones. I don't know how it works. There's but everyone all beat all the beings on the land or terror read. Okay, so planet terror read yeah, and planet shark sharks and terror read living in perfect harmony

with one another. And this is kind of like, well, I know this would be asking asked if it was like an or division era, but it would have to be much farther in the future than that, because you have land dwelling terror reads occurring. I guess it would be possible. I don't know. I hate to say that, you'd I'd have to be a meteorologist to really answer that. And a cosmologist. Well, there you have it. We've broken

it down. You have, on one side, the fire tornado, which actually exists, is rare, but exists and has been documented and seen throughout human history and may or may not be a god. And then on the other hand, you have the sharknado, which does not exist and will probably never exist on this planet, but is on some level possible. So which would win in a fight? What's

your take sharknado versus fire tornado? Yes? And do you think that terror read Is is the the great destroyer or is she just fodder for the great destroyers on planet terror read Let us sim all right, well you're complicating the question. And then here's another possibility. What if the two storms merged and then you had to deal with a fire tornado filled with flaming sharks when they just cancel each other out, No, no, I think they would.

It would upgrade. It would be like sharks on fire soaring through the air like meteorites, particularly if that water had a generous amount of a oil slick on it. Right, Oh, then it would be sort of like fire breathing. It would be like a napalm shark tornado. Yeah, it's pretty big. I think that's going to be the sequel. All right, well, here you go. Uh. Indeed, let us know what you think about this, um. The idea of Terry read is a destroyer of worlds. The idea of the fire torno,

the reality of the fire tornado? Have you ever seen one? We'd love to hear about that. Were you at two thousand twelve burning Man? And you've got to see these things spiral out and uh and mostly smoke, but still very impressive? Uh? And then your thoughts on Sharknado? Have you seen Sharknado and its entirety? It's so? What was that like? And then how feasible do you think it is? And then what would you do Sharkonado were to hit your town? All these questions are fair game. You can

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