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WONDERS OF NATURE
Tornadoes. Nature miracle
Few people have ever seen a real tornado in their lives, although everyone knows what it is from books, movies or photographs. But those who have met at least once with this formidable natural phenomenon will never forget the feeling of inner tension, some ever-increasing trembling bordering on horror, no matter whether this meeting happened on land or on water.
An air whirlwind in miniature has been observed by any of us more than once. Sometimes, walking along a field road on a hot summer afternoon, you notice, for example, that the breeze that ran ahead suddenly swirled, raising a column of dust or stirring up an armful of straw and blowing some of the straw to the sky. But a few seconds passed, and the dust settled, the straws fell down, and everything subsided again, as if there was no air turbulence. Such mini-whirlwinds pass without a trace and are usually not even noticed by most passers-by. Another thing is a real, strong and formidable air (or water) whirlwind - a tornado (this word comes from the same root as the word "dusk", since we usually associate atmospheric whirlwinds with a thunderous, gloomy situation). In the United States, tornadoes are called the Spanish word "tornado", in Western Europe they are called "clots", and sailors use the English term "spout" to refer to this phenomenon. However, journalists and simply the public far from meteorology more often use the slang expression "twister", that is, "spinner". The tornado who saw it on the open plain is described as follows. From a dark cumulonimbus cloud (colloquially - clouds) a dark, brown or gray-bluish very elongated cone descends down to the surface of the earth, somewhat reminiscent of an elephant's trunk. To meet him from the ground rises another, wider and shorter, raising dust, debris, fallen leaves, etc. Soon, two whirlwinds, stretching towards each other, meet and form a single huge column, reaching hundreds of meters in diameter at the ends and tapering in the middle to ten or twenty. A rapidly rotating spiral of air, drawing in objects in its path, moves with the wind, but can suddenly lose power for no apparent reason. Then the tornado disappears, and objects lifted into the air fall to the ground. The reason for the huge suction power of the vortex is that very low pressure is created inside it. In a few seconds, it can drop to tenths of an atmosphere, and then rise sharply again, sometimes up to ten atmospheres or more. Because of this, the action of a tornado sometimes resembles outwardly a picture of an explosion. The pressure on contact with it drops so quickly that the walls of buildings hit by a tornado sometimes burst, flying to pieces. In the same way, tanks and tanks, captain's cabins on ships and river buoys "explode". It happened that chickens caught in the tornado zone flew high into the air, and then fell to the ground ... naked, as if plucked by someone. Once appeared, the tornado begins to move, usually in a straight trajectory, leaving behind a strip of destruction and causing a lot of trouble to people and animals, houses and ships, forests and crops, and even rivers and lakes. The devastation zone reaches a width of several hundred meters, and in length - from one or two kilometers to thirty, rarely forty, and the danger is not only air jets moving at great speed (and their speed can reach three hundred or four hundred meters per second!), but also boards, logs, fragments of walls, roof sheets and uprooted trees lifted by a tornado into the air and scattered to the sides. The power of a tornado is literally amazing: it is able to lift a truck or a cow into the air and move a hundred meters, tear a bridge off its supports and throw it into a river, move small houses from place to place, suck a pond to the bottom along with fish and frogs (and spill sweat). "fish", "frog" or some other outlandish rain). Fortunately, frenzied atmospheric whirlwinds do not live long: a few seconds or minutes. In rare cases, there were tornadoes that existed for up to half an hour. Moreover, it is interesting that they have their own "favorite" areas, where they appear more often than in other places. Quite regularly, for example, you can see a tornado in the Great Plains of the United States, in Japan, in the Sahara and Gobi deserts, in inland Australia. American prairie tornadoes have been the most frequently observed and described in the most detail. They even managed to film them more than once, and in the famous Hollywood film "Smerch" such documentary footage was used, filmed at different times by cameramen who accidentally encountered a tornado. In some years, up to several hundred tornadoes are observed in the southern states of the United States. So, for example, in 1954, about six hundred cases of the appearance of atmospheric vortices were recorded, and in 1956, which was especially full of storms and hurricanes, more than eight hundred tornadoes. There are weeks when these frenzied whirlwinds appear in dozens, and the newspapers are full of reports of more casualties and destruction. Most often, tornadoes occur in areas located off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Here, warm and humid sea winds often meet with cold and dry air that came from the north, from Canada. As a result, a pre-thunderstorm situation is created. Clouds are gathering, a downpour begins, lightning flashes and thunder rumbles. This is where terrible tornadoes arise. Due to their frequent appearance, they were able to study in more detail than the tornadoes of other areas, and their characteristics are well known and described. Tornadoes move at speeds up to one hundred kilometers per hour, the length of the path traversed by the whirlwind is ten to fifty kilometers, and the width of the captured strip is from one hundred meters to a kilometer. The tornado usually has the form of an inclined column, since the lower part of it is slowed down by friction against the ground and lags behind the upper one. When meeting with a tornado, most people experienced, according to them, fear and horror. During the day, the whirlwind looked like a huge black spinning column, and at night it was illuminated with frightening bright reflections of dozens of lightning and reflections from objects drawn in by the tornado, illuminated by heavenly fire and rotating in a whirlwind. According to statistics, up to two hundred people become victims of tornadoes every year. In some years, this figure doubles or even triples. The material damage caused by whirlwinds reaches hundreds of millions of dollars. Here is a description of the "exploits" of a tornado that swept over the United States in the spring of 1974. On April 2, a cold cyclone that formed over the Rocky Mountains moved to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Here he encountered warm and humid air masses brought from the Caribbean Sea. A powerful atmospheric front arose, spawning more than a hundred tornadoes. They moved along the coastal plains at speeds up to four hundred kilometers per hour, destroying everything in their path, destroying people, houses, livestock and crops. The damage from these destructions amounted to seven hundred million dollars, three hundred and thirty people died and about four thousand were injured. The city of Brandenburg was the first to suffer. The tornado roared and rumbled into the city early in the morning, at four o'clock. Many houses were destroyed, more than a hundred cars were crushed by debris. Thirty people died in houses and on the streets, more than two hundred were wounded. In the neighboring city of Risek, before the passage of the tornado, hail fell, and the hailstones reached the size of a pigeon's egg. Immediately after, a tornado hit the city. And again - injuries and death of people, destruction, troubles and grief. The city of Xenia was half destroyed by a furious tornado. Thirty-four people were killed and fifteen hundred were injured. The flourishing town turned into a heap of ruins. And this is a chronicle of only one spring. A special Tornado Service has been created in the United States, which monitors the weather and warns by radio the inhabitants of settlements lying in the supposed path of a tornado. But it is difficult to predict the vagaries of air whirlwinds, and situations often occur when a tornado suddenly changes direction and falls on people who did not expect it. An amazing incident occurred in the fall of 1920 in Kansas. In a small house of a rural elementary school, which consisted of one classroom and a teacher's room, there was an ordinary lesson. Suddenly, it got dark outside the window and there was a strange rumble. The children were frightened, rushed to the teacher and clung to her. Suddenly the door and windows rumbled outward and a black whirlwind burst into the room. And then something incredible happened: everything rose into the air and rushed away. The teacher later recalled: “As if invisible hooks lifted me, the children and all the desks into the air. We flew smoothly and calmly, and some children and objects revolved around me several times. I became scared, and I lost consciousness ... " When she came to, she realized that she was lying on the ground in the bare steppe. Nearby, she saw children running towards her screaming. But, alas, thirteen schoolchildren still died on landing. Atmospheric whirlwinds create atrocities, of course, not only in America. Quite often, the appearance of tornadoes was noted in Europe. So, in May 1952, an ominous "blood clot" came in the vicinity of the German city of Göttingen. A giant whirlwind, rotating at a speed of two hundred kilometers per hour, as if with a knife "drawn" two deep furrows thirteen and sixteen kilometers long across the terrain, knocked down, broke and uprooted more than fifty thousand trees, destroyed hundreds of houses. And in January 1968 in Sweden, in the town of Jung, there was no longer a tragic, but rather a comical incident involving a tornado. During a hockey match, a whirlwind lifted the goalkeeper and the gate into the air, moved it a few meters to the side and put it on the ground. There were cases when tornadoes appeared in Russia. In particular, Muscovites had the "pleasure" to observe the formidable whirlwind in 1904. It happened on a hot summer day, June 29th. After lunch, a huge black cloud appeared on the horizon and a thunderstorm began. At the same time, a tornado appeared in the north-east of the city and moved towards Lefortovo. Under the roar of thunder, he broke and twisted trees, tore off roofs, pulled out window frames and doors from stone houses, and destroyed wooden buildings. People saw a huge black pillar, as if from clouds of smoke, rising to the sky and expanding in the upper and lower parts, and in fear they fled away from it. In Lefortovo Park, a grove of hundred-year-old trees was destroyed, an ancient palace and a hospital were damaged. In those places where the tornado passed through the Moscow River, the bottom was exposed, as the tornado sucked all the water into itself. At the German market, a tornado lifted a policeman into the air and carried him two hundred fathoms, then lowering him unharmed to the ground. The firemen, seeing a black column in the air, decided that a big fire had started, and rushed with their horse-drawn fire wagons to put out the fire. But the tornado twisted carts and people in its mighty whirlwind, scattered them around, and smashed fire barrels into chips. The most surprising thing is that the entire rampage of the elements lasted only two minutes in Lefortovo. Tornadoes were also observed in Moscow in 1945, 1951, 1956, 1957 and 1984. The last Moscow hurricane in 1998 was also accompanied by the appearance of small tornadoes in different parts of the city. In Teply Stan, one such whirlwind lifted a garbage container to the height of the tenth floor, and then lowered it to the ground undamaged, however, having previously sucked all the contents out of it. And in the area of Leninsky Prospekt, the tornado uprooted many trees, and even thin twigs remained intact on the same trees two or three meters from the tornado strip. In June 1974, a powerful tornado hit the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). He uprooted and felled trees, overturned cars, tore off roofs, tore wires. Like a feather, a whirlwind swept a crane weighing two hundred and forty tons into the Volga, damaged and destroyed hundreds of houses. And he did all this in just ten minutes. In 1975, in the Amur region, a tornado lifted one collective farmer high into the air, carried it over the entire village and dropped it into a silo trench outside the outskirts. The soft silage saved the life of the "migratory" peasant, and he did not even get a scratch. Ten years later, a powerful atmospheric whirlwind caused a lot of trouble in Belarus. A tornado that arose during a thunderstorm near the village of Ptich in the Gomel region absorbed water from a nearby river and poured it onto a nearby meadow along with fish. Then he ran into the village and walked along it, lifting into the air and carrying a variety of objects to a distance of up to a hundred meters, among which were a caterpillar tractor, a haylage tower, a railway car, a UAZ car with a driver and a passenger, and a large tree uprooted, growing near the neighborhood. Tornadoes that occur at sea pose a considerable danger to ships. In the old days, they repeatedly tore off gear, broke masts and superstructures on sailing ships, or even let them sink, spinning in their mighty whirlpool. It was even worse for boats, boats and longboats, which the tornado happened to lift into the air and throw down, smashing to smithereens. As a rule, the captains tried to avoid a dangerous meeting, and if it became inevitable, they fired a cannon into the water column. Sometimes this helped, and the vortex disintegrated from the impact of the core without harming the ship.
When the tornado collided with the ship, tragic consequences were inevitable. The maritime records are full of chilling stories like the following: "In November 1878, the sailing ship Fine Stewart was moving slowly through the calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Suddenly the wind picked up and the sky began to overcast. Suddenly, the surface of the sea in a small area in front of the ship foamed and covered with large irregular waves. A little later, the waves became even higher, began a whirlwind rotation. The water swelled, rose to meet the descending cloud, merged with it and moved onto the ship. At one moment, two masts with sails were broken and carried overboard. In place of a ship with snow-white sails, a pitiful helpless wreck dangled among the waves. " And here is another chilling excerpt from the memoirs of a sailor who survived a meeting with a "sky dancer": "Steamboat "Diamond" was finishing loading when someone's frightened cry was heard: - Tornado! Look, tornado! We all turned in that direction. The tornado was no further than half a kilometer from us. Its shape was like an inverted funnel, the throat of which was connected to the same funnel descending from heavy clouds. He did not remain at rest for a second and continuously changed his shape, now swelling, then narrowing. The tornado was heading straight for us. The sea bubbled and churned at its base like a giant bowl of boiling water. Horror gripped our hearts. We were petrified and silently looked at the monster, ready to devour us. Approaching forty meters, the tornado suddenly increased its speed and, with a deafening roar, rushed at the ship with a furious onslaught. We rushed to the stern to get into the boats, but we saw with horror that the whirlwind, having changed direction, rushed along the side of the steamer, captured the boat loaded with people in its whirlpool, then retreated for a moment and again moved towards us. He sank the second boat, and with the third he began to play like a cat with a mouse: he caught on her nose, poured several buckets of water inside, stepped back about four meters and circled around, and then in a wild and terrible dance moved to the boat again. Instantly it filled with water and sank to the bottom. Another moment, and the same will happen with the steamer ... Suddenly something strange happened. The tornado suddenly rushed up. Instead of the deafening roar of bubbling water, there was an ear-piercing hiss. A mountain of water began to rise under the spinning column, and the Diamond tipped to port, scooping water on board. Suddenly, the terrible column broke, the sea leveled off and the tornado disappeared, as if we had seen it in a dream. All this lasted only a few minutes, but to us they seemed like an eternity ... " Tornadoes passing over the sea often suck whole flocks of fish into the cloud that gave rise to them, which can then fall along with the rain onto the sea, and sometimes onto land, leading to considerable amazement of eyewitnesses. Residents of Scotland, Norway and Denmark have observed "herring rains" many times. In 1949, in New Zealand, during the rain, thousands of live fish also rained down on the ground. History also recorded rains of frogs and shrimp. An unusual type of atmospheric vortices is observed in the Far North. Here you can sometimes see a snow tornado. In the area of Dikson Island near the mouth of the Yenisei, such an unusual whirlwind was seen by the sailors of the Ob diesel-electric ship. The gigantic snow pillar, a kilometer high, looked like a white smoking chimney. It moved slowly along the icy surface, sucking in masses of snow from below and blowing them out of the upper bell. A large whirlwind was followed by several smaller ones. The spectacle was exceptionally spectacular. In an hour or so, everything melted into the blue frosty air. Until now, science has not been able to find effective measures to prevent the occurrence of tornadoes. Moreover, even the reasons for their occurrence are not really clear. So for a long time yet the formidable "waltzing invisibles" will perform their destructive dance, instilling fear and bringing death and destruction with them. Author: B.Wagner
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