cover of episode S4 Ep29: It's a Twista! The Terrifying Facts Whirling Inside Tornadoes

S4 Ep29: It's a Twista! The Terrifying Facts Whirling Inside Tornadoes

2024/12/5
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Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

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Daisy Egan: 本期节目探讨了龙卷风的形成、破坏性和应对措施。龙卷风是一种强大的自然现象,其发生地点、时间和持续时间都难以预测,对人类生命和财产安全构成严重威胁。节目中介绍了龙卷风的形成机制,包括超级单体雷暴中的垂直旋转气流以及各种类型的龙卷风,例如雨裹龙卷风、楔形龙卷风、陆龙卷、水龙卷和火龙卷。节目还回顾了美国龙卷风研究的历史,特别是John Park Finley 的贡献以及早期龙卷风预报的挑战。此外,节目还介绍了龙卷风造成的各种奇异破坏,例如鸡的羽毛被剥掉、物品被抛掷到很远的地方等。最后,节目强调了气候变化对龙卷风发生频率和强度的影响,以及加强预报技术和公众意识的重要性,以减少龙卷风造成的损失。 Daisy Egan: 节目中还介绍了关于龙卷风的一些常见误解,例如躲在立交桥下躲避龙卷风是不安全的,试图跑过龙卷风是不现实的,龙卷风发生时打开窗户以防止窗户破碎的说法是错误的,大城市并非躲避龙卷风的最佳地点,龙卷风并非只发生在春季,一年四季都可能发生。节目还提到了历史上一些最致命的龙卷风事件,例如1925年的三州龙卷风和1965年的棕枝主日龙卷风爆发。

Deep Dive

Key Insights

Why are tornadoes particularly common in the U.S.?

About 75% of tornadoes worldwide occur in the U.S., primarily in an area known as Tornado Alley, where warm, moist Gulf air meets cold, dry Canadian air and dry air from the Rockies, creating ideal conditions for tornado formation.

What is Tornado Alley, and which states are included?

Tornado Alley consists of states like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, the Dakotas, and Iowa, where the combination of warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cold, dry air from Canada and the Rockies fosters tornado formation.

How do tornadoes typically form?

Tornadoes form from a vertical rotation in a supercell thunderstorm known as a mesocyclone. Only about half of these rotations result in tornadoes, which typically occur in the late afternoon to early morning when optimal air temperature and moisture levels are present.

What is the average lifespan of a tornado?

A tornado typically lasts about five minutes, but some can persist for hours. The strongest winds are usually closest to the ground, making prolonged tornadoes particularly destructive.

What is the Fujita scale, and how is it used?

The Fujita scale, introduced in 1971, rates tornadoes based on the extent of damage they cause, helping meteorologists understand the wind speeds and potential destruction associated with different tornado intensities. It was later updated to the enhanced Fujita scale for greater accuracy.

Why are tornadoes becoming more frequent in winter?

Climate change is likely the culprit behind the increase in winter tornadoes, with a 102% rise in winter tornado occurrences. This shift is bad news for states like Mississippi, which are seeing a growing number of tornadoes annually.

What are some myths about tornado safety?

One common myth is that hiding under an overpass is safe, but overpasses act as wind tunnels, making the situation more dangerous. Another myth is that you can outrun a tornado, but they can travel up to 70 miles per hour and change direction quickly.

What is a firenado, and how is it formed?

A firenado, or fire tornado, is a tornado made of fire. It can form when a rapid rise of heated air creates a void into which cooler air flows, or when large fires create pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which can spawn firenados.

What is the deadliest tornado on record?

The Tri-State Tornado of 1925 remains the deadliest, killing 695 people and traveling 219 miles across three states. It is known for its relentless destruction and long path of devastation.

How has research on tornadoes improved safety?

Research, such as that by J.P. Finley and the development of the Fujita scale, has led to better tornado prediction and warning systems, significantly reducing tornado-related fatalities and improving community preparedness.

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
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Ryan Seacrest here.

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Have you ever seen a tsunami, a blizzard, a volcano erupting? How about a tornado? Is there any more frightening proof that human beings are tiny when compared to the vast power of the natural world than a whirling dervish of unbridled fury unleashed in seemingly random fashion, hurling debris and stealing lives?

And have you ever wondered what exactly powers nature? Is nature's power synonymous with divine power? Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I'm an actor and a writer who left L.A. because of the nonstop parade of earthquakes, followed by wildfires, followed by mudslides that seem to be the norm there now.

It was just too harrowing to live somewhere so plagued by natural disaster that you have to keep an emergency kit in your trunk in case of, well, emergency. But, you know, if you aren't into courting disaster every day in the form of one of those life-threatening events, you can just leave LA. So I did. But what happens when you find yourself faced with a powerful and frightening natural phenomenon that isn't bound by a particular locale?

What happens when nature takes the wild natural disaster for a spin? From the origins in their hearts of thunderstorms to their devastating impacts on communities, tornadoes are more than just wind and water. So grab your solar-powered flashlight and let's explore the twisted truth about tornadoes. When most of us think of tornadoes, we imagine the great swirling funnel cloud that carried Dorothy Gale to a magical land in The Wizard of Oz.

Or maybe we think of the cranky but lovable cartoon The Tasmanian Devil as he spins around in an indomitable messy rage wreaking havoc on his surroundings. Or we think of hunky modern weather cowboys chasing adventure and thrills as they race across the West in pickup trucks trying to glimpse the wonder of a tornado. But those who have really experienced tornadoes probably don't count wonder among the terms that first spring to mind when they think of the awesome weather phenomenon. ♪

Anyone who has experienced one can tell you tornadoes are frightening, unpredictable weather cells of such power and magnitude that they can pluck a chicken, peel away asphalt, and unmake a massive bridge as though they could almost just pull apart reality like ripping stitches out of an old shirt. But one of the most frightening things about tornadoes is that you don't know where they will crop up, when, for how long they will last, or often how they will touch down.

Fun fact: tornadoes are actually only tornadoes when they touch down. Otherwise, they are funnel clouds. The most damage is done when a tornado hits land because that's where human beings live and keep all our shit, which gets sucked up into the tornado and flies all about, adding the lethal element of pointy airborne debris to the already scary winds a tornado produces.

Also, you know why they are sometimes referred to as cyclones? That's because they turn counterclockwise 99.9% of the time. Counterclockwise, also known as cyclonically. But there are actually tornadoes, rare though they are, that revolve clockwise, or anti-cyclonically. These backward-spinning ones are not usually as strong as a typical tornado, but I wouldn't take my chances with one.

Whichever direction they spin, tornadoes have been terrorizing land dwellers the world over forever. But most tornadoes happen in the U.S., about 75% of them actually, and most of those occur in an area of the country fondly referred to as Tornado Alley. Not exactly a nickname the tourism board of a state would want to put on a license plate. Then again, Missouri is called the Show Me State. Okay, Missouri, you first. No, on second thought, never mind.

Tornado Alley is made up of Cheeky Little Exhibitionist, Missouri, Texas, the Dakotas, both north and south, and Iowa. Then there is also Dixie Alley, which forms a kind of also-ran Tornado Alley made up of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia. Okay, so we are talking about 12 states that are prone to tornadoes because of geological and meteorological factors.

Many of these areas are wide open plains where the warm, moist air of the Gulf of Mexico meets the cold, dry Canadian air, along with the dry air from the Rockies. Perhaps these places get more tornadoes because God is angry at them for taking away women's reproductive rights and trans rights and attempting to instate a real-life Gilead.

Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas are particularly perfect for the formation of tornadoes, which is why the National Severe Storms Laboratory and Storm Prediction Center are located in Oklahoma. But tornadoes don't only impact these areas. Oh no, tornadoes can happen anywhere. Every state in the U.S. and every single U.S. territory has had at least one tornado, even Alaska and Hawaii. So there goes my plan to head to Alaska to escape the scary stuff.

Come to think of it, I don't know if that was such a good plan. Let's go be safe in Alaska, said no one ever. Another fun fact, lelapsophobia is the fear of tornadoes and hurricanes, as in Daisy's crippling lelapsophobia made her take a very long nap indeed.

So, if tornadoes can happen anywhere, and they are wildly unpredictable, how can we possibly be safe? Well, sorry stranger, we can't. But we can arm ourselves with knowledge. The more you know, right? Ugh. Tornadoes, or funnel clouds, form out of a vertical rotation in a supercell thunderstorm called a mesocyclone.

Only about half of these actually make a tornado. The reason why is anyone's guess at this point. Meteorologists are studying it.

Researchers know that when tornadoes happen, they are most likely to form in the late afternoon to early morning because that is when the optimum air temperature and moisture are achieved. So I guess that means if you live in a twistery place, you can schedule your life around the possibility of tornadoes. How convenient! But listen, you would have a lot of full mid-mornings because, believe it or not, the U.S. averages more than 1,200 tornadoes a year.

Actually, that number is probably too low because there are likely to be tornadoes we don't see or that don't get reported or that don't damage anything. You know, nice tornadoes. Tornadoes only get reported when they are seen by an eyewitness or by radar. That usually happens when bad things occur and not-nice tornadoes touch down and fuck shit up. A tornado's average speed is about 10 to 20 miles per hour, but speeds of 60 miles an hour or more have been recorded.

A tornado typically lasts about five minutes, but some have been clocked at lasting for hours. In a big storm, the strongest winds are nearest to the ground. The storms that birth tornadoes have a strong vertical movement when an average storm's winds will span out horizontally. It is easy to imagine how a high-velocity, long-lasting funnel cloud touching down could do some damage. But how and why don't they just level everything they come in contact with?

The spinning appearance of a tornado actually comes from very localized, powerful wind moving in a rotating pattern. And this, combined with multiple vortices, plus the manner of the construction of a building, helps explain why some houses get destroyed and some remain untouched. The three little pigs were not far off when they taught us that a house made of mud or sticks can be huffed and puffed and blown down, while a house made of bricks can withstand most big bad wolves.

Some people and places are spared when a tornado hits, but sometimes others suffer double. That is what happened in Kansas on the 30th of May in 1879, when a double tornado, two tornadoes within minutes of each other, touched down and destroyed the small town of Irving.

The second tornado was the bigger of the two and may have been a multi-vortex tornado, so it probably did most of the damage, and it was there, following the tornado, that a young woman named Dorothy met her tragic, untimely end and was found with her head in the mud and her shoeless feet up in the air. Traveling salesman Frank L. Baum heard the story and used it as inspiration for The Wizard of Oz, giving the deceased woman's name to his main character.

Not only was a real tornado the inspiration for what is arguably the most famous literary and cinematic tornado, but the Irving, Kansas tornado was also among the first to be studied by a man named John Park, or J.P. Finley.

Finley was a pioneering U.S. tornado researcher whose research created the basis for a lot of what we know today. According to Wikipedia, Finley, quote, End quote.

I checked the sources, Wikipedia cites, and what do you know? It's true. So we really wouldn't be where we are, meteorologically speaking, without this guy Finley. Strangers, Mint Mobile is back. You know, back in my day, kids used to wander the streets from morning to night like packs of feral raccoons, drinking out of garden hoses, not wearing bike helmets, and completely out of contact with our parents.

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♪♪♪

After the Enigma tornado outbreak of February 19th, 1884, Finley established 15 rules for early tornado forecasting and published these rules in the American Meteorological Journal. In case you don't know what I mean by Enigma outbreak, I wasn't trying to be enigmatic. Ha ha.

The Enigma outbreak was a rash of tornadoes, the exact number of which is unknown, that lasted several hours from Mississippi up to North Carolina. At least seven of those tornadoes touched down in Alabama and killed 39 people or more, leaving about 116 more wounded. The Alabama tornadoes are just one that were confirmed and documented.

I'm not going to read you these 15 rules because I'm guessing most of us aren't meteorologists and don't know what a trough-like low is and will therefore likely fall asleep while listening. Suffice to say, it has to do with winds and air pressure and humidity and quadrants and isotherms. In other words, next time you meet a meteorologist, thank them for being such helpful nerds. They save a lot of lives. ♪

Finley made it possible to know not just when a tornado might occur, but where in the body of a storm a tornado, or tornadoes, might occur. Because of him, tornadoes are less unpredictable than I originally thought. This one guy probably saved a lot of lives, and he made the news doing it.

According to an article on Atlas Obscura from 2016, quote, End quote.

Finley intended to use his knowledge to develop a method of tornado prediction using local communities to broadcast the coming of a storm through, according to his writings via Atlas Obscura, quote, the ringing of church bells in some peculiar manner, end quote.

You would think this would be good news that would, again, save many lives. Unfortunately, certain people in positions of power were less excited at the prospect of Finley's alert system. According to the Atlas Obscura piece, a New York Times reporter wrote in 1887, quote, End quote.

Listen, everyone knows if you don't acknowledge something, it no longer exists. Atlas Obscura goes on to say, quote,

When the department was reorganized, Finley's new boss, General Adolphus Greeley, doubled down on this conviction. It is believed that the harm done by such predictions would eventually be greater than that which results from the tornado itself, Greeley wrote in a report to Congress, end quote. So you mean to tell me American big business interfered with a matter of public safety in order to protect its financial interests? Well, I never!

The article continues, quote, End quote. Oh, America, why do you have to America so hard?

On the one hand, we are supposed to be a country of big ideas and out-of-the-box thinking. But then that's only when we are sure it won't hurt the big boys' pocketbooks. I guess even back then, rich people just found the expert who would support the narrative that best suited them and shut down the folks who really put the work in. But the attempts to undermine Finley's research are just one part of the bureaucratic reaction to the situation.

Another part is the actual ban on the word tornado that lasted from the late 1800s all the way to the 1950s.

Atlas Obscura quotes the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center's lead forecaster since 1996, Roger Edwards, quote, "...tornadoes were, for most, dark and mysterious menaces of unfathomable power, fast-striking monsters from the sky capable of sudden and unpredictable acts of death and devastation."

End quote.

It was so not cool to say "tornado" or try to predict the landfall of a tornado that for weather forecasters, even mentioning the weather phenomenon was, quote, in the words of one historian, "career suicide." End quote. Sigh. Imagine if we just let people do their jobs? Anyway, I don't have to tell you, stranger, that just because you don't say it, it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

No, tornadoes kept happening. Of course they did. They just couldn't say so on ye olde weather report on the radio or whatever, and they still couldn't say so when TV came about. Eventually, the Signal Office's forecasting division, where Finley worked, was moved to the control of the Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Weather Bureau was born. ♪

The newly minted agency finally got down to business and developed warning systems for all kinds of natural disasters and weather phenomena. But, according to an article in Slate from 2016, quote, End quote.

Unfortunately, in the 1920s and 30s, the article tells us, quote, End quote. Thousands died. Finally, in 1938, the Weather Bureau allowed communications about tornadoes to be shared among emergency personnel.

This softening of the position that tornadoes could never be predicted and saying tornado would cause all holy hell to break loose likely opened the door for more sensible policies to take hold. In March of 1948, two Air Force meteorologists, Major Ernest J. Faubusch and Captain Robert E. Miller, instituted the much-needed prediction system that Finley had wanted for so long.

They used the system to warn the public about an upcoming storm in the first official tornado forecast in history. The forecast turned out to be correct, and in 1950, the ban, or what was left of it, was lifted.

According to Slate, the internal memo stated, quote, the forecaster, district or local, may at his discretion mention tornadoes in the forecast or warning, end quote. It was that simple. They said it and tornadoes just existed again. Well, thanks. Can we modify that memo and re-release it today so that it says people are once again allowed to use common sense? Just spitballing here. ♪

Once that happened, tornado warnings became a thing, but still only for the military. I guess scientists still didn't trust people not to freak out when they learned a giant twisty funnel cake from hell was coming for their town.

It took a couple more years before they started issuing warnings for the general public, and just in time, too. In 1953, there was a major widespread tornado outbreak. In a gripping article called A Brief History of the Storm Prediction Center by Stephen Corfiti on NOAA.gov, it says, quote,

shortly after death-dealing tornadoes struck Flint, Michigan, Waco, Texas, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Devastating storms on June 7th through 9th alone claimed more than 200 lives. These events tested the endurance of the center's relatively inexperienced staff. Although the storms on the 7th through 8th of June were well-forecast, the Worcester tornado on the 9th caught forecasters by surprise."

See, that's the thing about natural phenomena. In spite of our ever-growing technology and research, there can and will always be outliers. We can never be completely certain, but it's still crucial to try to warn people when and how we can, using what we know. But there are no guarantees in nature, except that she is wild and will do what she wants. Which, incidentally, also describes me after one shot of tequila.

So we do what some people do and continue to try to learn more and more. We try to create better systems so that we can keep vulnerable people safe.

Once we established a means of predicting tornadoes and warning people about them, a new need occurred to the meteorological community, and in the 1970s it was met by a couple of crazy kids named Tetsuya Ted Fujita and Alan Pearson. Ted, who we met in the Mackinac Bridge episode, was a research meteorologist at the University of Chicago and all-around fun guy.

And Allen, who was the head of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center, NSSFC, introduced their Fujita scale rating system at the University of Chicago in 1971. The scale was later updated to consider not just height, but length and width. The Fujita scale was applied retroactively to recorded tornadoes and helped meteorologists understand better the kinds and scope of damage a tornado could exact.

On February 1st, 2007, the Fujita scale was replaced by the enhanced Fujita scale, a new and improved version that is supposedly more accurate in its assessment of wind speeds and associated damage.

So new strides are apparently being made in this field all the time, which is great and is hugely important because as much as we know about tornadoes, there is still so much we don't know and so many things that have been misunderstood over the years. And as climate change continues, so do newer, wilder, more devastating and scary weather events.

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Hey, guess what's scarier than a big ol' tornado? How about a rain-wrapped tornado? It sounds like a kind of awful bad weather sushi. It is actually a tornado wrapped in rain, so you don't see it coming. Great. Oh, but there is one way to tell it's there. If you drive straight into the storm and hit hail, you are heading toward where the tornado is likely to form. Okay, I'll make note of that.

And while we are on the subject of crazy tornado variations, let me tell you about the wedge tornado. Those look more like a column than a funnel, just in case you were ready to breathe a sigh of relief at not seeing the signature V shape on the horizon. No, straight lines can kill you too. And back to wet tornadoes. Land spouts and water spouts are non-supercell tornadoes that form from the bottom up instead of cloud down like other tornadoes.

These tornadoes will form before the thunderstorm is fully formed. Picture a kind of deadly weather horror that a wizard might make as part of a spell to kill you, and then go put on your raincoat. Oh, but my favorite stranger is the legendary Firenado. I think you probably know right off the bat what that one is.

It's a tornado made of fire. Firenados are created two ways. They can form like a dust devil, but with fire, when a rapid rise of heated air creates a void into which cooler air flows. Or large fires can create pyrocumulonimbus clouds that can cause firenados.

For those of us who don't speak Harry Potter, a pyrocumulonimbus cloud is a big-ass cloud created by the rising of thermal air from a fire or explosion. Regardless of how you phrase it, we are talking about flaming, spinning death spirals, which is, incidentally, how many of us describe our lives right now.

According to Wikipedia, quote, End quote.

Holy Christ in a fancy sidecar. Not today, Bob. This is why I left the wildfires of California. I will remind myself of that when I am stuck in my house this winter in several feet of snow and Monty is watching Free Guy for the 67th time. I think I'm pretty lucky. I have naturally dewy skin. With all these different iterations of tornadoes and the havoc and death that they've been known to cause, it's easy to feel helpless in the face of fickle, fateful weather patterns.

Still, we may not be able to predict the coming of a weather event accurately, and we are far from being able to control the weather, despite conspiracy theories to the contrary. But advancements in forecasting technology have significantly reduced tornado-related fatalities. It's a stark reminder that while tornadoes are a part of our natural world, preparedness and knowledge can save lives.

Given their potential for wild impact, it's no wonder there are some myths swirling around about tornadoes out there. That is to be expected. After all, anywhere there is fear, human beings have figured out a way to make it weird. Nevertheless, let's try to get our facts straight, shall we?

Some folks say that in the event of a tornado, you should hide under an overpass. Sounds reasonable, but it is actually very unreasonable. Aside from the threat of flash floods, overpasses act as wind tunnels in storm conditions, funneling wind and debris through the overpass, making a dangerous situation much, much worse.

If you're outside when a tornado strikes, your best bet is to lie down in a ditch and cover your head. And if you happen to be clutching a pint of moonshine whilst down in that ditch, who am I to judge? Some folks think they can outrun a tornado. While these must be the same people who think they would win if they were to fight a shark. I have some news for those folks. Tornadoes can travel up to 70 miles per hour and shift direction quicker than you can say, let me just get my running shoes on.

So unless you are a down-low superhero or Usain Bolt, in the event of a tornado, please walk to a nearby shelter. Or go ahead and run if it makes you feel better or gets you there faster. Just know that if the tornado is behind you, the tornado wins in that race. You might as well save your energy for all that praying to your god that he save you from the thing he sent down.

I've always heard that if a tornado comes, you should crack the windows so they don't shatter, but apparently that's bunk too. It just staves off the inevitable and you shouldn't waste your time fiddling with the windows when you could be walking, not running, toward shelter. Some people believe that large cities are the safest place to be in a tornado, but some of the worst tornadoes in history have struck urban areas.

The infamous St. Louis tornado of 1896 tore through downtown, killing 255 people. That's a grim reminder that no place is truly safe from these swirling tempests. Also, contrary to conventional wisdom, tornadoes are not just spring phenomena. In fact, they can occur any old time throughout the year. Nebraska saw a December outbreak as recently as 2021.

And what tornadoes do when they do damage is chilling. The Tri-State Tornado of 1925 remains the deadliest tornado on record, killing 695 people and traveling 219 miles across three states. It was a relentless monster that swept through towns, leaving a trail of devastation behind it.

The Palm Sunday tornado outbreak in 1965 struck without warning across Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, killing over 260 people. Tornado damage is certainly terrifying, but it can also be bizarre. There are, for example, numerous tales of chickens found dead and featherless after a tornado. Some theories emerged around this phenomenon, and there was even some research on the topic.

According to a 2010 article in BackyardChickens.com by P.D. Savage, and trigger warning if you are uncomfortable with discussions of violence to animals, quote, H.A. Hazen's book The Tornado, published in 1890, which describes an 1842 experiment by Professor Elias Loomis at Western Reserve College in Ohio, the stripping of fowls attracted much attention in this and other tornadoes.

In order to determine the velocity needed to strip these feathers, the above six-pounder was loaded with five ounces of powder, and for a cannonball, a chicken, just killed, was used.

Loomis says the gun was pointed vertically upwards and fired. The feathers rose 20 or 30 feet and were scattered by the wind. On examination, they were found to be pulled out clean, the skin seldom adhering to them. The body was torn to small fragments. The velocity was 341 miles per hour. A fowl, then forced through the air with this velocity, is torn entirely to pieces.

With the less velocity, most of the feathers might be pulled out without mutilating the body. End quote. Murder. Most foul. I'm sorry. Seriously though, according to the piece on backyard chickens, quote, a bird's feathers are sometimes easy to pluck, especially during a psychological response known as flight molt. Possibly this may be a mechanism for survival, leaving a predator with only a mouthful of feathers and permitting the bird to escape. End quote.

This chicken thing has happened more than you might think, actually. Chickens have repeatedly been found completely missing their feathers, and it was thought for a long while that their feathers just exploded right off their bodies. With the wealth of research that has been done on the behavior of tornadoes and powerful weather systems, though, we now know that tornadoes don't get a low enough pressure for that to happen, and if they did, any poor chicken caught up in one would be blown away first. What?

Loomis's experiments were not confined to the dead chicken in a cannon thing. He also tried putting dead chickens in vacuum jars to see if their feathers would explode. They did not. The wind velocity results were unfortunately inconclusive.

Then, more than a century later, Bernard Vonnegut, an academic physicist from NYU Albany, went on to continue the research and came up with the flight molt theory, the one described above that would leave a predator chomping on quills instead of chicken meat. It's also been posited that the denuding of chickens has something to do with alternating electrical currents, but this theory doesn't really hold up since the static charge in most storms is not strong enough to cause something like that to happen.

But chickens aren't the only bird to suffer during tornadoes. In one instance, 45,000 migrating ducks got caught in a storm and were killed. Later reports of dead ducks falling from the sky came from as far as 40 miles away, from where the storm made landfall. We all enjoy a little mystery. Every other week, One Strange Thing presents forgotten stories from America's news archives.

They all have something in common, a single element that can't quite be explained. One strange thing brings you stories that are very real and just a little otherworldly. Subscribe now wherever you listen.

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So yeah, tornadoes do crazy, unfathomable things. Cars and even semis have been found wrapped around trees. Trees have been completely stripped of their bark. Steel trusses from buildings have been discovered rolled up like paper. 300-pound reinforced cement parking barriers have been ripped up and thrown 60 yards like they were pickup sticks being tossed by an angry toddler.

In one case, hospital x-ray machines and medical and dental records were found miles away in different counties. The list goes on. Concrete porches destroyed, cars thrown or never found at all. In one bizarre instance, a wood 2x4 was wedged into a concrete curb.

Along those lines, after the devastating Joplin, Missouri tornadoes of 2011, cardboard was found embedded in the stucco of a high school, while steel beams and fencing were found sticking out of the ground in the school's fields, and the bus was thrown into a nearby garage.

After the Great Bend, Nebraska tornado of 1915, a canceled check was found in a cornfield 305 miles away. Receipts, checks, photographs, ledger sheets, money, clothing, shingles, and fragments of books fell on almost every farm within 80 miles northeast of the city. A rack of neckties, with the neckties still on it, was carried 40 miles. A four-page love letter was found 70 miles away.

A flour sack from a local mill was retrieved 110 miles away from the storm. An iron water hydrant was found full of splinters. Mail from the train depot got carried away. An iron jug was said to have been found blown inside out. And in another case of twister-on-bird crime, another jug was found with a rooster inside it. The rooster was evidently blown into the jug with just its head sticking out.

As recently as 2015, an EF3 tornado near Pampa, Texas drove a corn stalk into a truck's radiator and pieces of corn stalk were found inside hailstones. The damage and destruction from a tornado can just be so varied, so total, and so irreversible. And yet, after the Great Bend tornado, it is said that some people just two miles away had no idea anything had happened at all until they showed up to town the next day.

Tornadoes are everywhere, now more than ever.

I may have lulled those of you who don't live in Tornado Alley into a false sense of security, but new studies show that tornado formation areas are moving to the east. They also show that tornado occurrences are shifting away from the typical spring-slash-summer peak and closer to a cold season peak, September through February. This means a 102% increase in winter tornadoes,

And, big surprise, climate change is the likely culprit for this seasonal shift in tornado occurrences. This change is good news for Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, who are experiencing a decrease in tornado activity in recent years, but it's bad news for Mississippi, especially Jackson, which is seeing a growing number of tornadoes annually.

The people of Mississippi can't ever seem to catch a break, what with the voting bans and the corruption and the complete lack of women's reproductive rights. It's kind of to a point where if I lived in Mississippi, I might pray a tornado would lift me up and deliver me safely to Oz, Wicked Witch and all.

The point is, you don't have to drop a house on my head to show me that things really are not getting better for the tornado-phobic among us. In 2024, there have been close to 400 confirmed tornadoes, 273 in April alone. So the next time you hear a thunderstorm brewing, remember, tornadoes, while fascinating, are becoming frighteningly common as the climate crisis worsens.

And as we all reel from the destruction and loss wrought throughout the South by Hurricane Helene, we can see that climate research and severe storm warning systems combined with real knowledge about what we are up against is more crucial than ever. And human beings are nothing if not ingenious when it comes to survival.

I think an increasingly valuable skill as the future of climate change dawns on us will be the ability to tap into that ingenuity and to be prepared to adapt to big changes. Because if we have learned anything from climate change, it is that things aren't going to get less freaky. So we will all need to be figuring out ways to watch each other's backs. Because let's face it, folks, there is nobody here on this planet but us chickens. ♪

Next time on Strange and Unexplained. At the turn of the 20th century, one man was so keen on making a name for himself amongst the elite anthropologists of the day, he went to great heights, or rather depths, to get there. We'll meet Piltdown Man, the lone member of a more evolved European-born branch of the Homo sapiens family.

Strange and Unexplained is a production of Three Goose Entertainment with help from Grab Bag Collab. This episode was written by Eve Kerrigan and me, Daisy Egan, with research by the Strange Research Squad. Sound engineering by Jeff Devine. If you have an idea for an episode, head to our website, strangeandunexplainedpod.com and fill out the contact form. I will write back.

For more amazing content, join us at patreon.com slash grabbagcollab, where for just five bucks a month, you get all the Grab Bag exclusive shows, and for eight bucks, you get those, plus Amber Hunt's Crimes of the Centuries and Strange and Unexplained, early and ad-free.

GrabBag is an all-female and non-binary-owned profit share network where our contributors get to keep ownership of their shows. We strive to give a platform to those who might not be able to land themselves on a bigger network. Who knows? Maybe you have a podcast idea you'd like to pitch to GrabBag. We've got live recordings, watch parties, book clubs, and more. While there's so much going on over at GrabBag, you'll wonder if we missed the memo on how capitalism works.

Join me on Instagram at SNUPod, Daisy Egan, and GrabBagCollab. Or head to the Facebook page to join in the conversation. If you like the show, please visit a sponsor with our unique code. Give us a quick review and five stars. Subscribe and download and tell a friend. Stay strange. ♪

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