Volcanic eruptions
can last for weeks,
months,
or even years.
This violent event is terrifying.
But what if another storm,
say a tornado or hurricane,
combined with a volcanic eruption?
Tornadoes only form during
giant thunderstorms called supercells.
And according to George Kourounis,
storm chaser and host of Angry Planet,
supercells are already frightening.
They're the biggest storms on planet Earth.
I've seen ones that have been
twice the height of Mount Everest.
All that energy rotating around produces
torrential flooding,
hail to the size of baseball or larger,
vicious lightning.
And that rotation can come all the way
to the ground and produce massive tornadoes.
Could one of these massive tornadoes
strike an active volcano?
Let's back up a bit.
Before we get into the details,
we need to visit the basics.
For a tornado to happen,
you need just the right ingredients.
When you're trying to forecast a tornado,
you have to try and make a
three dimensional picture of the atmosphere
from the ground all the way up,
almost to space.
The moisture humidity, wind patterns, wind shear,
all of these different ingredients.
And if something is off just ever so slightly,
it just wrecks the whole recipe.
So what are those ingredients?
First you need an updraft,
which can happen when cold air comes in
and shoves warm air higher
into the atmosphere.
Then you need winds to change direction
at different atmospheric heights.
As the warm air rises,
it starts to spin.
If there's enough spin,
then that column of air rotates until it
makes contact with the ground.
And now you have a tornado.
Volcanoes form when magma escapes
from the Earth's core through
a crack in Earth's crust.
In some volcanoes,
the magma is too thick and traps gas bubbles.
Eventually,
this creates so much pressure
that the volcano blows its top.
But according to George,
there is a lot left unknown
about the Earth's core.
If you were to shrink the Earth down
to about the size of an apple,
the crust portion would be about
as thick as the skin.
And we have never gone deep enough
to do more than even just scratch
the surface of that skin.
Usually these two natural phenomena
don't happen in the same
geographical location.
There aren't many volcanoes in tornado alley,
after all.
But there are places where the
possibility of the two colliding
become more of a reality.
Italy, surprisingly, gets quite a few tornadoes.
As a matter of fact,
one was reported there just the other day.
So we've got a place here in Europe
where they get tornadoes from time to time
and they also have active volcanoes.
Mount Etna is active all the time.
Mt. Stromboli is erupting today,
it erupts every single day
and has been doing so for 2000 years.
Alright,
so let's say that the largest tornado ever documented
is going to hit Mount Vesuvius,
which is the volcano that destroyed the city of Pompeii.
What would this catastrophe look like?
So if you had a tornado that big,
as strong as tornadoes get,
between 250 to 300 plus miles an hour,
air starts to basically act like a solid, it's so powerful.
So you take that and you combine that with a volcano.
This tornado would pick up the fire,
smoke, and ash from the volcano,
creating a spinning vortex from hell.
You've got sulfur gas,
you have volcanic ash,
which is microscopic shards of basaltic glass.
Just the ash alone,
being whipped at those speeds
would sand blast your skin completely off
of your body in seconds.
It's a level of destruction that is
difficult for the human brain to comprehend.
Lava is melted rock.
And it's three times denser than water,
so it’s quite heavy.
Different kinds of volcanoes
eject lava of different thicknesses.
Mount Vesuvius is a stratovalcano.
Which means it is made up of many layers of hardened magma,
volcanic ash,
and material created from volcanic eruptions called 'tephra.'
Stratovolcanoes have slow-moving lava
that hardens before it spreads very far.
Unfortunately,
stratovolcanoes also tend to erupt violently.
During the eruption of Vesuvius,
back in Roman times,
it was a Plinian eruption.
It was style of eruption
where you have these massive explosions,
You have rocks,
you got chunks of lava,
now they're being whipped around
by 300 mile per hour winds.
We're talking the worst place in the world to be.
And that's not all.
Like a fire tornado,
a 'lavanado' would spread hot ash and magma
over the surrounding area,
setting it ablaze.
Golf-ball sized hail, debris, and hardened lava
could rip through trees,
buildings, and cars.
Its core could reach temperatures of 1,093 °C (2,000 °F),
burning anything it touches to a crisp.
It is possible that a tornado could strike
a volcano like Vesuvius.
The odds are infintesimally small,
but it's not zero.
Well that's good news.
But what about a volcano creating its own tornado?
Volcanoes are so powerful
that they can create their own weather.
As a volcano spews hot gases and molten lava,
the surrounding temperature
increases rapidly.
This forces cold air to rise,
and stretch out into a column,
creating a massive cloud formation.
Something similar happened in 2020 in the California wildfires.
I'll let George explain.
During the California wildfires,
we had an interesting situation where the fire was so intense
that the heat coming off the fire
created an updraft that formed
what we call a pyrocumulus cloud.
The cloud grew so big, it turned into a thunderstorm,
a pyrocumulonimbus cloud.
And then it started to spin.
So now we had this supercell thunderstorm
that was literally created by the wildfire
and that storm produced an EF3 tornado.
So hypothetically,
something similar could happen
over a volcano as it creates its own weather.
And if the wind over a volcano suddenly changes direction,
and increases in speed,
the column of colder air
could begin to rotate,
creating a tornado.
Thankfully, this destructive storm has a short lifespan.
Like a normal tornado,
the lavanado would only last around 20 minutes.
It would also have a limited range.
Because it’s created by the unique weather
hovering over a volcano,
it wouldn't be able to travel very far.
Once the lavanado moves away
from the volcano’s hot gases,
it would start to break up.
But the fires it started would still be raging.
We’ve talked a lot about tornadoes and volcanoes.
But what would happen if a hurricane hit an active volcano?
Hurricanes are much larger and
longer-lasting than tornadoes.
With a horizontal reach of over 1,600 km (1,000 mi),
and wind speeds over 252 km/h (157 mph),
it’s much more likely that an
active volcano and a hurricane would combine.
But surprisingly,
not much would happen,
other than the normal destruction
caused by a hurricane,
that is.
Because a hurricane is so much
larger than a volcano,
they would have very little effect
on each other.
If the active volcano is large enough,
and we’re talking massive here,
it could make the hurricane
bigger and stronger.
And the hurricane could spread the volcano's
dangerous volcanic ash further away.
But that pales in comparison
to the effects of a lavanado.
There are about 1,500 active volcanoes on Earth,
and each of them could create
a lavanado during an eruption.
And what's even more dangerous
than a volcano creating a lavanado?
All those volcanoes erupting at the same time.
But that’s a story for another What If.