tornadoes are some of the most
terrifying natural disasters that happen
on our planet they can strike without
warning obliterate entire cities and can
throw people and cars around like
they're toys but how exactly big and
terrifying can a tornado actually get
well most tornadoes have wind speeds
that are under 110 miles per hour and
are smaller than 80 meters across
imagine an American football field and
the tornado would be about as wide as
75% of the fields length and while it
would certainly be difficult a human
could actually manage to withstand being
blown away by that wind speed but that's
not what you are watching this video for
so let's just get straight into the
insane world of gigantic tornadoes and
where they happen tornadoes have been
documented to occur in every continent
on Earth except for Antarctica but a
vast majority of tornadoes happen here
in the United States in a region known
as Tornado Alley the reasoning for this
makes sense because of the area's unique
geographic location cold dry air flows
in accompanied by the jet stream from
the north warm dry air flows in from the
deserts to the southwest and warm moist
air flows in from the Gulf of Mexico to
the south and east the combination of
all this air mixing together is what
causes tornado alley to be such a hot
spot for tornadoes and time and time
again new records have been set here the
year 2011 thought a tornado Super
Outbreak we're in just four days there
were three hundred sixty two tornadoes
that touched down over an area spanning
from Mississippi to Virginia on just
April 27th alone there were 218
tornadoes that touched the ground here
together in the span of just four days
these tornadoes caused over 11 billion
dollars in damages claimed the lives of
324 people and injured over 2,200 others
you can actually tell the path the
tornadoes have taken very easily from
satellite images like this one or this
one but even still this wasn't even the
most lethal tornado incident in the
region the deadliest tornado in US
history happened back in March 1925 in
this region of Missouri Illinois and
Indiana there is no record of how fast
the wind speed of the tornado may have
been at the time but it slashed through
a path between all three states of 219
miles long it traveled that distance and
only three and a half hours meaning that
if the tornado instead store
in Washington DC it would have reached
all the way to New York City in the same
amount of time in that distance the
tornado claimed the lives of 695 people
but even that wasn't the deadliest
tornado in world history a lesser known
tornado hotspot is located on the other
side of the world in this region of
Bangladesh and eastern India more lives
have actually been claimed in this
region by tornadoes than even a tornado
alley and the most catastrophic of these
happened back in 1989 most people in
this region live in very impoverished
conditions and poorly built structures
and that combined with the insane
population density of the area is what
led to this disaster the tornado struck
a heavily populated area of these poorly
built structures and ended up claiming
the lives of over 1,300 people and
injured over 12,000 more it was (He Misspelled 12,000 :o)
considered an ef5 tornado which is the
highest possible categorization for a
tornado meaning that it had wind speeds
of well over 200 miles per hour which is
capable of lifting cars trucks and even
train cars and turning them into
missiles that can be fired over a mile
away from the tornado itself it's often
not the wind that actually kills a
person in a tornado but the vast amount
of debris that the tornado picks up from
obliterating houses and buildings wooden
splinters trees metal cars and even
animals can all become a swirling vortex
of death traveling at speeds of several
hundred miles an hour with all of this
being said however the largest and
probably most terrifying tornado known
to have ever happened on our planet was
the El Reno tornado and it took place
not too long ago in 2013 just west of
Oklahoma City compared to the size of
most tornadoes that I talked about in
the beginning of this video the El Reno
behemoth reached a size of 2.6 miles
wide and achieved a terrifying wind
speed of 302 miles per hour which is the
fastest reported wind ever taken on our
planet to put these numbers into
perspective you could actually fit to
fully sovereign countries completely
inside the width of the tornado Vatican
City and Monaco even more ludicrous is
what it would look like if we put this
tornado over New York City the entire
length of Central Park from end to end
is almost a perfect measurement of how
wide this tornado actually was so
imagine a tornado that long with winds
screaming around it over
300 miles per hour that's fast enough to
severely damage even skyscrapers and can
rip the asphalt straight off of Street
on the ground if you're curious what
would happen to your face at those
speeds then here's a video taken from
the NASA Langley Research Center back
from 1946 showing exactly what would
happen to you in such a tornado
condition if the El Reno tornado had
happened literally just a few more miles
to the east and would have directly hit
downtown Oklahoma City and it probably
would have destroyed the city the
scariest thing about tornados like this
one is that they can happen in a huge
variety of places with very little
warning and it's entirely possible that
the next time a big one happens it won't
be in a countryside field but rather in
a large city I'm going to leave you with
this fascinating map from NOAA that
shows you the daily probability of a
tornado strike near your house
throughout to the year enjoy
(Background Music Plays)
so thank you very much for watching this
video this was done in a collaboration
with my good friends over at life noggin
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