00:00What if I told you there's a weather phenomenon that can turn a supertanker into scrap metal in
00:04four minutes, that glows in the dark, and that scientists took over 2,000 years to understand.
00:10This is the waterspout, and it's far stranger than anything Hollywood could invent.
00:15July 2024. Off the coast of Sicily, at 4 a.m., a column of water slammed down from the sky.
00:23It struck a supertanker directly. Four minutes later, the ship was gone.
00:30Seven crew members died, not from drowning, but from being trapped in air pockets 30 meters beneath
00:35the surface. This wasn't a hurricane. This wasn't a tsunami. This was a single waterspout.
00:44And here's the terrifying part, Florida alone sees about 400 of these every year.
00:50Waterspouts come in two varieties. The first is simply a tornado that crosses over water.
00:56If a tornado over Oklahoma passes over a river for a few seconds, it's now a waterspout.
01:03These can reach winds of 480 kilometers per hour, faster than a bullet train.
01:09But the second type is far more unsettling. It's called a fair weather waterspout.
01:15And it doesn't need a tornado at all. It only needs one thing, hot water.
01:20When ocean surface temperatures hit 32 degrees Celsius, about bathwater temperature, the water
01:27evaporates rapidly. The vapor rises, forms clouds, and as the cooling cloud meets dry surrounding air,
01:34an unstable updraft forms. Add a side wind, and you get a vortex that spins faster and faster until a
01:42funnel-shaped water column descends from the clouds. Sometimes, before a waterspout forms,
01:48a small white circle appears on the water surface, just a patch of mist floating there innocently.
01:53Then a water column erupts from that circle, reaching straight into the clouds.
01:58From gentle to violent in seconds.
02:02September 1551. The Grand Harbor of Malta.
02:07A waterspout slammed directly into the port, tearing several large ships apart.
02:12600 people died.
02:14This remains Europe's deadliest tornado-related event on record.
02:19Later analysis suggested winds of around 290 kilometers per hour.
02:251840, the Mississippi River.
02:28A massive tornado swept across the water, destroying 116 ships.
02:33Debris was found 50 kilometers away.
02:36Over 300 lives lost.
02:39And even the weakest waterspouts can kill.
02:42In June 1978, a Fairview-class waterspout, the lowest rating possible, hit a showboat on Lake Pomona, Kansas.
02:51The boat capsized.
02:5316 people died.
02:56That's the deadliest weak tornado ever recorded.
02:59A weak tornado on land might rip off a few roof tiles.
03:03The same weak tornado over water.
03:06It flips a boat and drowns everyone.
03:09But waterspouts don't just kill.
03:12They do things that shouldn't be possible.
03:15In 1894, near Cerberus, Australia, the crew of the steamship Burwell watched multiple waterspouts appear around them.
03:24The captain counted seven simultaneously.
03:27But one of them did something impossible.
03:30It bent horizontally in midair, curled into a complete circle, and then exploded.
03:36A snake coiling in the air, the captain wrote in his ship long.
03:40Then there are triple waterspouts, three columns descending from the same cloud.
03:45Some call them Cthulhu's tentacles reaching from the sky.
03:49And multi-walled waterspouts, one funneled inside another like a Russian nesting doll.
03:55No one can fully explain how they form.
03:58Now for the part that's truly unsettling, mass outbreak events.
04:03In 1888, Captain Gray of the steamship Magdalena was sailing near the Bahamas.
04:09The weather was mild.
04:10Then a mist ring appeared on the water surface.
04:14A waterspout erupted from it.
04:17Then another.
04:18And another.
04:20Gray counted over 30 waterspouts appearing in just a few hours.
04:24A nearby schooner reported seeing more than 20.
04:28Two ships, independently verifying the same impossible sight.
04:33Ancient nautical maps are filled with drawings of rows of water columns descending from the sky toward ships.
04:39Sailors thought the gods were angry.
04:42Modern times, same thing.
04:45In autumn 2003, over Lake Ontario, a cold front collided with warm lake air and a thunderstorm band.
04:5221 waterspouts rose simultaneously, like explosions across the lake surface.
04:58In August 2002, a photographer captured one of the most striking images ever taken,
05:04a cluster of waterspouts in the Gulf of Mexico, about 130 kilometers offshore.
05:10Multiple columns standing close together, like claws reaching from the clouds.
05:15And remember, this was 130 kilometers out to sea where no one was watching.
05:20These things are happening all the time, unseen.
05:24Humans have documented waterspouts for over 2,000 years.
05:28Aristotle studied them.
05:30He thought they were wind trapped in clouds, thrashing to escape.
05:35In the 17th century, French physicist Pierre Perrault claimed waterspouts were an electrical phenomenon.
05:42Even Benjamin Franklin published research on them.
05:45But it wasn't until modern meteorology that we finally understood how they formed.
05:502,000 years to figure it out.
05:53That's how strange these things are.
05:56And now that we understand them.
05:58We still can't predict them.
06:01Can't prevent them.
06:02Can't stop them.
06:04A fair weather waterspout can go from zero to fully formed in minutes.
06:09Your only option is to get out of the way.
06:12Nature doesn't need complex machinery.
06:15Hot water, a side wind, a few minutes.
06:19And she can conjure a rotating column of destruction out of thin air.
06:23Not just one.
06:25Dozens of them.
06:27Hanging silently between cloud and sea, with no warning, no sound.
06:32And we, 2,000 years after our ancestors stared at the same phenomenon in confusion, were no different.
06:39All we can do is watch.
07:08We'll see you next time.
07:21We'll see you next time.
07:51We'll see you next time.
08:11We'll see you next time.
