One time I made a joke in a Grist List post about some new horrible form of weather, where I was like “ha ha, what’s next, FIRENADOS?” And then people on Twitter were like “um, firenados are reality” and I was like “WHAT I don’t want to live in the world anymore” but yup. Fire tornados are a thing, and here is a video of one, and it will make you poop.
A firenado is basically a wildfire with some English on it — in rare circumstances, the flames from a raging fire spin into a vertical vortex. In the video, you can see filmmaker Chris Tangey say that this one was 50 meters wide at its base, or more than 160 feet. Then again, he also said he saw “a red tornado, a black one, a white one, and then several made of pure fire,” which sounds more like a vision from the House of the Undying than a weather phenomenon, so maybe we should take his description with a grain of salt. (Then again, the man just faced down a firenado, so I think he’s entitled to exaggerate a bit.)
