I was born in Tornado Alley, and one of my earliest memories is camping out in our basement during a storm warning, watching the Wizard of Oz, of all things, and quietly waiting for a twister to tear through the roof. It never did, but that dread is still palpable. When you live in the Midwest during tornado season, the air always seems a little pregnant with disaster.

As such, I can empathize with Temple University physicist Rongjia Tao's utopian proposal to build three massive, 1,000-foot high, 165-foot thick walls around the American Midwest, in order to keep the tornadoes out. In a rendering of the anti-tornado wall Tao sent me, it looks like this:

No, I don't know what the picture of the boat means, either.

In a paper he recently published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B, Tao points to two regions of China, the Northern and Eastern China Plains, that have a similar geographic location as the Midwest—but far fewer tornadoes. The difference, he says, is that China's plains are surrounded by three east-west mountain ranges, which slow down passing winds enough to prevent tornados from forming. 

Tao, then, is essentially suggesting we build mountain range-sized walls across Tornado Alley—a superstructure that he says could end tornado disasters in the region altogether. See, the notoriously windy American region lies right in "the zone of mixing," with warm, moist air blowing north from the Gulf, and cold air heading southbound. When the winds collide, they can create vortex turbulence, which can spawn major tornadoes.....Continue Reading

> via motherboard.vice.com