From: Engaget
A towering, 50-meter thick wall may sound like the fevered dream of isolationists bent on border control, but it just might be the solution to the midwest's tornado problems.
University of Drextel physicist Rongjia Tao reckons that a trio of
1,000-foot high, 165-foot "great walls" could mitigate the worst natural
weather of Tornado Alley -- a loosely defined area that spans several
states with high tornado risk. Tao compared Tornado Alley to a
geographically similar area in China and concluded that the midwest
suffered from more tornados primarily because it doesn't have east-west
mountain ranges to weaken or block the weather patterns that form them.
Now he's proposing that we build some.
Tao envisions three enormous walls to protect the midwest: one in
North Dakota, a second in a middle area like Oklahoma and a third near
Texas or Louisiana. Smaller sections of these barriers could be built in
high-risk areas to start, he says, and then gradually extended. As much
as Tao believes in his proposed solution, he's at least being realistic
about it: he doesn't expect the project to start anytime in the near
future. Even so, it could be comparatively affordable -- one mile of the
tornado wall is estimated to cost about $160 million, but it has the
potential to stop tornados that cause damages that rack up into billions. Check out Tao's findings in the International Journal of Modern Physics at the source link below.
[Image credit: Gettystock]
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