Tumbleweed vortex video

Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, December 16, 2008 1:10 PM |

This vortex of tumbleweeds in Australia is a thing of beauty. (via Arbroath)
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#1 posted by palindromic , December 16, 2008 1:16 PM

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.

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#2 posted by key , December 16, 2008 1:26 PM

Reminds me of the tent vortex I saw at Bonnaroo. God bless youtube. If it didn't exist, no way would I have been able to convince anybody that I didn't hallucinate this.

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#3 posted by Anonymous , December 16, 2008 1:27 PM

i'd sort of want to stand inside that, but given the venom of some of Australia's little creatures, and that those tumble weeds are probably kinda spiky, i might think again

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#4 posted by igpajo , December 16, 2008 1:28 PM

LMAO at #1. I was just coming to post that someone needs to overlay the theme music from "American Beauty" onto that.
I see mini-twisters like that all the time driving through central Washington State during the summer. Huge 100 - 200 foot tall dust devils, some time 2 or 3 at a time rolling across the palouse. Pretty awesome to watch. Never seen one so full of tumble weed though.

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#5 posted by tallman , December 16, 2008 1:49 PM

hehe here in Australia we call these Willy Willy's.

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#6 posted by Anonymous , December 16, 2008 1:52 PM

I'm kind of amazed that those other cars just keep on driving by.

If it were up to me, I'd be out of the car and trying to run around inside the vortex.

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#7 posted by ErikO23 , December 16, 2008 1:59 PM

Australian Beauty?

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#8 posted by gabu Author Profile Page, December 16, 2008 2:05 PM

DAMMIT! Was just listening to Pandora and the track "Any Other Name" by Thomas Newman was playing -- the exact song that was playing during that scene in American Beauty -- when I saw this video. What's going on, World???????????!?!?!

I s**t you not.

(Of course, as my friend Mike and I would say, "Wow, that's amazing! I just finished reading a book about coincidences!")

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#9 posted by thebonobo , December 16, 2008 2:08 PM

if you lived in pre-industrial times and you saw one of these, how would you explain it?

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#10 posted by buddy66 , December 16, 2008 2:11 PM

Dust devils are impressive and even at times awesome, but they are dangerous for soft damp things like us. In short, they can kill you. I soldiered for a year in West Texas and saw one sand-blast a radar van so bad that it had to be repainted.

Duck and cover! And hope.

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#11 posted by snagglepuss , December 16, 2008 2:24 PM

.....Where the hell's the Flying Cow? Moo!

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#12 posted by Bonnie Author Profile Page, December 16, 2008 2:25 PM

Awwww durt devils! Us Kansas kids used to dare each other to run through the smaller ones and get flipped over.

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#13 posted by acx99 , December 16, 2008 2:37 PM

Headline should read "Air elemental captured on video"

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#14 posted by forgeweld , December 16, 2008 2:43 PM

It's witchcraft, I say!

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#15 posted by JDavid , December 16, 2008 2:49 PM

I have a strange compulsion to watch "Lost" season 2 again.

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#16 posted by technogeek , December 16, 2008 3:03 PM

I'm told we used to get waterspouts on the river from time to time. I've always regretted not having seen one.

On the other hand, having had to help clean up after a small twister hit a scout camp (offseason, luckily), I've got a healthy respect for 'em. Better admired from a safe distance.

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#17 posted by Tom Hale , December 16, 2008 3:04 PM

This reminds me of something I saw here in Memphis, TN about 15 years ago - maybe one of you can tell me what it was.

After a thunderstorm which spawned several tornadoes, I went outside, the air was calm and muggy, the sun was shining and the streets were steaming since it was a regular very hot summer day before the storm rolled in. I noticed that a smoothly spinning cylinder of fog was coming from a storm drain near my yard. It was about 5 inches wide and went up into the sky as far as the eye could see. I moved my hand through the fog and in a few moments it dissipated. My wife also saw it and we haven't seen anything like it since. We weren't on any hallucinogens either. The air pressure was low because of the storm - maybe that could have had something to do with it. Does anyone have an idea what it was we saw?

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#18 posted by Anonymous , December 16, 2008 3:14 PM

@Tom Hale

That sounds very much like a steam devil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_devil).

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#19 posted by Anonymous , December 16, 2008 3:23 PM

This must be where all those tumbleweeds created by bad jokes go to die

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#20 posted by SamSam , December 16, 2008 3:57 PM

And we're certain this wasn't in Tasmania..?

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#21 posted by airshowfan Author Profile Page, December 16, 2008 4:04 PM

When I saw the post title I thought we had another DWFTTW thread in our hands...

Okay, I'll go watch the video now.

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#22 posted by Alpinwolf , December 16, 2008 4:29 PM

Nature's Own Automated Paint Stripper.

I dunno if Ausie tumbleweeds are taxonomically anything like American ones, but if they are, you don't want your car anywhere near that.

As I understand it (although no direct experience. MythBusters?) driving through a dried free-range tumbleweed is guaranteed to ruin a car's paint job.

I've passed a few and made a point to avoid them. They do, however, explode on contact. (...with a vehicle going 60mph) Cool to see when it's someone else's car taking the hit.

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#23 posted by frankieboy , December 16, 2008 4:37 PM

put me in mind of the afflictions of man unleashed circling Pandora before scattering across the globe

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#24 posted by Ian Mackereth , December 16, 2008 4:56 PM

I grew up in an Aussie desert and willi-willies like this were common enough sights (although one full of dust is less lovely than this wonderful gyre!)

I came across one that was crossing a sealed road (bitumen, macadam, tar, pick your term) and the dust dispersed and was replaced by a fierce sucking sound as it vacuumed (hoovered, etc) the road, looking for material to flesh out its sudden invisibility.

As a foolish 12 year old boy on a bicycle, I took this as a challenge to ride through it...
It lifted and spun me off the bike in an instant and deposited the bike some metres away, off the side of the road.

Ah well, I'd lost plenty of skin on those roads before and would do it again.

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#25 posted by loopGhost , December 16, 2008 4:58 PM

how did somebody not run into the middle of that and yell, "I AM FIRESTORM!!" or something equally nerdy?

don't you be the judge me!

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#26 posted by holtt , December 16, 2008 5:00 PM

I once saw something similar here in Oregon (Willamette Valley) that was composed of loose straw. It was pretty amazing to watch.

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#27 posted by ROSSINDETROIT , December 16, 2008 5:00 PM

Note the hypnotic effect that causes passing vehicles to drive down the wrong side of the road. Neat!

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#28 posted by EmperorNasiGoreng , December 16, 2008 5:27 PM

Lovely. Saw one like it on a beach down in Melbourne last year, with brightly coloured inflatable things and small children in place of the tumbleweed.

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#29 posted by Vanwall Author Profile Page, December 16, 2008 6:44 PM

The original "Outer Limits" series - the episode titled "Cry of Silence' with Eddie Albert and June Havoc! Space tumbleweeds!

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#30 posted by PolishQ , December 16, 2008 9:08 PM

It's like a real-life graphics card physics demonstration!

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#31 posted by Anonymous , December 17, 2008 12:23 AM

Not tumbleweed, we don't have that here. It looks like clothes dryer lint to me - it only takes 5 minutes of spin to end up with a bucket of that stuff.

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#33 posted by igpajo , December 17, 2008 2:39 PM

That haydevil video is awesome. Thanks for posting that.

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#34 posted by nil8r , December 17, 2008 10:33 PM

@17

I moved my hand through the fog and in a few moments it dissipated.

And when you did that, you stopped a tornado that might have killed brazillions of people.

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#35 posted by Seth Goldin Author Profile Page, December 18, 2008 11:33 PM

I'm surprised no troll has commented that it's going counterclockwise, even in Australia.

The myth about the direction of toilets flushing in opposite directions in different hemispheres, by the way, is nonsense.

http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.asp

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#36 posted by greffless , December 20, 2008 11:12 PM

@35, you wally.

the spin direction of tiny vortices like that has nothing to do with the coriolis effect. it is entirely determined by the directions of the local opposing wind currents that cause them.

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