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Storms can devastate lives and property, but they have benefits as well--plenty of water for the plants and nitrogen for the soil. Even drought has its benefits, giving the landscape an occasional rest from rain showers.

But the one weather type I could not think of benefits for is the tornado. Not once have I heard of any benefits that this fast-moving spiral unleashes, only raw devastation.

So do tornadoes have any benefits to an affected habitat? Also, what geographical features could I place on a world I am designing, to prevent or deflect tornadoes? For example, on a variant Earth, how could I deflect Tornado Alley away from northeastern Nebraska?

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  • $\begingroup$ I think this question is more legitimate than the answers are giving it credit for. A lot of times you get a question of "what happens if I eliminate [apparently bad thing]" and the answers turn out to be "everything dies." This question is trying to get at the same idea - why shouldn't I block out the tornados? What are the downsides (besides the difficulty)? $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 19:49

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I think the original question title implied a misunderstanding of what's happening. "What's the point with tornadoes?" implies that there is an intelligence with an intention that invented tornadoes for a purpose. Even if one believes in a literal divine intelligence that thought up how Earth does what it does, that intelligence was vastly smarter and more detail oriented than that wording implies, and it certainly didn't invent tornadoes as an afterthought. Tornadoes are just something that happens in liquids and gasses because complex math & physics (q.v. Advanced Fluid Dynamics & Meteorology). However if we ignore your wording, there is an answer to what good tornadoes do for life on Earth, and assuming that's what you mean, see below:

Depends on what you mean by "nature".

One view of "nature" includes everything natural, including tornadoes and volcanoes, which benefit nature in that they add something glorious and interesting that is itself a plus.

Another view might be that "nature" means life, and that an abundance of thriving living species is what is meant by "benefits" for nature.

Before considering what the positive aspects are for life, of a hurricane, I think it's important to consider what plants and animals generally do with their environment. Living things generally look for food, comfort, company, shelter, and so on, and try to stay alive and be happy. Even plants check out their local environment and make the best of it (e.g. they bend and grow leaves so as to get light, and sense and grow roots towards water, even inside your water pipes). Animals evolve and adapt to their conditions, and the conditions they create themselves, as well as to events.

Events are interesting because they aren't always there, so they may tend to shake up the situation and even kill many things that are adapted to that type of event not happening. But what's destructive for one type of life is often better for other types of life, particularly since life in the non-event condition may have started to dominate an area and create its own conditions (for example, dense bushes and trees blocking light and preventing other plants from using the same space). Over the course of many thousands of years, there even appear species adapted to rare events, such as floods. Some species even have reproductive cycles that wait dormant even for years waiting for a flood.

A hurricane is violent and destructive, but is also "just" an event such as a forest fire or other weather. Sure it kills a lot of things, but also:

  • It carries things long distances. This can be very nice for some kinds of life that might appreciate what gets brought to them that isn't normally where they are, whether it is food (e.g. newly broken wood and dead bodies are yummy to some other life forms) or shelter or nest materials or soil (many plants may like soil brought from other places - it's like someone's tilling or bringing them nutritious soil). It's also good for spreading seeds farther than they'd usually go. And small creatures such as worms and insects, not to mention small plants, lichens, moss, and fungus, may survive quite easily and so are being given great transportation to places they wouldn't easily get by themselves. Things can be brought across barriers such as rivers or even over mountains, deserts or seas this way.

  • Ripping away established heavy vegetation makes room for other plants to get sunlight and water and have room to grow where they otherwise couldn't. And as each species uses different nutrients and leaves different by-products, this can work a little like crop rotation, as the new plants may appreciate the soil used by the old trees, and eventually new trees may like what those plants have done to the soil.

  • Similarly, killing off or disrupting some animals may create opportunities for others.

  • New types of objects may be created by breakage, which may be useful to some species.

  • All the broken branches and debris may also make a fire more likely later sooner or later, which is a different type of event that creates different types of change and opportunity, which can be good in moderation.

  • Killing large trees can increase erosion, which is another kind of event that can open up new opportunities for different species.

Etc. In general, change is often good for other species, and the more species that have opportunity, the healthier the whole ecosystem tends to be, because there are more abundant types of resources that can fall into mutually supporting balance with each other. When circumstances stay the same for too long, then the few species that are best in those static conditions tend to overpopulate and strain their own resources, which can throw things out of balance and cause survival issues for their food, thus themselves, as well as other species.

So chaos and destruction can be good, in moderation.

As for what can deflect tornadoes, mountain ranges do the trick, but they need to be in the way of all tornado weather patterns, as you can see on this map of tornado-struck areas of the USA - the eastern ranges don't block tornadoes coming up from the south:

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ So how do I use the mountains to kick the Alley off northeastern Nebraska? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 11, 2015 at 19:11
  • $\begingroup$ @JohnWDailey As Cyrus indicated, it's a very tall order. Erect a mountain range perhaps near Denver, running all the way through Kansas, and another from just the other side of the Missouri River northeast until you get close to Des Moines in Iowa. I hear Donald Trump thinks new geological features are just construction projects, so you could ask him. Otherwise maybe look into contacting Sauron - he seems to like mountain frontiers in that style. $\endgroup$
    – Dronz
    Commented Nov 11, 2015 at 23:34
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Down the street from where I grew up was this A-frame house that everyone hated because it was hideous. Then a tornado stripped it to the slab while the family was on vacation. So there's that.

That said, tornadoes aren't created by any kind of selective mechanism, so there's no reason to suspect they should be beneficial. They're just a natural part of our planet's environment that living things have to survive whether they want to or not.

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    $\begingroup$ I'm not sure what the first paragraph has to do with the question, besides being something of a joke, and one that is in somewhat poor taste. $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868
    Commented Nov 10, 2015 at 21:33
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Assuming that weather phenomena need to produce benefits to justify their existence suggests you do not understand any of them. They are the result of a complex interaction of physical laws, so they simply happen when conditions cause them to. In the case of tornadoes the condition is a cold air front hitting a warm air front at a certain angle. Tornado Alley in the US just happens to be where warm Gulf air meets cold air from the Rockies and further north. Nothing short of major climate change and shifting wind patterns will change this.

If you believe tornadoes are intentionally created by God, the most logical conclusion is that He is mighty pissed off at the American Midwest. Why that might be is a topic for religion, not Worldbuilding.

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  • $\begingroup$ A fictional world with literal Gods (who like smacking the Midwest, or otherwise) would be on-topic on this site. $\endgroup$
    – Dronz
    Commented Nov 10, 2015 at 16:44
  • $\begingroup$ So how do I kick the Alley OFF northeastern Nebraska? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 10, 2015 at 17:05
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    $\begingroup$ Build a 5 km high wall, put a mountain range inbetween Nebraska and the Gulf of Mexico or maybe dam the gulf and empty out the water. Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for the terrible side effects this will have. $\endgroup$
    – Cyrus
    Commented Nov 10, 2015 at 17:10
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With evolution, you need to look at things a bit differently. There is nothing inherently beneficial about storms or droughts. They are natural events, and they don't care at all about the environment or the plants.

So why are they somewhat helpful? Because plants that took advantage of them had an advantage in the evolutionary race. They happen often enough, and with sufficient frequency that they provided evolutionary pressure, and so flora adapted and adjusted to them.

So, why haven't plants adapted to tornadoes? This is just a guess, but:

They're too small. Tornadoes may be tremendously violent, but they're also extremely localized. A very large tornado may devastate hundreds of square miles - but Kansas alone is almost one hundred thousand square miles in size, almost three orders of magnitude larger. And that's only a large tornado, most are smaller.

On the other hand, storms and droughts are big - they cover large areas - and relatively frequent. On average a plant will probably experience several storms and maybe a drought each year. I would bet that the average plant never sees a single tornado in its lifetime.

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You could try tossing a mountain range across it to alter weather patterns. Maybe you could push them mountains up with some colossal seismic activity. I would feel sorry for the rest of the planet though, as the benefit of earthquakes is also very suspect.

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I imagine that one could make the argument that seeds could get sucked into a tornado, and then dispersed, sometimes miles away.

But, I don't know if there has to be a "reason" other than when the perfect weather conditions meet.

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Tornadoes are disasters, but also have many benefits such as, seeds dispersed, but also disadvantages the seeds are dispersed but now a farmer has lost his seeds, and crops for cotton season, which means he's not going to know how he's going to pay for his house that has been destroyed by the tornado or afford to care for his family.

Summary of that is for every up there a couples of downs.🤗😢

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  • $\begingroup$ The question is essentially: if you eliminate tornadoes, what good doesn't happen? What if the seeds never spread to Australia and it's just a barren wasteland with no plants? In what way would a world without tornadoes be different? Another answer already mentioned seeds. What do you add to that in terms of answering this question? It's easy to come up with bad things that happen because of tornadoes. What are the good? $\endgroup$
    – Brythan
    Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 16:14
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If you look at the tornado map posted earlier, it appears that mountains and lakes appear to reduce them. Check out the great lakes and Appalachians. I know Lake Michigan has a big effect on the local weather.

Perhaps a giant man made lake would be more feasible than a mountain range? Nuke some craters, build a damn?

I would imagine tornadoes might whip up some seeds and pollen, sending them further than usual?

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