Irma might have been one bitch of a hurricane, but in no way was she basic.

Not only did she wipe out one island after another in the Caribbean, she also changed course more than once – and broke multiple records along her path of destruction.

Let’s take a look at a few of them:

First off, Irma excelled in the length of time she managed to sustain her extremely high wind speeds; she kept going at 185 mph (300 kmh) for 37 hours in total. The previous record holder, Typhoon Haiyan, held that speed in 2013 for 24 hours, reports The Telegraph.

Take a look at the comparison of wind speeds:

Her tropical winds spanned a massive 70 000 miles² (181 299 km²) which is larger than the surface of England at 50 301 miles². How’s that for size?

Here’s Irma’s path:

And that’s not even the worst of it:

Irma is the first hurricane since Hugo in 1989 to achieve category 5 status in the tropical Atlantic region.

It spent 8.5 days as a major hurricane and had a 3.25 day lifetime as a category 5 hurricane – the joint longest lifetime for a storm of this intensity on record. Irma is tied with with the 1932 Cuba hurricane in this regard.

This makes it the most sustained category 5 storm and the second most sustained major hurricane in the satellite era (starting in 1966), trailing behind Ivan in 2004.

It’s also the first time on record that “two category 4 hurricanes have made landfall in the US”.

But you knew that already.

Although the value of Irma’s total destruction has yet to be established, she definitely made 2017 the most costly year on record in monetary terms when it comes to hurricanes.

And let’s just take a look at the power she produced:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use a measure called Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) to measure the power of hurricanes. This is calculated based on the velocity and duration of a given storm.

So far Irma has generated an ACE score of 66.8, more than six times more powerful than Harvey’s score of 11.1.

If that means nothing to you, this graph might help:

However, thanks to improvements in the way we are able to track storms of this kind, “those living in the direct path of Irma had plenty of warning ahead of its arrival”:

The Bahamas underwent its largest ever evacuation procedure with 5,000 people leaving the islands while 6.3 million people were told to evacuate from Florida.

This could also turn out to be the largest evacuation in US history, depending on how many people actually heeded this warning.

Of course, Irma-related meme creation was thriving.

And one more for kicks:

[source:telegraph]