In a game of one-upmanship with itself, nature was apparently unsatisfied with the destructive force of an ordinary tornado so it decided to up the ante and add some fire, the result: a “fire devil”.

Yesterday, filmmaker Chris Tangey was in Alice Springs, Australia, minding his own business, scouting for new filming locations when he stumbled upon one of nature’s rare occurrences, a tornado made of fire.

The weather was perfectly still and it was about 25 degrees celsius – it was an entirely uneventful day.

Then the next thing a man is yelling ‘what the hell is that?’, and I turned around and saw a 30-metre fire tornado.

I was about 300 metres away and there was no wind but the tornado sounded like a fighter jet. My jaw just dropped.

According to Mark Wysocki, New York’s state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, calling it a “fire tornado” isn’t technically correct though.

I would just call them fire vortices but that doesn’t sound so sexy to the public, so I would call them fire devils.

Much less unsettling.

Wysocki also explained that these fire devils are not unlike dust devils, and occur when a hot patch of ground releases a plume of heated air, in this case the source of heat being a wildfire. Although they’re not witnessed often, it is believed they may be more common than thought – in the furnacy heart of wildfires.

[Source: YouTube, Business Insider, Mirror]