Can We Stop Tornadoes by Building a Giant Wall?

Ask a 6-year-old kid chewing on a Lego how we can get rid of tornadoes and the answer you might receive is, "Build a big wall." But maybe that's not such a dumb idea, according to a partly U.S. Navy-funded study that looked into fortifying the Midwest with titanic, twister-blocking barriers.

Rongjia Tao of Philadelphia's Temple University proposed this unusual solution after studying how world geography affects tornado propagation. His focus is Tornado Alley in the south-central United States, an area of extremely high and violent twister activity. The region's vast expanse of flat ground provides the perfect mixing bowl for cool polar and warm subtropical air masses, leading to supercell thunderstorms and roaring monstrosities like the dual funnels that hit Pilger, Nebraska, last week: