Name: What If It Rained in One Gigantic Drop
Uploaded: 2020-03-23T21:32:45.000Z
Duration: 10 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The second conditional

If just 1 inch of rain fell over an area of 5,000 acres, the amount of water would be

Adverbs of degree

enough to fill almost 3-and-a-half million 40-gallon bathtubs!

But wait -- the geek in me is now asking: what would happen if all this rainwater gathered

in one gigantic raindrop and fell to the earth?

Well grab your floatation device, because here we go!

So, it's a stifling day in the middle of July, and you're staying outside, trying to catch

Suddenly, you spot a dark, ominous-looking cloud growing on the horizon.

But then, as the cloud is coming closer, you notice that it has a bizarre shape and doesn’t

And secondly, it's narrower at the bottom and spreads wider at the top.

Suddenly, the whole sky turns so dark, it looks like twilight.

At first, it's just gently ruffling your hair.

But soon, you have to cover your eyes to protect them from dust, sand, and other debris.

The wind is gaining force, and now you have trouble standing straight.

You don't know it yet, but somewhere up there, in the clouds, an imminent danger hides, ready

All the rainstorm water has already gathered into one monstrous drop weighing hundreds

This drop, which is almost a mile across, appears several miles above the ground where

For the next few minutes, you notice nothing strange: just that dark and threatening cloud

But just as you finally decide to hide inside the nearest building, the drop starts falling.

In shocked silence, you see the bottom of the cloud bulging downward.

It's widening... and widening... and in a few seconds, the bottom side of the gigantic

Not only have you never seen anything like that, but you also realize you don't have

The raindrop is rushing toward the ground at 200 miles per hour.

Its outer layer gets whipped up into spray and turns into foam after mixing with the

If the ground wasn't relatively close, the wind would eventually disperse even such a

Unfortunately, there’s no time for that.

In just 10 seconds after the drop comes into view, its bottom edge hits the ground.

At the moment of impact, the water is already moving at 450 miles per hour.

Mere seconds before the monstrosity touches the ground, the grass right under the middle

This happens because the air can't rush from under the falling drop fast enough, and the

compression heats it, not only incredibly fast, but also to an extreme temperature.

But the fire doesn't last long because almost immediately, tons of cold water extinguishes

And what would happen to you if you stood right under the center of the falling drop?

Well, assuming that the drop was symmetrical, the water would just fall around your body

You’d probably have to raise your hands above your head to streamline your body and

take a deep breath since, after that, you'd have to hold your breath for a long time.

But to confess, it would be nothing but a miracle if you survived being hit by a huge

mass of water moving at more than half the speed of sound.

But if somehow you did, you’d feel pressure similar to that at a depth of 1 mile (remember

Such pressure equals 155 atmospheres, and it's 155 times more than what you feel on

And since experiments have shown that the maximum pressure a person can withstand is

71 atmospheres, you can probably imagine the results of getting in the way of our massive

Yeah, your new nickname would be “Pancake”.

But what if you stood a bit to the side, instead of directly under the center of the raindrop?

Still, nothing good would come out of it.

A super-fast current of water would hit you and sweep you away in the blink of an eye.

It would be impossible to get out, with water surrounding you from all sides.

But the worst would be the acceleration that would make all your struggle pointless.

The good news is that now, you CAN buy that farm!

What if, for some inexplicable, mysterious reason, you’d be floating inside the enormous

Then you’d feel nothing until the very last moment.

If you decided to swim toward the edge of the drop, you’d start to distinguish some

But that's only if your lungs had enough capacity, and you had enough time to get close to the

You’d realize that you’re approaching the ground when your ears start to pop.

It’d be your body's reaction to the increase in pressure caused by air resistance.

Unfortunately, you wouldn't feel much after that: the shock from the impact would create

immense pressure, comparable to that at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

But let's return to our initial scenario where you're standing far away from the raindrop

and watching a real-time horror movie playing in front of your eyes.

The soil simply explodes in the places where the water hits it.

But the bedrock underneath is unyielding.

It forces the water to rush sideways, destroying everything in its path.

If you're far enough, you still have some time left to see the water expand outward,

covering mile by mile of land; sweeping away houses, bridges, and roads, and ripping up

As the raindrop water moves, it also pulls along topsoil.

In a matter of minutes, all that’s left for miles around is bedrock covered with pools

But the rainwater tsunami just wouldn't stop!

It keeps moving outward, wiping away everything within a distance of 20 miles from the face