No Hurricane Has Ever Crossed The Equator, Here's Why

Hurricanes, also known as typhoons or cyclones, are powerhouse weather events that suck heat from tropical waters to fuel their fury. Hurricanes are like a vast spinning turbine fueled by warm, moist air. They tend to form in tropical seas where the waters are above 26 degrees Celsius. These powerful storms wreak havoc in various parts of the world. However, it's a curious fact that they very rarely approach the equator and - stranger still - never cross it.

According to Newsweek, the reason for this hurricane-free equatorial zone is due to the Coriolis effect, a force that acts on our atmosphere because the Earth rotates faster at the equator than at the poles. This means that air currents and storms bend to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere, the degree to which depends on the air speed and size of the storm system. 

Although hurricanes thrive on balmy tropical waters, they rarely form within 400 kilometers of the equator. This is because there is no Coriolis effect at the equator, meaning patches of stormy weather don't tend to "spin up" into a hurricane. 

"The closest recorded formation was about 100 miles away from the equator, to give a sense of distances. Because they're forming away from the equator, they're generally being affected by winds that steer them away from the equator," Mathew Barlow, a professor of environmental earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, told Newsweek.

We also don't see hurricanes cross the equator as it would effectively mean they'd have to stop spinning, reverse direction, and spin in the other direction to continue. 

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Hypothetically, it might be possible for a hurricane to overcome this. According to IFL Science, Gary Barnes, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Hawaii, explained that it is theoretically possible for a "well developed storm" to be strong enough to continue its momentum over the relatively weak Coriolis force and push through to the equator.

However, Mr Barnes and others have noted that they have never come across an example of this happening in the real world.