Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons regularly stir up a storm around the tropical stretches of our planet, raising cain wherever they may fall. However, it’s a curious fact that they very rarely approach the equator and — stranger still — never cross it. Hurricanes are like a vast spinning turbine fueled by warm, moist air. They tend to form in tropical seas where the waters are above 79ºF. The "Coriolis force” is the inertial spinning of an object that’s caused by the rotation of the Earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, the spin of the Earth causes air to be pulled counterclockwise, which results in hurricanes that spin counterclockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere, the opposite happens and they spin clockwise. Although hurricanes thrive on balmy waters, they rarely form within 186 miles of the equator because there’s no Coriolois effect there — meaning patches of stormy weather don’t tend to "spin up" into a hurricane. Likewise, we don’t see hurricanes cross the equator because that would mean they would have to stop spinning, reverse direction, and spin in the other direction to continue. Hypothetically, it might be possible for a hurricane to overcome this, but to date no meteorologist has ever come across an example of this happening in the real world.
