Jaw-dropping satellite images show historic Hurricane Irma swallowing Caribbean islands
Historic Hurricane Irma has rewritten storm history in the Atlantic Ocean, setting records for its windspeed and its long-lasting Category 5 status.
As the storm continues to travel through the Atlantic, the first to feel the storm's wrath have been tiny Caribbean islands and the northern Leeward Islands.
Many of these locations experienced catastrophic damage. Winds gusted to 161 mph at Saint Maarten on Wednesday morning, with a wind gust up to 155 mph recorded in Barbuda, before the instrument stopped functioning.
One of the remarkable scenes that played out on Wednesday has been the wide, nearly calm eye of the storm engulfing these comparatively tiny islands, as if swallowing them whole.
Satellite images showed this happened in Barbuda, which was unlucky enough to take a direct hit from the monster storm.
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In addition, the same thing happened in Antigua and St. Martin, which were both inside the eye at the same time.
The storm's eye has been remarkably clear, with a so-called "stadium effect" of clouds surrounding it, containing the storm's fiercest winds. This ring of storms, known as the eye wall, is what brought Category 5 hurricane-force winds to these islands.
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The storm has set records as the 2nd-most intense Atlantic hurricane in history, the storm with the longest duration of 180-mile per hour winds or greater in the Atlantic, and the strongest storm to ever hit the Leeward Islands.
According to the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang, it's also the most intense Atlantic storm to strike land since the Florida Keys hurricane of 1935.
Andrew Freedman is Mashable's Senior Editor for Science and Special Projects. Prior to working at Mashable, Freedman was a Senior Science writer for Climate Central. He has also worked as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and Greenwire/E&E Daily. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, online at The Weather Channel, and washingtonpost.com, where he wrote a weekly climate science column for the "Capital Weather Gang" blog. He has provided commentary on climate science and policy for Sky News, CBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Sirius XM Radio, PBS NewsHour, and other national and international outlets. He holds a Masters in Climate and Society from Columbia University, and a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
