Beaches in the Bahamas have been completely drained of water because of the sheer force of Hurricane Irma.
In a shocking video shared online, the powerful force of the hurricane, which has been upgraded to a Category 4 storm, sucked the ocean away from a beach in Long Island, Bahamas, on Friday.
Twitter user @Piznack, one of multiple people to share videos of the strange scene, tweeted that Irma had “sucked up all the water”.
He tweeted a follow-up video that showed how the water had retreated at a beach in Long Island, Bahamas.
The Washington Post’s deputy weather editor, Angela Fritz, confirmed this phenomenon is real and may occur during extremely powerful hurricanes such as Irma.
“Basically, Hurricane Irma is so strong and its pressure is so low, it’s sucking water from its surroundings into the core of the storm,” Fritz wrote.
“In the center of the storm, where there is extreme low pressure, water is drawn upward. Low pressure is basically a sucking mechanism — it sucks the air into it, and when it’s really low, it can change the shape of the surface of the ocean.
“As the storm draws water toward the center, it gets pulled away from the surroundings.”
Wayne Neely, a forecaster with the Bahamas’ Department of Meteorology, said in a post on Facebook that water receding from the shoreline is “not a normal phenomena” but is happening because of Hurricane Irma.
He added: “Care must be taken in this case because the water often returns with even greater fury.”
Witnesses who said they saw the water recede on Friday said it returned the following day.
Irma has killed at least 22 people and displaced thousands so far as it ripped through the Caribbean Sea and parts of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is expected to make landfall in Florida on Sunday.