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There is a bird (Antpitta avis canis Ridgley) that barks instead of sings! |
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Could science defeat hurricanes?
Posted on Saturday, September 24, 2005 (CDT) by Thoth
 Another monster hurricane tearing toward the Gulf Coast. Millions of people on the run. Billions of dollars in damage predicted. All leading to the question: Can't these storms be stopped?
It's a question scientists, not to mention people living in the path of hurricanes, have been asking for decades. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we prevent a killer storm -- or at least slow it down a bit?
Researchers and zealous amateurs have hatched plenty of schemes, from shooting space-based heat rays to lining the coast with giant windmills. But nothing looks promising for now. The government did try one idea, called Project Stormfury. The plan: Drop silver iodide from airplanes into the outer rainbands of a storm.
The goal was
to create a new ring of convection to compete with a hurricane's eye
and rob the storm of its power. For a decade starting in 1961,
scientists seeded clouds in four hurricanes. The storms weakened, so
they thought it was working.
Then Hugh Willoughby came along. The former director of the government's Hurricane Research Division concluded that a natural process called "eyewall replacement" often makes storms wobble in intensity. That phenomenon weakened Hurricane Rita somewhat Thursday as it plowed toward Texas.
"If I were really astute," says Willoughby, now a professor at Florida International University, "I'd go out tonight and seed the clouds, and when the winds drop I'd claim, `I saved Houston! For $50 million, I'll do it again.' "
So silver iodide is out. Other ideas over the years: dropping sponges from airplanes; blasting storms with a fleet of jet engines; dragging icebergs from the North Pole to cool down the tropics.
Robert Simpson, a former director of the National Hurricane Center (and one of the guys the Saffir-Simpson storm scale is named after), thought spreading an oil slick in front of a hurricane might work. The Soviets tested it over the Pacific Ocean in the 1970s. The results were never disclosed.
There's even the all-purpose plan to stop everything from asteroids to aliens: Nuke 'em.
Willoughby has heard them all. He even helped come up with a few ideas himself, such as building fiberglass ducts to suck water from the ocean floor and cool the Gulf Stream.
One drawback: That might kick off the next ice age.
"When you do this kind of mega-engineering," Willoughby says, "you might create a solution that comes back and bites you in the backside."
Indeed, hurricanes exist for a reason. They help the Earth expel heat from the tropics, provide much-needed rain to parts of the United States during late summer, and help cleanse polluted coastal ecosystems.
"I think we'll be able to modify them someday, but because of the uncertainty, we may not want to," said Ross Hoffman, an atmospheric researcher at a Massachusetts firm.
His idea involves using satellites with mirrors to reflect solar radiation, thus changing wind patterns.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has pretty much given up on influencing storms. So has the American Meteorological Society, which concluded in 1998 that there is "no sound physical hypothesis" for trying it.
Scientists keep coming up with ideas, though. Robert Langer, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to create a substance that could be spread in front of a hurricane to absorb water vapor (a variation on Simpson's old oil-slick idea).
"The biggest problem we've had is getting funding," Langer said.
"The government will spend $50 billion on recovery, and we could have helped them for a great deal less."
Willoughby says there are promising ideas out there -- if scientists can overcome the massive engineering problems.
Another suggestion he has heard: Drag a piece of fabric into a hurricane's path.
Again, it might work, he said. But it would need to be about the size of Mecklenburg County. And how would you get it in place?
"The suggestion I heard was, pull it with mini-subs," Willoughby said.
"You'd need a lot of mini-subs."
Hurricane Busters
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Research Division has studied several ideas for disrupting storms. Here's what it says about them:
Coat the ocean with oil or another substance
A promising idea that could stop a storm from absorbing water vapor, thus weakening it. But scientists have yet to find a chemical that can stay together in the rough seas of a tropical storm.
Cool the ocean surface with icebergs
A hurricane with a 30-mile-wide eyewall, moving at 10 mph, will cover 7,200 square miles of ocean in a day (that's an area larger than Connecticut). Add in the uncertainty of the forecast track, and you'd need to cool a patch of water the size of South Carolina. That's a lot of ice.
Suck the water out of a storm with a chemical
A Florida businessman proposed using a substance called "Dyn-O-Gel," a glop that would make raindrops lumpy and weaken a storm's eyewall. The research division said the effect was too small -- it would take 37,000 tons of "Dyn-O-Gel," delivered every 90 minutes or so, to be effective.
Nuke 'em
Probably the most persistent suggestion. There's no evidence it would work, though. A major hurricane releases as much heat energy as a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes -- or five times as much as the human race uses in an entire year. So one bomb wouldn't do much. Plus, even if it worked, the radioactive fallout would have to go somewhere.
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Re: Could science defeat hurricanes?
by Isis on Saturday, September 24, 2005 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.thothweb.com/ | Maybe I'm being a little naive here, but why don't they just build houses, offices etc that are designed to withstand hurricanes in the first place.
The idea is always that nature is 'wrong' and must be stopped. All that happems is we end up causing more inbalances in nature, maybe the trick is to learn to live with the earth not to try and change it. |
Re: Could science defeat hurricanes? (Score: 1)
by beforebc on Saturday, September 24, 2005 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) | Hi Isis and all,
It's kinna hard to live with a force as destructive as a hurricane, so I'd be for diverting it.
But scientists have to learn that hurricanes, like earthquake, are electrically driven, not heat driven as they claim.
And as I don't hold out any hope for them learning anything as difficult as that for a long time, we'll just have to learn to live with the hurricane.
bc |
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Re: Could science defeat hurricanes?
by Salik on Tuesday, September 27, 2005 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message | Journal) | Hurricanes have always been thought of -- a concept strongly held by a great number of individuals in certain societies -- to be a form of retribution for the many lives lost during that "middle passage". Laugh if you must, but can you remember the first recorded hurricane? During the holocaust of that "middle passage", many millions were either starved, beaten or pushed to their death while making that crossing, their poor souls so tortured it is believed they speak to us yet today. Have you ever noticed the origin of the "storms", their pathways? Something to ponder, eh?
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Re: Could science defeat hurricanes?
by Salik on Wednesday, October 19, 2005 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message | Journal) | Something popped today regarding hurricanes, and remembering this particular article about how man possibly could control this natural occurrence, I got to thinking -- Dear Lord! here I go again!
Has anyone ever checked into the "his story" of the Army Corps of Engineers' efforts to re-route Ol' Man River and the dire consequences of that effort? (Think Hurricane Katrina)
Don't you suppose if man had left things as The Good Lord created 'em, we'd be singing different tunes today? Remember the Johnstown Flood, buena gente?!
Let's not throw more bombs at Nature, 'cause it's just not nice to mess wit Mother!!
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