Texas Shores, Volume 39, Number 4, Winter 2007 Page: 7
36 p. : col. ill.View a full description of this periodical.
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AKD LssoN5
theoretically because it would rob the hur-
ricane of the massive amounts of water it
needs to fuel itself.
The idea died when no one could find a
substance that would stay together in the
rough seas of a tropical cyclone.
Since hurricanes run on heat draw
from warm water, the common sense thing
to do is cool the ocean around a storm
and take its fuel (although the 2005 storms
that developed in cooler water appear to
contradict this theory). Ideas along this
line proposed towing icebergs from the
arctic zone or pumping cold water from
the ocean's depths to its surface.
Without going into too much detail,
the idea fails on scale alone. By NOAA's
calculations, people would have to cool
about 24,000 square miles of ocean during
any given 24-hour period to cover every
potential track a storm might take, and
that does not take into account the lead
time needed to find the icebergs and tow
them into place.
The pumping plan is an even larger
undertaking. To make it work, humans
would have to pre-position sufficient
numbers of pumps in a grid comprising all
possible storm tracks. For the mainland
United States alone (from Cape Hatteras,
N.C., to Brownsville) the grid would have
to cover 528,000 square miles.
Now consider what the plan would
mean to the marine ecosystem. Suddenly
cooling the surface of the ocean would
most likely kill much of the sea life in theaffected area.
By far the most outlandish proposal,
and one of the most frequently submitted
to NOAA by some of the more eccentric
members of the general public, calls for
using a nuclear warhead to simply blow a
hurricane apart. Forget for a moment that
the plan calls for using a weapon of mass
destruction. The main difficulty with using
any explosive to modify hurricanes is the
amount of energy required. Hurricanes
already release enough energy per hour tosupply the world's electrical needs for the
same period of time.
One nuclear warhead might not even
cause a hurricane to flinch, let alone disap-
pear. On top of that, the fallout would
spread quickly along with the trade winds
and contaminate large areas of land and
ocean, causing untold environmental dam-
age.
Hurricanes are bad enough without be-
ing radioactive, too.
Having the ability to control hurricanes
would lead to the inevitable ethical ques-
tion: Should we control hurricanes?
"We need hurricanes, that's what takes
the heat from the tropics to the north,"
says Hasling. "We need them to make our
north livable and they break droughts."
For instance, Hurricane Camille averted
drought conditions and ended water defi-
cits along much of its path in August 1969.
Tropical regions would be unbearably
hot if hurricanes (and other natural mech-
anisms) did not redistribute heat to cooler
climates. The storms' surges and winds
also stir up the waters in coastal estuaries,A view of New Orleans
from a U.S. Coast
Gard helicopter after
Hurricane Katrina.
Photo courtesy USCGwhich are important nursery grounds for
many species of sea life.
There is no doubt that Atlantic storms
are becoming more financially destructive.Texas Shores I 7
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Texas A & M University. Sea Grant College Program. Texas Shores, Volume 39, Number 4, Winter 2007, periodical, Winter 2007; College Station, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1633704/m1/9/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.