Science fiction. Norway has come up with an unusual way to stop hurricanes

According to OceanTherm CEO Olav Hollingster, the destructive power of the hurricane can be reduced by using techniques that have kept Norwegian fjords ice-free since the late 1960s.

Hollingster proposes to use a thin, flexible pipe stretched between the two ships a hundred meters below the surface. A massive stream of bubbles should erupt from the pipe, forming a foamy white stream.

Hurricanes get their energy from warm surface waters, making the air humid. Hotter surface water increases humidity. Hollingster says the bubbling updraft will push cooler water to the ocean’s surface, theoretically draining the hurricane’s energy.

“If we could have avoided this hot water”, – says Hollingster, – “hurricanes would not be as strong. They all disappear when they get into colder water”.

Some scientists say these geoengineering projects are doomed to fail because hurricanes are complex systems formed by the interplay of both atmospheric and oceanic conditions. Even if someone could change any of these variables, it wouldn’t be enough to affect a hurricane.

“Hurricanes certainly need warm water, but they also need convection, rotational component, and light wind displacement above them”, – says James Fleming, professor of science, technology and society at Colby College and visiting professor at Harvard University.

In Norway, OceanTherm is already using its bubble net technology to keep ice at a distance from two power plants along the water’s edge. In these narrow, deep channels off the Norwegian coast, bubble technology works in reverse.

There, they submerge a metal pipe about 60 meters, inject compressed air into the pipe from the surface ship, and the bubbles rise upward, bringing in warmer and saltier water from below to mix with the cooler freshwater above. (In Norway, cold rivers flow into the fjords, and warm ocean waters accumulate from above.) This bubbly current heats the surface and protects the fjords from ice.

While bubble web technology is not new, its massive deployment in the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean will be unprecedented. But this does not mean that the Norwegian team has no idea how to do it. One could stretch a bubble net across the Yucatan between Cuba and Mexico. According to Grim Eidnes, oceanographers at the Norwegian research institute SINTEF and chief scientific adviser to OceanTherm, this is the bottleneck where the Atlantic Ocean water enters the Gulf of Mexico, and it is the perfect place to deploy a giant bubble network.

“We could have done this if one system was operating in Mexico and the other in Cuba, with two different compressors and bubble systems. The idea is to cool the water before the storm”, – says Eidnes.

Such a project requires tens of millions of dollars, according to OceanTherm officials, but a pilot project that confirms its feasibility will cost significantly less. The company has received a grant from the Norwegian government to create additional computer simulations of how a bubble device might work in the ocean, and they are looking for US investors to support the pilot.

Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the idea is theoretically possible, but probably too expensive. Emanuel is an expert on tropical storm formation. He says that if something could cool surface water by 2.5 degrees Celsius, the storm would be much weaker. But cooling such a vast swath of ocean several hundred miles in diameter would require a fleet of ships, aircraft, and a huge amount of compressed air.

Source: nv.ua