Hurricane season is typically a bad time for many Florida residents.
These storms can cost the state millions — if not billions — in damage, leading some to wonder whether there’s a way to stop them from hitting the Sunshine State altogether.
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According to Axios, former President Donald Trump once inquired about whether a nuke could be used to disrupt hurricanes before they made landfall.
While the idea raised eyebrows, it wasn’t the first time someone had that thought. The Washington Post reports that the question has been posed by Florida leaders several times since the U.S. first dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan during WWII.
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said that an Air Force meteorologist also proposed the idea back in 1956 — setting off a megaton nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane to blast away the warm air feeding the storm. The hypothesis was that this would prevent the storm from gathering more strength, eventually causing it to fall apart.
BUT IS IT POSSIBLE?
The answer is no — but perhaps not for the reason some might think.
Nuclear bombs are incredibly powerful, with the strongest bomb owned by the U.S. capable of reaching just over 1 megaton in strength. That’s 60 times stronger than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
But hurricanes are much stronger.
Weather experts with the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory say that the heat released by a fully developed hurricane is about equal to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes.
Hurricanes also have a lower barometric pressure than the general atmosphere — meaning it has less air pressure. Dropping a bomb in the eye of the storm would cause a shockwave, but it wouldn’t really change that pressure.
And trying to bomb a tropical depression in the Atlantic before it becomes a hurricane isn’t a feasible option, either.
“If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it’s still a lot of power,” researchers said. “So the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world’s lights many times a year.”
There’s also the issue with radioactive fallout, which could be carried to land on trade winds and cause plenty of environmental problems.
ARE THERE ANY OTHER OPTIONS?
Hossenfelder discusses several other ideas that have been posed to help stop hurricanes. They include:
- CLOUD SEEDING: This involves spraying clouds with certain substances aimed at making clouds rain off, which could help weaken hurricanes. But the vast size of hurricanes makes this less than tenable with current technology.
- OPERATION STORMFURY: In the 1960s, Americans tried to seed a hurricane with silver iodide to freeze super-cooled water in the storm and weaken the inner structure. These researchers discovered that most hurricanes don’t have enough super-cooled water for this to be effective, though.
- OIL SLICKS: Covering the ocean’s surface in oil films could help prevent the water from evaporating and feeding into the growth of a hurricane. However, these slicks can break up and potentially warm the water further, which only helps strengthen the hurricane (alongside the obvious environmental damage).
- COOLING THE OCEAN: In 2009, Bill Gates patented a floating pump that would take cool water from deep in the ocean up to the surface. While cooling the water could weaken the hurricane, these storms are too large for a single pump to work — you’d need to have a vast number floating in the right place at the right time.
- ICEBERGS: Dragging icebergs from the poles to the tropics would also theoretically help to cool the water. But the logistics are untenable, and a single iceberg would likely do little to stop a hurricane.
“As you have seen, there are a lot of ideas, but the key problem is that hurricanes are enormous!” Hossenfelder writes. “And that means the most promising way to prevent them is to intervene before they get too large.”
The main issue is that meteorologists don’t yet have the means to predict exactly how hurricanes will grow or where they’ll move.
“But as you have seen, researchers have tried quite a few methods to interfere with the feedback cycle that grows hurricanes, and some of them work,” she added. “So if we could tell just when and where to interfere, that might actually make a difference.”
SHOULD WE EVEN TRY TO STOP HURRICANES?
While there are plenty of reasons behind why people want to weaken hurricanes, they’re still important to our environment.
News 6 Meteorologist Jonathan Kegges explains why that is:
“Even though hurricanes are destructive to us, they do play a vital role in how the world works.
One of the main purposes of hurricanes is to balance the temperature between the poles and equator. Hurricanes move heat from the equator to the north.
These storms also help to break up red tide and bacteria and help to cool the ocean to help the coral reef. There are several other positives, as well.
While hurricanes are certainly devastating to humans, I’m not sure we should be messing with something that helps keep our planet in balance.”
News 6 Meteorologist Jonathan Kegges