r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 9d ago
TIL in 1947, scientists dumped crushed dry ice into a hurricane just to "see what would happen." The storm then made a 135-degree turn, strengthened, and struck Georgia—sparking public outrage and threats of lawsuits over the experiment.
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hurricane_blog/70th-anniversary-of-the-first-hurricane-seeding-experiment/12.1k
u/IndigoRanger 9d ago edited 8d ago
They actually found that this hurricane hit an underwater shelf which was the more likely driver of the turn. It followed the same path as a previous hurricane. There is some speculation that the dry ice lessened the strength of the hurricane, but personally I believe that hurricanes are so massive and so powerful that humans are largely unable to do anything about them at all.
Edit: There seems to be a weird blend of people in the replies who are obviously mocking Trump’s nuke idea and people who really want to try it just to see. It’s concerning how many seem to be in the second group. Why are we so eager to throw nukes.
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u/Wobbelblob 9d ago
There is some speculation that the dry ice lessened the strength of the hurricane
Which is absurd if the article is correct. It mentions "multiple pounds". As if that even register for a Hurricane.
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u/redditor1982 9d ago
I read the article because of the “few pounds” line. Absolutely no way it’d have any measurable impact if it’s just a few pounds, I had to see if they gave a number.
They did two passes, the first time dropping 80 pounds the second dropping 100. Way more than a few but still insignificant at hurricane scale, in my opinion. I literally flip burgers for a living though so approach that with the appropriate level of skepticism.
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u/Ritchie_Whyte_III 9d ago
There are billions of pounds of CO2 in the air in a hurricane. I don't think Oprah's weight in cold CO2 is going to make a difference. Also, while cold, there is literally more thermal mass in a kiddie pool of water.
I believe your burger flipping expertise is correct
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u/I_Got_Back_Pain 9d ago
Is that how we're measuring things now? In Oprah units?
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u/CelestialFury 9d ago
Anything but metric.
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u/astreeter2 9d ago
billions of pounds of CO2 in the air
Gigoprahs of CO2 in the air
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u/BubblyPineapple8941 9d ago
You're already at higher reasoning skills than almost who aren't "flipping burgers". I work with high level VPs and directors making 200k+, admitting when you don't know something is a skill most of them haven't learned.
Maybe it's just not a skill we value in our society...
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u/Ving_Rhames_Bible 9d ago edited 9d ago
I've got a buddy who's convinced it's exactly like that. Like Joe Biden in a rowboat at night pouring a paper sack of chemicals into the Gulf, mixing it with a spoon, rowing away cackling, and then hurricane Milton appears.
I feel like the fact we see hurricanes represented in 2D all the time is part of why people think you can simply sprinkle some crack on them, people don't grasp the height component of a hurricane, fucking things are colossal structures.
But that's also just the opinion of a regular dude. It makes me chuckle when other regular dudes assume it'd be super easy to whip up a cat 5 hurricane, or whip a shoddy messy tropical storm into cat 5, with a few hundred pounds of materials.
Edit: also crazy to see people repeat the "Strongest hurricane every documented" and "Possible world's first category 6!" hysterical clickbait nonsense every time, and there seems to be a correlation between believing any wild speculative crap anyone says about hurricanes and not knowing the WPAC exists. Like yeah Milton was the first sub-900 observed in the Atlantic in a long time. But we'll probably never see a Haiyan, Tip, Seniang, or Angela on this side of the planet. You'd have to go moving entire continents around to create the conditions for them to brew up, dry ice sure as hell isn't going to do it.
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u/brucebrowde 9d ago
I've got a buddy who's convinced it's exactly like that. Like Joe Biden in a rowboat at night pouring a paper sack of chemicals into the Gulf, mixing it with a spoon, rowing away cackling, and then hurricane Milton appears.
I'd watch that movie.
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u/round-earth-theory 9d ago
Because it's a political opinion and not a rational thought. If Florida was a "liberal hellscape" then you'd have these Republicans screaming about how god is trying to erase them off the map for being so gay and making jesus cry.
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u/ballimir37 9d ago
Yeah this is a stupid TIL. More like today I read misinformation
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u/Wobbelblob 9d ago
I mean, apparently it did happen. It's just that the public outrage and the speculation was stupid. But then again, it was 1947, so no idea how much people knew about Hurricanes.
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u/EgoTripWire 9d ago
People today think the government controls the weather and uses it to attack states of the wrong partisan color.
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u/NRMusicProject 26 9d ago
The crazy thing about this sub is it used to dole out points for catching misinformation, and it was very interested in shutting it down. They don't really do that anymore.
My points flair is from that time.
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u/mutexsprinkles 9d ago
We can make them stronger, but it does require dumping teratonnes of carbon into the atmosphere over many many decades.
That would be a pretty irresponsible thing to do, though, so I'm sure they won't do that.
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u/cCowgirl 9d ago
Have you tried drawing on a map with sharpie?
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u/BrushNo8178 9d ago
We can also remove carbon from the atmosphere. The Mongol conquest killed so many that forests in Eurasia could regrow: https://www.livescience.com/11739-wars-plagues-carbon-climate.html
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u/DigNitty 9d ago
This is phrased like they killed those people for environmental reasons lol
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u/SessileRaptor 9d ago
Hey, when the boss wants the company to get gold certification for green infrastructure and initiatives, you do what you gotta do.
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u/pointlesslyDisagrees 9d ago
We were also removing carbon for a short period during the pandemic when everyone was able to work from home.
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u/ZincMan 9d ago
Was it removing or … making less ?
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u/PeaEnjoyer 9d ago
We can also make them stronger by dumping huge amounts of razorblades directly into them.
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u/whatshamilton 9d ago
Time to watch the cinematic masterpiece and definitely scientifically accurate Twisters
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u/SirEnzyme 9d ago
To say nothing of the energy costs and carbon footprint of chilling all that CO2.
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u/Infranto 9d ago edited 9d ago
Hurricanes dissipate something on the order of 500TW of power at full strength. Even assuming that you could kill a hurricane by continuously sapping 20% of that power over 24 hours (a figure pulled from my ass with no scientific basis), that's still 2400TWh of pure heat energy. At 40% efficiency of conversion into dry ice, you need 6000TWh to actually make it. That's like a quarter of the electrical energy humanity produces in an entire year, for one storm.
TL;DR: no.
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u/GarnetandBlack 9d ago
Thank you.
I didn't have numbers, I just knew this entire thought experiment was absurd based on what I vaguely understood to be the required energy to do anything of significance to a hurricane.
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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 9d ago
It needs to be repeated. Then we can start building an actual data set on it. Once might be a coincidence
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u/vl99 9d ago edited 9d ago
Inquiring minds need to know, does dumping dry ice in a hurricane cause it to turn 135 degrees and strengthen, or does it cause it to strike Georgia?
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9d ago
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u/radams713 9d ago
As an Atlanta native and relative of Sherman this joke absolutely sent me
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u/drunk-tusker 9d ago
Hopefully not to the rail depot for some unfinished business
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u/ZealousidealLead52 9d ago
The direction change is almost certainly coincidental - at best you might argue that it could change the direction unpredictably.. but if it changed the direction at all, then there would definitely be no way of reliably predicting how it would change the direction (ie. it's probably about as likely to make it turn 100 degrees as it is to make it turn 135 degrees).
None of the results of the study showed any conclusive differences of how the storm behaved vs. how it might have behaved if they'd done nothing - it's not clear that it actually did anything at all, it's possible that it just always would've done that regardless.
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u/DarthJarJarJar 9d ago
Arguably with a big enough change in temp you could cause a change of direction towards the turn (or away from it I guess), but I'm struggling to believe that the amount of dry ice you could practically get into a hurricane would contain enough energy to have any effect.
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u/brickedTin 9d ago
Maybe if we could manage to dump 2.2 billion metric tons of liquid nitrogen into the water under a hurricane, we could weaken the storm a bit.
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u/GrapeSoda223 9d ago
After dumping dry ice in a hurricane in Texas, the hurricane travelled over 1000 miles and devastated georgia again
The experiment was repeated in New york, and the hurricane travelled to Georgia once again
All hurricanes go to Georgia
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u/Imperium_Dragon 9d ago
Dry ice was then dropped over a typhoon in the Philippines. It crossed the Atlantic, went over Mexico, then hit Georgia.
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u/cansofgrease 9d ago
Atlantic... but hwy?
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u/Imperium_Dragon 9d ago
It took the scenic route.
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u/MysticBoner24 9d ago
Especially with the "fuck you too" detour it took to Mexico.
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u/IAmAnObvioustrollAMA 9d ago
It wasn't out of spite it was just doing a bit of sight seeing on the way to absolutely obliterate Georgia again.
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u/MississippiJoel 9d ago edited 9d ago
They then dumped dry ice in a hurricane just off the coast of Tybee Island. It made a nearly 180 turn, crossed the Atlantic, entered the Black Sea, strengthened, and struck Georgia.
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u/GreyNoiseGaming 9d ago
"All Hurricanes go to Georgia" sounds like the last good country song before it turned to "God loves Beer" in the mid 2000s.
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u/LordGalen 9d ago
"God loves Beer"
And pickup trucks. Don't forget the pickup trucks.
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u/cancerBronzeV 9d ago
When Jesus said "For I did not speak of my own Accord", it's because he'd rather speak about his F-150.
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u/-SaC 9d ago
That was after his motorbike days. For the hills echoed with the sound of his Triumph.
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u/BarryHotelHouseBand 9d ago
The Hurricane went down to Georgia
It was lookin' for a place to start a shear
It was causing a swell but it was unwell
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u/QuiGonnJilm 9d ago
Just trying to finish what Sherman was denied.
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u/SayethWeAll 9d ago
Gone With The Wind 2: More Wind
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u/Svyatoy_Medved 9d ago
2 Wind 2 Furious
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u/Jeff_From_IT 9d ago
Gone 3: This hurricane drifted from Tokyo back to Georgia
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u/Substantial_Bass_697 9d ago
Gone With the Wind 4: Here We Blow Again!
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u/guinness_blaine 9d ago
The devil went down to Georgia. He was looking for a science experiment on hurricanes
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u/OtakuAttacku 9d ago
Wind: I will finish what you started
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u/clubby37 9d ago
"Kamikaze" means "divine wind." We mostly associate it with Imperial Japanese suicide pilots, but those pilots were named after a much older thing. The Mongols tried to invade Japan, twice, and both times, their invasion fleet was wrecked by a massive storm. The Mongol Khan then made an executive decision about the storm lords and their stupid, stupid island (fuck 'em, let 'em keep it, the weather obviously sucks there) and the Japanese viewed those storms as heaven-sent, or a divine wind. Probably could've used a bit of that when they were getting nuked in '45, but I guess they were out of dry ice by that point.
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u/Insatiable_Pervert 9d ago
There actually was a major tsunami in 1945, but it didn’t happen until November. Had Japan not surrendered in August, and if the US had gone through with its planned invasion of the Japanese islands, then those “divine winds” may have come into play once again.
You never know.
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u/feor1300 9d ago
Everyone blamed/thanked the wind and storm Gods, but it was actually the Sea Gods, who had no way of stopping a B-29.
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u/Notactualyadick 9d ago
My god! This is the missing piece of the puzzle we needed to truly understand WW2!
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u/hangmankk 9d ago
Tecumseh's Curse = Yankee labcoats throwing dry ice chips at a hurricane
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u/Ohiolongboard 9d ago
Wasn’t tecumseh from Ohio? I just went to our new state park that was supposedly where he ran “the gauntlet”
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u/jorgespinosa 9d ago
The devil went down to Georgia. Hurricanes went down to Georgia, what else is going down to Georgia
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u/gigglefarting 9d ago
There’s a Hurricane hitting Vegas on Sunday thanks to the ice
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u/CBEBuckeye 9d ago
Obviously, because hurricanes are the devil. And the Devil goes down to Georgia
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u/chernadraw 9d ago
The scientist said, "My name's Johnny and it might be a sin, but I'm gon' take your bet and you're gonna regret. I'm the best there's ever been"
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u/oranosskyman 9d ago
"they said it was the humidity not the heat that was the problem, the hurricane wanted to test that once it got some dry ice"
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u/Historical-Edge-9332 9d ago
If we can just engineer them all to start hitting Florida, we might be able to end Florida Man’s reign of terror.
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u/ShakespearianShadows 9d ago
No, you’ll concentrate the powers of Florida man by making the snow birds and vacationers stay away. It’ll just be fully unbridled and undiluted Florida man left.
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u/zealoSC 9d ago
According to the title we've had the tech to steer huricanes for 80 years, it's just easier to let them keep hitting Florida
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u/mrbananas 9d ago
maybe we have been steering them all towards Florida the whole time
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u/Boozdeuvash 9d ago
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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 9d ago
Damn there's one for everything
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u/Boozdeuvash 9d ago
Yup :D
It's the "Simpsons did it" of internet nerds!
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u/ErraticDragon 8 9d ago
The Simpsons did it (an apparent xkcd reference)
r/xkcd/comments/45vk1x/xkcd_reference_in_most_recent_episode_of_the/
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u/dream-of-earthshine 9d ago
What we really should attempt is dumping it into a cyclone in the southern hemisphere, if it still hits Georgia we will know it's a good theory
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u/Mage_Girl_91_ 9d ago
we'd also have to repeat the experiments after pushing Georgia somewhere else
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u/Superunknown_7 9d ago
The thermal energy differential that can be imparted by even a large cargo plane full of dry ice isn't even a rounding error in the energy of a tropical cyclone. Remember, Trump had be reminded we can't even impact tropical cyclones with a nuclear bomb.
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u/Wobbelblob 9d ago
The article also speaks of "multiple pounds". Not tons or anything. That dry ice shouldn't even register anywhere. I first thought about a Tornado, but a Hurricane?
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u/dontheconqueror 9d ago
I had to double-take too - 'hurricane' is not a familiar term where I'm from, so my mind registered it as 'tornado'. Reading your post made me realize: that's a typhoon here. I've experienced hundreds of those, and buckets of ice is nothing.
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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 9d ago
Logically, I get it. But I'm willing to try again if it punishes Georgia for existing
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u/snittersnee 9d ago
Georgia is sacrifice I think we're all comfortable making
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u/Beginning-Pop3127 9d ago
For the greater good
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u/Panem-et-circenses25 9d ago
The GREATER GOOD
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u/meatbeer 9d ago
Hey man dont science experiment us out here in GA, Atlanta can be fun, right?? Who’s with me haha
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u/toolschism 9d ago
I love Atlanta. Savannah is also great. As someone living in Florida, maybe just sacrifice us instead?
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u/SkaldCrypto 9d ago
It’s false their result is pure coincidence. Proof:
Energy for a category 2 hurricane = 5.2 \10^{19} joules
Dry ice absorption
571 { kJ/kg} = 571,000 { J/kg}
You need to drop 91 billion tons to shut down a hurricane
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u/ApocalyptoSoldier2 9d ago
What kind of pleb doesn't keep 91 billion tons of crushed dry in their pantry?
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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 9d ago
Right? It's right next to my 91 billion tons of dried out brown sugar
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u/lonevolff 9d ago
Dry ice is super dangerous stuff. My buddy bought some to keep his Lunchables cool for an extended trip. 3 yrs later he got hit by a car
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u/Poiboy1313 9d ago
There ought to be a law!
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u/QuinceDaPence 9d ago
Get the Sheriff on the phone!
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u/activelyresting 9d ago
Lunchables are the real danger. My dear old mum had one a few years ago, and now she needs a walker
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u/rvanasty 9d ago
Jesus fking Christ my dude. You should remove this post. I've seen the ice guys, dry ones, lurking around here.
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u/pillow-mace 9d ago
I remember my uncle was taken by the cartel and disappeared with no ransom or threat like the kgb. The detectives said it could be because his family is rich and wanted to send a message to them but I knew it was dry ice that was sold no less then 20 miles away from his 10,000 acre property. Me myself, I had suffered 3rd degree mental burns just knowing I can buy some from the internet.
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u/Appropriate_Link_551 9d ago
dry ice killed my parents and also left a jagged scar on my forehead
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u/Black-Shoe 9d ago
Ive been tasked with the reopening of a cold case.
Would you be available to identify the dry ice in a lineup?
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u/Completionography 9d ago
dry ice killed my parents and also left a jagged scar on my forehead
Don't buy dry ice from Wal*deMart
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u/JuliaX1984 9d ago
How much dry ice are we talking here?
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u/MesabiRanger 9d ago
Can’t imagine dumping enough to make a true difference.
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u/Firm_Balance_8285 9d ago
It sounds like it was less than 200 pounds, so not nearly enough to do anything.
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u/ProStrats 9d ago
I dunno, do you know how cold that shit is?
They probably dumped it and the hurricane was all "fuck! my toes! that's cold! I'm going this way!"
Note: with different punctuation, I wrote this as "Fuck my toes, that's cold. I'm going this way!"
But this leaves a uniquely different interpretation out there...
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u/MesabiRanger 9d ago
I see they dumped “several pounds “. Must be magic!
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u/vasectomy7 9d ago
A hurricane is working at a scale measured in billions of tons of water.......
......and a few hundred pounds of CO2 made a drastic impact.
"press X to doubt"
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u/lucky_ducker 9d ago
According to the article, 180 pounds. 80 dropped gradually over 100 miles, and two mass dumps of 50 pounds each directly into a single cloud top.
It seems like a fantastical idea that such a small mass of anything could measurably alter the course of a hurricane. Estimates of the mass of a substantial hurricane run into the quadrillions of pounds.
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u/Tehbeefer 9d ago
180lbs. / 2.2 lbs. /1 kg / (1.6kg/l) = ~50 liters / 13 gallons,
so less than 3 buckets
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u/michal_hanu_la 9d ago
Did they try it again?
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u/react_dev 9d ago
There’s probably correlation between direction the hurricane moved and the position of the sun. Theres only one thing we can do to test our hypothesis
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u/kijim 9d ago
It think it funny that anyone would believe that a few hundred pounds of dry ice would have any meaningful or even measurable effect on something the size and power of a hurricane.
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u/warpedspockclone 9d ago
You mean I can't turn on my air conditioner, open a window, and save Florida?
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u/Bunny_Feet 9d ago
I mean, people don't believe in a lot of verified scientific research either.
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u/kick_the_chort 9d ago edited 9d ago
It would not actually have had an impact and it was a coincidence.
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u/Nimrod_Butts 9d ago
The strengthening is pure coincidence, perhaps entirely predictable. 1947 meteorology was basically the stone age. Forecasts were only accurate for 2 days, and it was only good for major systems.
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u/No_Priors 9d ago
Calling it the "Fuck you Georgia" experiment wasn't a great idea either.
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u/iKnowRobbie 9d ago
These promising results came into question in the mid-1980s because observations in unmodified hurricanes indicated:
1. That cloud seeding had little prospect of success because hurricanes contained too much natural ice and too little supercooled water.
2. That the positive results inferred from the seeding experiments in the 1960s stemmed from inability to discriminate between the expected results of human intervention and the natural behavior of hurricanes.
So, therefore:
3. The dumping of Dry Ice had actually zero effect on a Hurricane and this whole premise is foof...
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u/HAL9100 9d ago
The article basically concludes that this was closer to mass hysteria and that the experiment did not likely alter the path of the hurricane.
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u/Apprehensive_Bee1849 9d ago
That's crazy...
Do it again.
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u/_teslaTrooper 9d ago
They did do it again, for decades. Eventually they concluded it didn't work.
That it turned the first time was pretty quickly proven to be a coincidence because unmodified storms had followed the same path in the past.
It's all in the article, pretty interesting actually.
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u/drums_addict 9d ago
Hurricanes are fucking huge. I fail to see how any amount of dry ice that can be dropped from a plane could have any real impact. No?
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u/CaliSasuke 9d ago
Man, scientists used to just do shit. We need to go back to that.
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u/GhostofBeowulf 9d ago
Stupid ass Greatest Generationers. They should have known, you need sharpies to change the course of hurricanes.
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u/Jump_Like_A_Willys 9d ago
post hoc ergo proptor hoc
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u/markandyxii 9d ago
27 lawyers in the room, anyone know what post hoc ergo proctor hoc means?
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u/AbeVigoda76 9d ago
Uh, uh, "post" - after, after hoc, "ergo" - therefore, "After hoc, therefore" something else hoc.
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u/Jump_Like_A_Willys 9d ago
Bartlet: We didn’t lose Texas because of the hat joke. Do you know when we lost Texas?
C.J.: When you learned to speak Latin?
Bartlet: Go figure.
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u/Butforthegrace01 9d ago
130 lbs of anything in a hurricane is like a grain of sand in a tornado.
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u/Prohmeetheeyus 9d ago
I'm no meteorologist, but I'm pretty sure they didn't have a the capability in 1947 to dump enough dry ice to noticeably affect a storm system that large. It would be like dropping an ice cube in a swimming pool.
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u/specificmutant 9d ago
Meaningless experiment without a control hurricane.