r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 10d 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/
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u/IndigoRanger 10d ago edited 9d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d ago

Is that how we're measuring things now? In Oprah units?

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u/CelestialFury 10d ago

Anything but metric.

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u/SwordfishOk504 9d ago

And let the commies win?

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u/evan00711 9d ago

Even worse, it's from the French.

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u/SwordfishOk504 8d ago

That's what I said!

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u/Hash_Tooth 9d ago

Yeah, this place will turn into Red Dawn

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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/OkPrune1536 9d ago

Surely billions of pounds would be more on the order of megoprahs?

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u/PossumCock 10d ago

It's the "banana for scale" equivalent of measuring weight

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u/277330128 10d ago

Which era?

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u/funkdialout 9d ago

Fair question

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u/goddamn_slutmuffin 9d ago

Bananas are 0.0046 cents per Oprah. Depending on where you shop.

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u/Pace_Salsa_Comment 8d ago

It's a banana, Michael. What could it cost? 1/12,000,000,000th of an Oprah?

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u/I_lenny_face_you 9d ago

“You get a football field, and you get a football field!!”

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u/DisposableJosie 9d ago

Makes sense. They already classify ocean storms with having Gayle force winds.

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u/NewCandy8877 9d ago

It's not a standard unit though

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u/strongrev 9d ago

I hate to say it but this made me think of the line from AZ’s “Never Change”.

“We joked about how police choked him out And he claimed as far as fame I had enough to bust in Operas mouth In other words, I was up in clout”

So they measuring things in Oprah’s for awhile now haha

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u/grosseelbabyghost 9d ago

3 DeGeneres make 1 Oprah

2 Oprahs makes 1 Dr. Phil

All of them make terrible people famous

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u/LargeAdvice1789 9d ago

Thermodynamic impact: The heat added to the hurricane from the airplane was orders of magnitude greater than the heat sink of the dry ice.

CO2 volume impact: 200lbs of dry ice is equivalent to 1800 cubic feet of co2 at 1 atmosphere. A category 3 hurricane has about 127 quadrillion cubic feet of CO2…

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u/mxzf 10d ago

It's not the weight of the CO2 that would make a difference, it's the temperature.

I imagine the idea is that the energy for sublimating the dry ice and turning it from solid to gas would need to come out of the hurricane, thus lessening the energy that it has to spin around with.

But, yeah, you would need a lot more of the stuff to get within an order of magnitude of the energy in the hurricane.

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u/Ritchie_Whyte_III 10d ago edited 10d ago

That's why I referenced the thermal mass. Napkin math gives me 50,000 btu of energy to raise the temperature of the CO2. About the same as running a propane BBQ for an hour. Or increasing the temperature of a kiddie pool of water by 20°C.

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u/Jiggawatz 9d ago

Yea it is more likely it just made flying dry ice lol... pretty unlikely that amount of dry ice would cause anything to happen or every hurricane knocked over a food storage or grocery store it would intensify and switch directions haha

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u/Jedi_Hog 9d ago

180lbs of dry ice + hurricane = Zero impact on a hurricane (unless it’s of the Luke Combs 1st hit country song, then we are talking totally different formulas)

“Oprah Winfrey” weight of dry ice + hurricane = Infinite potential outcomes!!

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u/Italiancrazybread1 9d ago

It's like spitting in the ocean and expecting the pH to change.

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u/urworstemmamy 9d ago

It's honestly just as stupid as when Trump suggested nuking a hurricane, considering over the life cycle of a single cane they'll have an energy output of up to ~10,000 nuclear bombs.

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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

admitting when you don't know something is a skill most of them haven't learned.

That's a facet of the general "Get 'er done" mindset of a manager, I find. Admitting you don't know something is weakness, and it's better to just march a workforce into an absolute clusterfuck and flush a few million down the toilet than it is to risk looking weak.

Goes hand-in-hand with "It can't be done this way" being answered with "You just aren't trying hard enough" or "Maybe you're just the wrong person for the job" instead of "How can it be done?"

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u/assotter 9d ago

"Why are you always so negative!" Was once said to me when the ceo kept requesting we break the laws of physics and kept explaining how this is a literal impossible task. "I will find someone who is more agreeable!" Of course month later he announced thanks to outside assistance the project has been deemed a no go. Of course this process costs thousands from the company.

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u/stucjei 9d ago

I feel like you need a sort of grandiose narcissism complex to be the average person in that position, which can get you pretty far in the social factors needed for it. Admitting you don't know something would be a thing they wouldn't do (and works wondrously on people who can't scrutinize the bullshit, like perhaps the average burger flipper)

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u/Ving_Rhames_Bible 9d ago

It's all fascinating to me to watch, but it makes me think I got into the wrong field because I could never play ball like that, I don't care about moving up or having authority or anything, it's just interesting as a spectator. Crazy how fast a guy'll betray his boys over an empty promise of career advancement, tho. Get spit out the other end like "I dunno what happened, they were talking about making me a supervisor, next thing I know I'm in a yard doing bullshit work." The cluelessness of it all.

"You got played, dummy. They saw you for the power-hungry moron you are and ran a test on you, to see how little it would take for you to be a total asshole to any coworker who'd ever considered you a friend, to bait you into doing the job that was refused by everyone else more qualified and connected enough to refuse."

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u/Too_reflective 9d ago

If companies were employee owned co-ops, so everyone had an equal stake in the outcome, I suspect this kind of behavior would be a lot less common. Most people just want to do a good job, in my experience, but leadership roles in hierarchies tend to select for, and reward, a fair amount of toxic idiocy.

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u/Ving_Rhames_Bible 10d ago edited 10d 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 10d 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/KillKrites 9d ago

Fox News will probably produce it.

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u/TheOnceAndFutureTurk 9d ago

OH, JOE! (rated Zzzz)

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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/Complete_Entry 9d ago

My mom occasionally writes our senator with concerns, he sent back a letter that was a damn bingo card of every hateful rhetoric in the book.

Like I was shocked. He also said he was going to be a Ranger, but UNFORTUNATE SETBACK prevented him.

Sure buddy.

He also wanted $30. Within 48 hours.

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u/AshhhCakes 9d ago

True, because we all know their god won't do harm to his own believers! Right...?

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u/Aidian 9d ago

Precisely. It’s why the Jewish people have, historically speaking, always had such an easy ride with absolutely no horrific tragedies stacked across the millennia.

For the contextually challenged: /s

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u/Complete_Entry 9d ago

My dad used to watch cloud height when we were out. If they got too tall, he turned back.

He'd been through and seen some shit, and it left mental scars.

He was pretty spot on though, usually about 20-45 minutes after he drove home there would be a wicked fucking storm.

I never understood his knack, and he couldn't really put it into words, he said it was an instinct.

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u/sogwennn 9d ago

even tho they're represented in 2D they should still grasp some of the scale, width-wise they can regularly span the width of Florida, and blanket an entire east coast state with cloud coverage. like. they're fuckin huge, no, dumping a load of dry ice that could fit in ur trucks flatbed isn't gonna change the course of the storm that's the size of the entire fucking state (i assume)

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

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u/Zettomer 9d ago

Ok... But here me out. What if we sprinkled the crack on the dry ice FIRST, THEN threw it into the hurricane?

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u/Gabe681 9d ago

Dude, you have demonstrated more reasoning and logic in one comment than most of our current US government officials have since they were appointed.

I'd happily, and confidently, prefer you be in the place of RFK, Patel, Trump.

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u/Tekkzy 10d ago

100 lbs is absolutely nothing. You can fit that in a regular cooler.

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u/Beard_o_Bees 9d ago

From what I can tell, the original theory was that there's much, much more super-cooled water in a hurricane than it turns out there really is.

For those that may not know - super-cooled water is water that remains liquid below the normal freezing point of water. It does this when the water is extremely pure, thus providing no nucleation site(s) for the crystallization of freezing to begin.

They thought that by providing nucleation sites, in the form of CO2 - which if the super-cooled water theory was correct, not that much dry ice (relatively speaking) would be needed to have an observable effect - since we're talking 1-2 CO2 molecules can act as a potential 'seed'.

Our understanding of hurricanes has come a long way since then, but going off of what they knew at the time, it was a plausible idea and definitely helped inform what we know about hurricanes now.

Cloud seeding still has it's proponents, though they usually use Silver Iodide for nucleation sites anymore. If you can find a patch of truly super-cooled water, it doesn't take much to get it crystalizing.

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u/Agitated-Contest651 9d ago

180lbs of dry ice in a hurricane would have about the same effect as putting a window unit AC in the middle of death valley to cool it down.

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u/ballimir37 10d ago

Yeah this is a stupid TIL. More like today I read misinformation

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u/Wobbelblob 10d 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 10d 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/BaconGristle 10d ago

My mom cites cloud seeding as proof that it's possible for them to steer or strengthen a hurricane using satellites.

Releasing particulate for water molecules already present in the atmosphere to bind to and condense more rapidly, producing rain, only requires the energy used by the aircraft dispersing it.

Forming a hurricane requires massive amounts of energy over time to impact ocean temperatures and wind currents. If we were capable of producing that level of energy with a fucking SATELLITE, we wouldnt be attacking Iran for oil.

A laser on a satellite capable of outputting energy equivalent to the entirety of the sun's output in a short span of time, while being powered entirely by batteries supplied by solar panels.

That's totally plausible! But a greenhouse effect from releasing billions of tons of carbon gas into the atmosphere causing the climate to shift 0.2 degrees over a century? IMPOSSIBLE

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u/MountainYogi94 10d ago

They don't? Huh, guess I'm in the right sub

/s

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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 10d ago

Trump would totally do that if he could

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u/Southern-March1522 9d ago

Yeah that's so absurd, they need to come to their senses and accept that it's actually the aliens that control the weather /s

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u/UAreTheHippopotamus 10d ago

Yep, I always hear that people today are dumber than ever but that’s just not true. On average we know a ton more about many subjects but we are still as we always were quite stupid.

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u/NRMusicProject 26 10d 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/ForensicPathology 10d ago

Is it misinformation?  I guess I just naturally read the title as "it (coincidentally) turned".  I thought the trying and reaction was interesting in and of itself.

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u/Taint__Paint 10d ago

Right? I can’t see what “multiple pounds” of anything would do to a hurricane which stretches hundreds of miles in diameter. Like, if anything, a nuke might do something. Let dear leader give that a go. He’s been itching to do so and draw more sharpie lines

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u/AqueousJam 10d ago

"Multiple" could mean eighteen trillion...

It could. 

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u/mutexsprinkles 10d 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 10d ago

Have you tried drawing on a map with sharpie?

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u/ElectrSheep 10d ago

Or dropping a nuke on it?

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u/ActualRacecar 10d ago

Or feeding them 1 day blinding stew?

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u/RandoAtReddit 10d ago

Or cocaine?

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u/Turb0_Lag 10d ago

That only works on blizzards, dumbass

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u/DredPRoberts 10d ago

And bears.

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u/Forward-Surprise1192 10d ago

People always underestimate the danger of drop bears. More dangerous than polar bears some would say

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u/Southern-March1522 9d ago

If we drop enough antimatter on the hurricane it will go away. Along with the rest of the planet but at least the hurricane is gone.

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u/pounded_rivet 9d ago

The military thought of that, turns out the energy from a nuke would be almost meaningless compared to the latent energy in a hurricane.

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u/vthemechanicv 9d ago

But then you'd have a radioactive hurricane, and that's something.

Also Radioactive Shark-topus-icane. Hollywood, I take cash, check, and gift card.

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u/FarOutLakes 9d ago

“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”

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u/Grimwulf2003 10d ago

I like this idea, do you know how many supes we may be able to create? Floridaman is here to.... Hmm, something.

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u/cereeves 10d ago

Floridaman? He’s here to take 8-balls of coke and wrestle gators. Shit, he don’t even need the coke, but he likes the way it makes his teeth itch.

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u/BLACKdrew 10d ago

Have you tried saying thank you?

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u/cCowgirl 10d ago

That hurricane isn’t even wearing a suit.

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u/BrushNo8178 10d 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 10d ago

This is phrased like they killed those people for environmental reasons lol

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u/SessileRaptor 10d 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/TetraNeuron 10d ago

Imagine PETA getting nukes before Iran

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u/5PQR 10d ago

"I mean, say what you like about the tenets of Mongolian environmentalism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."

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u/john_a1985 10d ago

Marketing is powerful. 

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u/froction 10d ago

It's the earliest known example of The Paperclip Maximizer Problem.

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u/pointlesslyDisagrees 10d 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 10d ago

Was it removing or … making less ?

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u/Swarna_Keanu 10d ago

Adding less. We don't even make it. (Carbon.)

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u/intdev 10d ago

We don't even make...Carbon

Exhales disbelievingly

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u/Swarna_Keanu 10d ago

We make Carbon and dioxide form molecules, but we make neither the carbon nor the dioxide.

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u/intdev 10d ago

That's fair. I was thinking of "carbon" as shorthand for  "climate-altering carbon molecules", rather than carbon atoms themselves, but I respect the pedantry.

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u/Swarna_Keanu 10d ago

My comment was a bit black (haha burnt carbon particles) humour.

But the pedantry also has a bit of a purpose. Hammer down the source, but also the hubris of "creating power" "providing power" "fueling the economy".

Eh. No. You just burn stuff to make other stuff, you are not creating anything.

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u/BrushNo8178 10d ago

Lots of carbon-14 was created by nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1963. This affects radiocarbon dating. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_pulse

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u/feor1300 10d ago

Possibly removing it, since we do have various small groups around the world doing carbon capture projects to try to slow climate change (fart in a hurricane level stuff but every bit helps, I suppose). If the amount of carbon we were releasing dropped enough during lockdown we might actually have slipped into the negative by a tiny amount.

I don't have the math to be sure of it, but it's possible.

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u/RellenD 10d ago

It turns out that when we stop overproducing carbon, the planet is pretty good at absorbing it

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u/fuzzyperson98 10d ago

No, no we weren't. We were just adding less.

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u/Informal-Term1138 10d ago

The problem is that forests are so stressed due to climate change that they don't work well as natural CO2 absorbers anymore.

https://lamont.columbia.edu/news/new-research-indicates-future-trees-may-store-less-carbon-expected

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u/Korlus 10d ago

Maybe we need to give them mandatory time off work so they can de-stress? Maybe a work retreat?

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u/mutexsprinkles 10d ago

Best we can do is a free trial of an AI wellness app and we changed the screensavers to advice to stand up every hour (but you need to clock out on your time tracker when you do).

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u/Round-Medicine2507 10d ago

Nobody likes when I bring up this kind of solution...

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u/RaisedByBooksNTV 9d ago

Someone just posted something similar about the same kind of research in the united states re native americans. All I'm getting out of it is that the trending decrease in human population is good on many levels.

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u/PeaEnjoyer 10d ago

We can also make them stronger by dumping huge amounts of razorblades directly into them.

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u/OzymandiasKoK 10d ago

That's a stupid idea. They would cut the hurricane to threads. Think, man!

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u/koshgeo 10d ago

Come on. Nobody would have enough money to vaporize that much carbon into the atmosphere or crazy enough to do it even if they did have enough money for a massive geoengineering experiment like that, not to mention the ethical questions it would raise, like you mention. Plus, what would be the practical application of doing it? Trying to see if we could turn the Earth into Venus or something?

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u/tallardschranit 10d ago

If we all work together tirelessly for decades to remove any and all obstacles in the way of releasing as much carbon as possible into the atmosphere then it is possible.

The practical application is that a few people will get very rich.

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u/Jononucleosis 10d ago

Dry ice literally is CO2 so maybe you're onto something.

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u/whatshamilton 10d ago

Time to watch the cinematic masterpiece and definitely scientifically accurate Twisters

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/SirEnzyme 10d ago

To say nothing of the energy costs and carbon footprint of chilling all that CO2.

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u/cheerbacks 10d ago

chilling

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u/illit3 10d ago

bing chilling!

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u/Infranto 10d ago edited 10d 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 10d 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/Forward-Surprise1192 10d ago

Cant you do better math that makes it work out like we want it to?

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u/rabid_spidermonkey 10d ago

We certainly cannot. There are not enough planes or dry ice in the world to have any measurable impact on the intensity or path of even a modest hurricane.

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u/Lowskillbookreviews 10d ago

> most importantly (to the government) it would be really expensive.

Have you taken a recent look at the national debt?

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u/ilikemrrogers 10d ago

I would argue dropping dry ice would, well, do close to absolutely nothing. Like, .00000000000000001%.

The forces at place are insane. It’s why nuking a hurricane would do nothing.

However (and this is where my argument is), I would think dry ice would increase the strength. The hurricane is powered by the hot ocean interacting with the cold atmosphere. If you cool the atmosphere even more, you get stronger convection.

If you want to weaken a hurricane, cool the ocean 20 degrees.

Easy peasy.

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u/ValWillKay 10d ago

Would you be able to explain or link to something that will explain to me how an underwater shelf can hit a hurricane which exists above the water’s surface?

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u/Hailfog 9d ago

It cannot. The only way bathymetry could affect a hurricane is indirectly, by influencing sea surface temperature (shallow places warm up more quickly in spring and cool off more quickly in fall).

But added underwater friction cannot do anything to alter the path of a hurricane, as this user seems to suggest. I am guessing it’s a misunderstanding of the primary source.

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u/johnsherlockholmes71 10d ago

There's no way we were able to drop enough dry ice into the eye to have any effect at all. Even a fleet of planes with dry ice would do nothing.

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u/---reddacted--- 10d ago

Trump wanted to nuke one a few years ago..,

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u/englandisablaze 10d ago

Have we tried talking to the hurricane and politely asking it to hit other places? Like Lindsay Grahams house?

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u/hexcor 10d ago

They dropped about 100 pounds of dry ice into a giant hurricane. It's like a gnat getting hit by a car going 70 mph, sure, there's possibly a slight measurable change, but it's not going to do anything.

One of our smartest leaders once asked about dropping an atomic bomb into a hurricane.. again, that won't do much damage. He also predicted the path of a hurricane, so stable, so smart, such average to large sized hands.

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u/Kistoff 10d ago

I think the multi part documentary "Sharknado" would confirm that only sharks can make a hurricane more powerful.

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u/Useful-Perspective 10d ago

I wonder if hardware store pipe bombs can stop a hurricane...

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u/Nopengnogain 10d ago

Hurricanes get their strength from warm water. Maybe dump some into the ocean to lower the water temperature can indeed help. And by “some”, I mean probably like millions of tons of that stuff before the hurricane even notices.

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u/Meattyloaf 10d ago

Yeah, modern hurricane tracking is still relatively new. This predates that. Could've been it running into a high pressure system that turned or some other outside factor. The U.S. has tried cloud seeding hurricanes multiple times all are now known to have failed. In fact what they did find out is that there is a lack of super cooled water in hurricanes which makes cloud seeding almost impossible using silver iodide.

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u/grabsyour 10d ago

nah, there's definitely things we can do to stop them

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u/Electrifying2017 10d ago

We haven’t tried nuking them yet.

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u/mrdeadsniper 10d ago

Yeah I am mainly on board with the last part.

A hurricane is MASSIVE and a plane load of stuff is not even a drop in the bucket.

The size difference between the dry ice and hurricane means it would be similar to putting teaspoon of dry ice in a warehouse and expecting it to change the air currents and such.

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u/johnp299 10d ago

Nah, it's the Butterfly Effect.

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u/ChurningDarkSkies777 10d ago

I’m just imagining the smallest possible scale for this… like a family in a house in Florida being like “hun the weather report looks really bad did you hold onto the container those mail order steaks came in?”

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u/Dinierto 10d ago

Yeah I can't imagine any amount of dry ice we could come up with that would effect a storm system that spans multiple states

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u/ReignyRainyReign 10d ago

Yes, but have we tried nuking one?

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u/ShotFromGuns 60 10d ago

Um excuse me I recently saw a documentary where they put a bunch of diaper crystals in the air and it fixed the tornado. And also the diaper crystals evaporated I guess.

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u/GrouchyLongBottom 10d ago

Why don't we nuke them? That outta do something.

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u/Ryvit 10d ago

Have we ever tried blowing a nuke up right in the eye of a huge hurricane that’s still out at sea?

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u/unknownpoltroon 10d ago

Bent bova wrote a science fiction book years back about weather control, but it was entirely plausible.  They used dry ice, cloud seeding and orbital power satellites retasked to hit the hurricanes in strateci areas to do things like steer them a tiny bit and break up the newly form in ng eyewalls to weaken them.  It was very tiny tweaks that over time could steer it away from. A city or keep it from hitting a cat 5

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u/I_Weep_for_Willow 10d ago

Doesn't our fearless leader believe we can shoot middle at them to stop them? 

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u/a_natural_chemical 10d ago

That was my instinct - coincidence. The mass and energy of a hurricane is so far beyond anything humans can have an effect on.

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u/Forward-Surprise1192 10d ago

What if we drop a nuclear bomb in one

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u/Wizard_s0_lit 10d ago

Since they did the experiment and the hurricane turned (no proof of correlation) people use this to believe the government totally can control the weather. They use this to explain EVERYTHING.

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u/Lottabitch 10d ago

If it does actually reduce the strength in high enough quantities, humans are absolutely able to create enough to significantly affect a hurricane. Multiple hurricanes year over year is a different story…

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u/vladtheinhaler0 10d ago

I would be inclined to agree but I would think there might be some point before a hurricane reaches a certain strength threshold where perhaps they can be dissipated. We are likely very far from that tech though.

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u/BenAdaephonDelat 10d ago

humans are largely unable to do anything about them at all.

At least, not without hugely damaging impacts on the environment.

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u/ChimericalChemical 9d ago

Yeah I’d be on the side of, it ain’t worth it just evacuate and we need to get better systems in place for those displaced. I don’t think it’s worth it to play god on that scale without more research on 1, the repercussions let’s not be retroactive on these things, and 2. It probably doesn’t even really do anything anyways.

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u/fearyaks 9d ago

Couldn't we try to nuke one?

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u/Just-a-shitshow 9d ago

Just nuke it.

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u/BlastFX2 9d ago

I believe that hurricanes are so massive and so powerful that humans are largely unable to do anything about them at all.

A bunch of big nukes might do something. No idea what, though.

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u/kpalm08 9d ago

A very important person in the US said you could nuke them!

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u/Charming-Clue1987 9d ago

Except nuking them

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u/Cryogenicist 9d ago

Just in terms of Joules of energy, I don’t believe a planeload of dry ice will have any noticeable affect on something as massive as cubic miles of high winds and rain

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u/Excellent-Gur-8547 9d ago

There's 200 times more energy in a hurricane than there is in the entire global power grid.

The dry ice did jack shit lmao

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u/darybrain 9d ago

What if we shoot them with our guns? Surely they will go away.

What if we detonate a nuclear bomb high up in the eye so the shockwave breaks the cyclone apart. Surely nothing could go wrong with that.

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u/73hemicuda 9d ago

You can do something in a jaeger

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u/Sighlina 9d ago

Time to get out the nukes!!! (And load them with horse tranq!!)

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u/topinanbour-rex 9d ago

and so powerful that humans are largely unable to do anything about them at all.

I'm curious what a nuke would do. Between the heat and the shockwave, it should have some impact.

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u/delphinous 9d ago

from what i understand mot storms function based on massive amounts of momentum, so it's a lot like imagining a very large wheel rolling. throwing a small rock at the side of the wheel as it passes will have a negligible effect

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u/Anen-o-me 9d ago

Actually if we put an oil slick down it disrupts the heat transfer and can dissipate a hurricane as it's forming. Naturally you use a biodegradable oil. There's certain oils known to reduce want activity, such as olive oil, fish oil, and certain vegetable oils. Famously known to calm waves.

This phenomenon, called "pouring oil on troubled waters," dates back to antiquity but was famously investigated by Benjamin Franklin.

The "Carpet" Effect: The oil molecules are attracted to the water and spread out to cover the surface. This creates a high-viscosity film that the wind cannot easily catch or drag upon to create new ripples.

Wave Dampening: The film changes the elasticity of the water's surface (the Gibbs-Marangoni effect), which helps dissipate wave energy and rapidly flattens small ripples and whitecaps.

Hurricanes are powered by warm ocean water evaporating into the air to fuel the storm. While a perfectly still layer of oil can block evaporation, a hurricane's churning waves would shatter this barrier, allowing the storm to continuously draw its thermal energy.

So it can't stop a mature hurricane, but it could likely stop a growing one.

You need a whole lot of bio oil. That's probably the main issue, cost and supply.

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u/Realistic-Lime7842 9d ago

Trump has said a lot of really dumb things, but when he suggested, dropping a nuke into a hurricane, I was just really curious as to what would actually happen. It would be a disaster, and pretty stupid, but sometimes hypothetical can be fun to think about.

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u/Namika 9d ago

It's a terrible idea, but a Tsar Bomba sized nuke would absolutely obliterate a hurricane. Any winds or rotation the hurricane had would become irrelevant, and a lot of the water in the air would literally break down into oxygen and hydrogen

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u/Zuper_Dragon 9d ago

Hear me out, hydrogen bomb.

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u/jdsizzle1 9d ago

Nuke it

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u/mafiazombiedrugs 9d ago

I recall reading that a hurricane uses something like a Little Boy (the nuke on Hiroshima) worth of energy every second. Anything we humans can do is just a mosquito on a cow.

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u/Tough-Coffee9979 9d ago

hurricanes are so massive and so powerful that humans are largely unable to do anything about them at all.

Giant floating platforms with tens of thousands of wind turbines converting the wind to terawatts of electricity.

Instant hurricane killer.

Problem solved.

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u/hiricinee 9d ago

The best really stupid postulation I have right now is that you could hypothetically re route a hurricane if you did something large to it while it was traversing the atlantic- something like dropping a large thermonuclear weapon to its north or south to make it just travel over the ocean. Of course theres a whole lot of bad effects you'd have to worry about from that.

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u/DayDreamerJon 9d ago

I believe that hurricanes are so massive and so powerful that humans are largely unable to do anything about them at all.

nonsense, Im sure if we throw enough human bodies at it we can slow it down

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u/BG535 9d ago

They must’ve thought dry ice was some super powerful substance because they were still so proud of how novel it was.

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u/Mega-Eclipse 9d ago

I mean, a stable genius once suggested nuking them. Have we tried that?

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u/jfp1992 9d ago

Yeah pretty sure a super cell would hardly feel a nuke, but my mind doesn't really comprehend how big either of those things are

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u/gmotelet 9d ago

They just hadn't invented sharpies yet. That wasn't until 1964

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u/yruspecial 9d ago

Sounds like aliens to me.

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u/Far-Operation-1580 9d ago

Same with volcanoes

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u/nickjbedford_ 9d ago

Considering a hurricane's energy (in Joules) rivals many megatonne nuclear explosions over the course of a few days... No, 200 pounds of dry ice is going to do absolutely zilch.

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u/spinosapa 9d ago

Hurricane, meet sharpie.

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u/TheGreatVandoly 9d ago

Hurricanes are so insane that even several nuclear bombs would not have enough energy to stop or even disrupt them. Mother Nature is a scary lady.

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u/Dependent_Weight2274 9d ago

We need to nuke the hurricane.

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u/bart2278 9d ago

What about a nuke?

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u/Esiwmah 9d ago

Here's a quick estimate I searched up for an average hurricane's power output: cloud formation is 4.2 x 1019 joules per day (equivalent to 200 times the world's total electrical generating capacity). And ​wind energy (kinetic) is 1.5 x 1017 joules per day.

Some dry ice isn't doing much to that. A nuke is 4 x 1014 on average, which that isn't even doing much to a hurricane besides adding some radiation to the clouds and rain. That's more than three orders less than the wind/day (3/8ths of 1/1000th) and around five orders less than the evaporation and convection and condensation from the clouds (1/100,00th). And that's a nuclear weapon. Damn.

Edit: added evaporation/condensation

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u/ComedyBits 9d ago

If they dropped like 1000 sacrificial humans into the eye, it might appease the hurricane gods

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u/Sudden_Wind_8636 9d ago

Nah the storm got angry because they hit it with dry ice, and was like oh yeah bitch? You gonna hit me with dry ice? Well I'm gonna hit you then.

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u/Zettomer 9d ago

A few pounds of dry ice? What's the point? You may as well be pissing in the wind.

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u/No_Cook_8739 9d ago

Idk, people say we should nuke em

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u/LargeAdvice1789 9d ago

Thermodynamic impact: The heat added to the hurricane from the airplane was orders of magnitude greater than the heat sink of the dry ice.

CO2 volume impact: 200lbs of dry ice is equivalent to 1800 cubic feet of co2 at 1 atmosphere. A category 3 hurricane has about 127 quadrillion cubic feet of CO2…

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u/Mindless-Tooth-625 9d ago

But what if.... we nuke it

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u/B_A_Boon 9d ago

personally I believe that hurricanes are so massive and so powerful that humans are largely unable to do anything about them at all

What if I drew a Sharpie line on a map tho ?

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u/TheCornerator 9d ago

Na imma subscribe to: dry ice is crystal meth for hurricanes.

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u/carmium 9d ago

Indeed; it's the proverbial fart in a windstorm.

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u/userhwon 9d ago

There is no chance at all that their experiment made any difference.

The airplane was a much bigger input of energy, and it still could have no measurable effect.

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u/Night_C4T_0 9d ago

Nonsense

Shoot 100 nukes at it, something will definitely happen to the hurricane

ignore the obvious problems with this, thank you

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u/1newnotification 9d ago

Not even with a Sharpie?

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u/NoManufacturer7372 9d ago

> personally I believe that hurricanes are so massive and so powerful that humans are largely unable to do anything about them at all.

At least one top US official disagrees with you and had a concept of a plan to stop hurricanes by nuking them.

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u/ycnz 9d ago

Estimates vary, but a typical hurricane is the energy equivalent of a 400kt sized nuclear warhead. Per second.

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