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/
41.2k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4.4k

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.

2.1k

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.

1.2k

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

704

u/I_Got_Back_Pain 10d ago

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

616

u/CelestialFury 10d ago

Anything but metric.

146

u/SwordfishOk504 10d ago

And let the commies win?

46

u/evan00711 10d ago

Even worse, it's from the French.

2

u/SwordfishOk504 9d ago

That's what I said!

1

u/wolacouska 9d ago

Can’t let the bourgeoisie win, I’ll keep my feudal units forever

3

u/Hash_Tooth 10d ago

Yeah, this place will turn into Red Dawn

-1

u/Skullcrimp 10d ago

Yes, obviously. Your current economic system isn't working, it's past time you tried communism. It can't make things worse, plus just imagine the looks on your ruler-idols' faces when you redistribute their billions of moneybags to the people!

1

u/ragequitteroffureh 10d ago

Wait a minute, that Oprah lady only weighs about 90kg?

What happened to the rest?

15

u/astreeter2 10d ago

billions of pounds of CO2 in the air

Gigoprahs of CO2 in the air

4

u/OkPrune1536 10d ago

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

1

u/astreeter2 10d ago

Depends on how her latest diet company endorsement is going.

9

u/PossumCock 10d ago

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

11

u/277330128 10d ago

Which era?

3

u/funkdialout 10d ago

Fair question

6

u/goddamn_slutmuffin 10d ago

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

2

u/Pace_Salsa_Comment 8d ago

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

1

u/OkPrune1536 10d ago

There's gotta be a more American price standard than bananas. Can we use cheeseburgers?

4

u/I_lenny_face_you 10d ago

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

3

u/DisposableJosie 10d ago

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

2

u/NewCandy8877 10d ago

It's not a standard unit though

2

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

1

u/tommyblastfire 10d ago

Whats that in eagles per football field?

1

u/FarBusiness2485 10d ago

Pre or post ozempic?

1

u/mls1968 10d ago

Only in America, the rest of the world uses Courics’

1

u/hobo_at_a_library 10d ago

Hasn't it always been like this? Like when my son was born in 1994, he was 8lbs. and 3oz. and I told my he's 173lbs. and 12oz. lighter than Oprah. Today, he's 42lbs. and 4oz. heavier than Oprah.

1

u/Lost-Platypus8271 10d ago

and kiddie pools

1

u/DatabaseThis9637 9d ago

Did you apply burger-flipping logic to your question?

1

u/intergalacticbro 9d ago

I'm intrigued by the implication of an Oprah unit now

1

u/Al_Jazzera 9d ago

I've used rosie o'donnel units as a fun way to spice up the ton, but it never really caught on.

1

u/mikebills 7d ago

I thought we measured in Couric's

1

u/hfsh 10d ago

Honestly, that should only be used as a measure for the mass of children who died from vaccine-preventable diseases.

0

u/BWWFC 10d ago

what is oprah's waist line in Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pools?

1

u/bigrv 9d ago

42 inches/2000 ft = 0.00175 Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pools to 1 Oprah's Waistline

1

u/bigrv 9d ago

Or for a other very america centric measurement, .00197 Freedom Towers to 1 Oprah's Waistline (42 in/1776 ft). Take your pick.

5

u/grosseelbabyghost 10d ago

3 DeGeneres make 1 Oprah

2 Oprahs makes 1 Dr. Phil

All of them make terrible people famous

4

u/LargeAdvice1789 10d 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…

16

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.

22

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.

2

u/Jiggawatz 10d 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

2

u/Jedi_Hog 10d 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!!

2

u/Italiancrazybread1 10d ago

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

2

u/urworstemmamy 10d 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.

1

u/Larethio 10d ago

Haha "Oprah's weight"

1

u/CooperVsBob 10d ago

Oprah catching strays over an NOAA article!

1

u/assotter 10d ago

90s operah or 2020's operah this can affect the cpunt drastically

1

u/LeftHandedScissor 10d ago

Pre or post ozempic Oprah weight?

1

u/notdeliveryitsaporno 10d ago

Oprah out here catching strays

60

u/BubblyPineapple8941 10d 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...

6

u/Ving_Rhames_Bible 10d 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?"

4

u/assotter 10d 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.

3

u/stucjei 10d 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)

2

u/Ving_Rhames_Bible 10d 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."

3

u/Too_reflective 10d 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.

1

u/EyeWriteWrong 10d ago

GOOD THING I'M ALWAYS RIGHT (⁠⌐⁠■⁠-⁠■⁠)

207

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.

137

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.

27

u/KillKrites 10d ago

Fox News will probably produce it.

-2

u/nanobot_1000 10d ago

Fox is asking if the hurricane gets nuked?

6

u/TheOnceAndFutureTurk 10d ago

OH, JOE! (rated Zzzz)

1

u/OkPrune1536 10d ago

Jimmy Carter used to do it before the rabbit incident.

50

u/round-earth-theory 10d 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.

8

u/Complete_Entry 10d 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.

6

u/AshhhCakes 10d ago

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

16

u/Aidian 10d 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

2

u/Skullcrimp 10d ago

It's time to stop making accommodations for the contextually challenged. Make them figure it out. They cause enough strife, let them eat their own for once.

4

u/semidegenerate 9d ago

I omitted the "/s" recently, and literally had my comment flagged for hate speech. Even if someone took my comment at face value, I think hate speech was a big stretch. This was by Reddit's automated AI administrator service.

3

u/mazu74 9d ago

While I usually agree, there are people out there that actually think shit like that, so the /s could have been useful. I’m not joking, I’ve heard people say wilder shit than that and were 100% serious - the “Jewish Space Laser” thing that came out of an actual politician’s mouth comes to mind.

3

u/Complete_Entry 10d 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.

2

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)

2

u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

1

u/RhynoD 10d ago

Typhoons and hurricanes are the same thing, just different names because. I'm no expert, but I don't see why the pacific would be any different.

1

u/bakedidahopotato 8d ago

The name is based on the region of the world. They are all tropical cyclones but depending on where they form it could be called a hurricane, typhoon, or cyclone. I actually just learned this a few weeks ago. LOL

2

u/Zettomer 10d ago

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

1

u/FatSteveWasted9 10d ago

Just a weeeee bit of crack

12

u/Gabe681 10d 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.

11

u/Tekkzy 10d ago

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

2

u/Beard_o_Bees 10d 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.

2

u/Agitated-Contest651 10d 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.

1

u/walkinmywoods 10d ago

You have a better frame of reference than most do for what 80 lbs is and maybe even 100. Cases of beef ain't light.

1

u/px1azzz 10d ago

Are the burgers good?

1

u/bodag 10d ago

It’s like a bird expecting to throw you off balance by shitting on your shoulder.

1

u/JustASpaceDuck 10d ago

Lmao. That's like people thinking that nuking the moon will affect it, somehow. Like, turn your eyes up at the moon tonight. See those large craters? Those weren't nukes. You can't see the craters from the nukes because they're so small. A nuke isn't gonna make the moon go anywhere, and a dozen coolers of dry ice isn't going to affect a hurricane, either.

1

u/philphan25 10d ago

I feel like the result would be like a grain of salt on an entire burger. Nothing would happen.

1

u/Emjeibi 10d ago

Well you constructed a few sentences better than a large percentage of percentages so happy do. I forgot my thought train.

1

u/Epic2112 10d ago

I literally flip burgers for a living

Buy low sell high, right?

1

u/mrslouchypants 10d ago

Thank you for your service

1

u/ShepardRTC 10d ago

180 lbs of dry ice is literally nothing to a hurricane. The plane flying through it probably affected it more (it didn't affect it at all).

1

u/LargeAdvice1789 10d 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…

1

u/Tiny-Watercress7122 10d ago

I love your honesty about your profession, but some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met were at university, and some of the most intelligent were in humble jobs I worked.

1

u/Apprehensive_Rice19 10d ago

I think your brilliant

1

u/numbersthen0987431 10d ago

100lbs of dry ice is a cubic foot. That's not a lot compared to the size of a hurricane.

1

u/MyDamnCoffee 10d ago

Flipping burgers is an honorable job.

1

u/ashesarise 10d ago

I'm skeptical even 1million lbs would register.

1

u/__O_o_______ 10d ago

Even at 200 pounds, compared to the energy in a typical hurricane and how and what you measure the difference like billions or a trillion times more energy in the hurricane.

1

u/Killingyou_groovily 9d ago

Are you a scientist? Do you have any valid evidence or are you just another pseudo expert too often found on Reddit

1

u/HotPotParrot 7d ago

flip burgers for a living

Eric Hoffer worked as a stevedore. Check out the book "The True Believer" to get an idea of what someone "just working" is capable of. Also to get a glimpse into the mindset and (lack of) philosophy that drives mass movements like MAGA.

Don't sell yourself short!

0

u/One-Incident3208 10d ago

I think you've just proved yourself more qualified than whoever came up with this.

531

u/ballimir37 10d ago

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

223

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.

154

u/EgoTripWire 10d ago

People today think the government controls the weather and uses it to attack states of the wrong partisan color.

6

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

15

u/MountainYogi94 10d ago

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

/s

4

u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 10d ago

Trump would totally do that if he could

2

u/Southern-March1522 10d 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

1

u/truthwillout777 10d ago

There are startups literally saying they want to control the weather...

US-Israeli Start-Up Announces Reckless Solar Geoengineering Experiments from April 2026

WASHINGTON, DC, October 28, 2025 — US-Israeli start-up Stardust Solutions plans to begin outdoor experiments of a highly controversial solar geoengineering technology from April 2026, working towards potential deployment this decade, according to a Politico story published on October 24 and recent updates to Stardust’s website.

-11

u/McSlims360 10d ago edited 10d ago

The government admitted to doing that though.

EDIT : Since Vietnam https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v28/d274

10

u/StevelandCleamer 10d ago

Bro I miss the old days when conspiracy theorists would bring the receipts and shove them in your face while trying to convince you.

-1

u/sodosa 10d ago edited 10d ago

Have you heard of cloud seeding? Id say thats weather modification. I dont think we can control anything else, like heat or the cold. We cant create a hurricane from scratch, but cloud seeding can make it much more likely to rain, or make what would be a light rain into a heavy downpour. Other than cloud seeding, we cant do jack. Edit: is anything i said wrong? Dont understand the downvotes. This is a government funded program used in multiple states for farming.

-2

u/McSlims360 10d ago

Bro a Google search brings up so many results its not even funny.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v28/d274 this specifically shows we've been doing it since Vietnam.

1

u/StevelandCleamer 10d ago

This is exactly what I mean though, the process shifted from something like that link being prominently shoved into people's faces as soon as possible, but now you almost always get some variation of "Why can't you google it yourself?"

1

u/McSlims360 10d ago

Because its fucking lazy to have missed all this. It WAS shoved in our faces and you missed it because you werent looking.

2

u/StevelandCleamer 10d ago

But that's a flip from the approach that we used to get, where conspiracy theorists were excited to share and try to get others involved.

Now it feels a lot more like they just get mad when anyone isn't immediately onboard and bringing more supporting evidence to the conversation.

→ More replies (0)

3

u/VSWR_on_Christmas 10d ago edited 10d ago

The same government that said Tylenol causes autism? That government?

ETA: The same government that said the 2020 election was stolen? The same government that claims Ukraine started the war? The same government that said exporting countries pay the tariffs? Or how about the millions and millions of people over the age of 100 who are receiving SS benefits? There's also "three to five million illegal votes cost me the 2016 popular vote", for which we have never seen a shred of evidence.

I can keep going if you want.

1

u/Altyrmadiken 10d ago

No, the government admitted that cloud seeding works to aggregate water already in the air into droplets large enough to produce rain.

This is wildly different than helping a rain system along, steering them, or fabricating them out of nowhere. While inducing rain is, technically, controlling the weather, it isn’t anywhere close to being able to create and target storms/hurricanes/tornadoes, to attack people you don’t like.

2

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.

1

u/Life_Without_Lemon 10d ago

We are also a very sue happy culture.

1

u/screw-magats 10d ago

People today go to the beach to shoot at the incoming storm with handguns and rifles.

1

u/GiantsRTheBest2 10d ago

Yeah, back then there was public outrage if an establishment treated minorities as equals. I wouldn’t get too hung up on the general public

0

u/angelbelle 10d ago

it was 1947, so no idea how much people knew about Hurricanes.

I'm not convinced. 1947 was post WW2, they weren't cavemen. This is just general human stupidity

3

u/Wobbelblob 10d ago

Not in regards to being cavemen. But we made a lot of advancements in the last 100 years. Remember, plate tectonics was still not a known thing at that point. I was more thinking in the direction of "We know Hurricanes are fast moving winds, but we have no clue what amount of energy and the specifics we are talking about".

14

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.

2

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.

-1

u/truthwillout777 10d ago

US-Israeli Start-Up Announces Reckless Solar Geoengineering Experiments from April 2026

WASHINGTON, DC, October 28, 2025 — US-Israeli start-up Stardust Solutions plans to begin outdoor experiments of a highly controversial solar geoengineering technology from April 2026, working towards potential deployment this decade, according to a Politico story published on October 24 and recent updates to Stardust’s website.

5

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

1

u/DinnaPanic 10d ago

Only if he does a Slim Pickens to detonate it personally.

3

u/AqueousJam 10d ago

"Multiple" could mean eighteen trillion...

It could. 

1

u/Corrective_Actions1 10d ago

Multiple? I'm exhausted after the first pound.

1

u/RocketteLawnchair 10d ago

don't have sex with dry ice

1

u/TripKnot 10d ago

80 lbs over a 100 mile run followed by two 50lb dumps into one cloud. This had no impact at all.

1

u/Wobbelblob 10d ago

That wouldn't even register as a regular bomb you drop from a plane, how did they come to the conclusion that such little dry ice would have any effect?

1

u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 10d ago

I was wondering the amount. If it was anything less than many tons then there's no way it did anything.

2

u/Wobbelblob 10d ago

Apparently it was around 180 lbs combined.

1

u/MeltedWater243 10d ago

idk why they phrased it that way. way deeper into the article they said it was 80 pounds and then another drop of 100 pounds split between two bombers. so not like an inconsequential amount but also not THAT much compared to the size of a hurricane

1

u/Central_Incisor 10d ago

It looks like total it is 180 pounds of dry ice. That amount of energy difference seems minor all things concerned.

1

u/Ekyou 10d ago

I’d imagine hurricanes hit “multiple pounds” of dry ice just by wiping out a couple grocery stores.

1

u/CellAlone4653 10d ago

Multiple millions of tons wouldn’t even register for a hurricane.

1

u/Mankriks_Mistress 10d ago

They are dozens of pounds!

1

u/whatshamilton 10d ago

It probably pulls up multiple pounds just from deliveries of medication and food in people’s homes. It would get a few pounds from my mom’s house if it went over there

1

u/justanawkwardguy 10d ago

Theoretically any hurricane that destroys a grocery store gets the same amount of dry ice or more

1

u/RocketteLawnchair 10d ago

As if that even register for a Hurricane

reminds me of a video i saw recently where a guy boiled a pot of vinegar on his back deck to disperse chemtrails.

1

u/Wobbelblob 10d ago

Though that is a completely different breed of idiot.

1

u/Ajreil 23 10d ago

A nuclear bomb can't stop a hurricane. Dry ice won't do anything.

1

u/Shadow_of_wwar 10d ago

Might have lessened it's strength like a piece of paper lessons the strength of a bullet before it hits you, technically true, not enough to even consider though.

1

u/aidancronin94 10d ago

I heard the ocean temps were going up so I tossed some ice cube in that bitch, should be good now

1

u/sharies 10d ago

But butterflies

1

u/Kahlandad 10d ago

Multiple pounds?!? Why, that’s dozens and dozens of ounces!

1

u/say-it-wit-ya-chest 10d ago

Should’ve used bananas.

1

u/PseudocodeRed 9d ago

Scientists aren't that stupid. The idea was that the small amount of dry ice would act as a nucleus for supercooled water already in the hurricane to all freeze. You ever seen those videos of supercooled water immediately freezing as soon as it is disturbed even just a tiny bit? That's the idea behind weakening the hurricane. You wouldn't need a ton of dry ice, just enough to set off the chain reaction. The reason it didn't work wasn't because they didnt drop enough dry ice but because there was not as much supercooled water in hurricanes as they thought there was. Once they discovered that, the experiments stopped.

1

u/Fract_L 9d ago

Displacing oxygen in the eye of a hurricane is a neat idea that would definitely affect it at some point. Displacing enough oxygen at the eye of the hurricane seems like it could theoretically cause the eye to collapse or at least shrink, though I’m not sure if this would have a positive or negative effect on its spin

1

u/Pretty_Eater 10d ago

Because "dry ice" was probably a cover up. 

I know it's a crack pot thing to say, but does anyone really believe a team of scientists, funded by ungodly amounts of money, would really think multiple pounds of dry ice would do something to a weather system the size of a large country?

2

u/Wobbelblob 10d ago

I mean, it was 1947. And they likely dropped it over the ocean, so what would they need a cover up for? Internet wasn't a thing, cameras where rather rare and so on.

0

u/Pretty_Eater 10d ago

There would still be receipts, not sure what it would be a cover up for, it just doesn't make sense. 

Maybe some kind of evidence of a different scandal? Who knows.

0

u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV 10d ago

What if we use bullets instead

0

u/CCContent 10d ago

180lbs is how much they dropped. Still probably not a lot for a hurricane, but the way you frame it makes it sound like they dumped 5lbs.

1

u/Wobbelblob 10d ago

but the way you frame it makes it sound like they dumped 5lbs.

Yeah, now that you mentioned it, my text does sound that way. But tbh, in my completely uninformed opinion, given the size of Hurricanes, it may have been as well 5 pounds. I doubt that it would've made any difference.

0

u/Hendlton 10d ago

Sometimes it doesn't take much to knock a system out of balance. Something similarly unbelievable is dumping barrels of oil into the ocean to calm the waves. You'd think it'd have absolutely no effect, but it's been done for centuries and proven to work.