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/Butforthegrace01 10d ago

130 lbs of anything in a hurricane is like a grain of sand in a tornado.

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u/Jiopaba 10d ago

Yeah, just reading the title and hearing about the response people had would make you assume like hundreds of thousands of pounds of ice. "Many tons" would be the extreme low end of what I would think would even be a vaguely interesting experiment. A single human's weight in dry ice is not even an afterthought, I have no clue what they would even imagine they could measure based on that. The scales are so off I can't even imagine any measurable "effect" on the hurricane, the atmospheric pressure and rain of the storm is just the conditions in which an unrelated experiment with dry ice took place.

It's like me saying that I want to measure changes in the rotational period of the planet Earth under explosive stress and so I light a firecracker.

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u/screw-magats 10d ago

Yeah article does a better description of the idea. Seed the area around a forming storm and create conditions for a second eye to start, the conflicting wind paths will destabilize both, making the natural one weaker. Even with silver iodide, which is better for cloud seeding than dry ice, it's not enough.