Can We Engineer a Way to Stop a Hurricane?
Since late summer, as hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, Maria and Nate spun up over the ocean and headed for North America, the phone calls and emails have been pinging into the office of Frank D. Marks, director of hurricane research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Miami.
For three decades, before and after big storms, Marks has been bombarded with imaginative ideas on how to weaken or destroy them: Why don’t we nuke them? Or drag icebergs into their path? Or cover the sea with some kind of film to stop the evaporation that feeds their intensity?
So far, says Marks, none of the proposals, whether from inventors in their garages or Ph.D. physicists in their labs, “has come close to capturing the complexity of hurricanes – or the risks” of meddling with one.
Kabsik Park