Warmer water on the ocean surface makes hurricanes faster. What if (be careful) underwater tubes were used to move the colder water at the bottom to the surface?
I climate changes they are making hurricanes more and more violent, and one reason is that warmer oceans make the storms speed up. Increasing water surface temperatures by just one degree can increase wind speeds by up to 20 miles (over 30 kilometers) per hour. What if a technology could cool water? Could it help prevent disasters and stop hurricanes? This is what OceanTherm, a Norwegian startup, is asking.
OceanTherm, cold water from the seabed
The theory exposed above is the basis of a technology (yet unproven) from a Norwegian startup called OceanTherm.
In hurricane season, ships would have to deploy large tubes with deep holes underwater, where the water is coldest, and then pump in air, which would push cold water bubbles to the surface.
As a storm passes over cooler water, the different temperatures could stop more damaging hurricanes.
OceanTherm, the genesis of the project
OceanTherm CEO, Olav Hollingsaeter is a retired submarine officer in the Norwegian Navy. He started thinking about the concept after seeing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
That storm gained strength “due to very warm sea surface temperatures before it made landfall,” Olav says. “I am an old submariner and I knew that the water is colder in the depths of the ocean. So my thought was: Why don't we use this cold water in the deep sea mixed with surface water to stop hurricanes? ”
In the most recent case of Hurricane Laura, as another example, the storm traveled over water with a surface temperature of 30 degrees Celsius (87 degrees Farenheit). “If you can get the sea surface temperature below 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius), then you take away a source of energy from the hurricane,” Hollingsaeter says. “That's the theory.”
It's not the only such approach to stopping hurricanes
Others have considered similar ideas, including Bill Gates and the Stanford climate scientist Ken caldeira, who filed a patent in 2009 for a system that would push hot water down from the surface and lift cooler water up (with a fixed fixture). But many experts are skeptical that the technology will have the desired effect, due to multiple factors that influence storm growth, not just water temperature. “Half the problem is missing,” says Frank marks, director of the Atlantic Hurricane Research Division. Changing ocean temperatures at the scale needed to stop hurricanes and impact a huge storm could also have unintended consequences, such as causing a drought or another storm elsewhere.
OceanTherm disagrees, and argues that the concept would need further study before it can be rejected.
The pilot project
The Norwegian startup plans to begin a two-year pilot project with computer modeling and real-world testing in the Gulf of Mexico. In the first tests in cold waters off Norway, the startup showed that it was possible to cool the surface temperature by around four degrees Celsius (enough to stop hurricanes). In Norway, submersible tube systems have used bubbles for the opposite purpose for decades: push warmer water to the surface to prevent ice.
The pilot project will help the company better understand how large this type of system would need to be to work (and what effects it could have on marine life). One version could be permanently installed in a key location, such as between Cuba and Mexico or between Cuba and Florida. OceanTherm estimates it would cost around 500 million euros to build and between 80 million and 100 million a year to operate.
Another version, mobile, could be deployed from ships during hurricane season. Stopping hurricanes in a “flexible” way would have lower initial costs but a much higher operating budget of between 100 million and 300 million per year. That's a huge cost, but far less than the damage that can be caused by massive storms. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that hurricane-force winds, storm surges and heavy rains cause losses for approximately 54 billion euros per year.
