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HurricaneSandy.jpg
NASA image of Hurricane Sandy spinning in the Atlantic Ocean and making landfall on the East Coast. Sandy has been downgraded to a "Superstorm." As of Tuesday morning, almost million people are without power due to the storm.

Former Microsoft executive has a way to prevent hurricanes

October 29, 2012 @ 4:18 pm (Updated: 7:24 am - 10/30/12 )

Bellevue inventors say there is a way to either reduce the strength of hurricanes or prevent them completely.

Microsoft's former chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, says people look at him in a strange way when he tells them his company has a way to stop hurricanes.

"That sounds looney, right? You say how on earth are you going to change a hurricane? It turns out, there's a way," he says.

Myhrvold is a big thinker. He created Microsoft's research division, and in 1991 predicted the emergence of something he called the "digital wallet" that would be a phone, schedule manager, computer, library of music and books. Sounds like an iPhone.

He left Microsoft more than a decade ago to start Intellectual Ventures. They refer to the Eastside company as, I-V.

"Our only job is to invent, so we try to swing for the fences and try to solve really big problems," says Myhrvold, the company's CEO. "Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't but we'd rather try and fail than not try at all."

Hurricanes are "really big problems" but Myhrvold believes there's a simple solution.

Scientists have long understood the natural mechanics behind hurricanes. The storms are fueled by warm water at the ocean's surface. When hurricanes form, the ocean is about 82 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface. Deep below, the water is much colder.

All we need to do is "stir the ocean," he says in a TED talk on the subject.

Forcing the cool water to the surface causes hurricanes to lose their power.

Great. Wait, how do we stir hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean?

Using free wave energy and no moving parts with something called the Salter Sink.

Dr. Stephen Salter is also with I-V. His invention is basically a several-hundred-foot-long funnel attached to a flotation device.

As warm surface water spills into the device, the funnel carries it to the cold depths below. Waves wash over and raise the water level inside the "sink" or funnel, then gravity pulls the water down through a tube.

Scientists say that even a 1-degree difference in surface temperature could be the difference between the formation of a hurricane, or between a Category 4 or 5 storm.

Myhrvold suggests deploying thousands of Salter Sinks in the Atlantic, where hurricanes form.

"Our rough estimates are it would take on the order of 10,000 of these devices which ought to be possible to construct for a few thousand dollars apiece," Myhrvold says. "Even if it was tens of millions of dollars per year, that is a drop in the bucket compared to what even what of these hurricanes costs in terms of property damage that it causes."

Damage estimates from Hurricane Sandy could run from $10 billion to $20 billion, with insured damage of $5-10 billion, according to disaster estimator Eqecat.

The 2005 Hurricane Katrina killed more 1,836 people and caused damage worth $108 billion.

Myhrvold says his invention company's water-stirring-hurricane-stopping flotation devices would not create any environmental or ecological problems.

The only negative he can think of with the Salter Sink is that it would allow people to keep building things near the seashore, which "they seem to be doing perfectly well without having any hurricane prevention in place."

The hurricane stopper will work "in theory." The only way to know for sure if it works is to try it. The I-V team thinks the potential reward from stopping hurricanes far exceeds the potential embarrassment if it doesn't work.

Although Intellectual Ventures has grand ideas, and claims patents on more than 30,000 inventions, they have yet to produce a viable product.

By LINDA THOMAS

More from Linda Thomas

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Comments (18)


  • Add A Comment

  • anotherfencewalker wrote...
    You can't fool mother nature..
    October 29, 2012 6:58 pm
    So don't.
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • awbitf wrote...
    Why would you want to prevent hurricaines?
    October 29, 2012 7:28 pm
    Aren't the intended as punishment for some kind of direct action?
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • Chrisfrommv wrote...
    Not so sure it's a great Idea...
    October 29, 2012 8:02 pm
    It's a great thought and concept. Mother nature has events like these as a balancing act, whenever you screw with mother nature the concequences can be unforseen and severe! You live on a sometimes brutal planet, adapt to your environment; adapting your environment to you is much more complicated and can end very poorly. I remember a simalar thought about atomizing small flacks of aluminum into the atmosphere to prevent global warming or something like that... hmmm.... I fear when it comes to things like this we may just find our own vanity will lead to our own destruction
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  • Chrisfrommv wrote...
    one possble thought
    October 29, 2012 10:10 pm
    Ok, so one idea that might be of a concern... The Ocean often acts like a regulator for corbon dioxide emmissions. Emissons from the magma bed of the ocean crust gets trapped in the pressure and saturates the ocean water in the cold deep waters the gas is very compressed and is trapped. large disturbences often release this gas (ref Lake Nyos asphixiating 17,000 people in a large gas release) If we constently are "stiring" this mixer of less dense warmer water into the cold co2 filled water, would this allow for the unnaturally large emmision of co2 in area? How would the creating pockets of greenhouse gases react with the normal airstream balance? what would the introduction of this warmer water do to the ocean currents? remember heat is energy and isn't destroyed, when you are reducing the temperature on the top in this manner, all your doing is transfering that energy to another location (i.e dispresing it and introducing it at lower sea levels).
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • Country_Dog wrote...
    This is the kind of hubris
    October 30, 2012 4:19 am
    that runs rampant in Redmond and the Eastside.
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • Chuck Gould wrote...
    Note to genius inventors: warm water rises
    October 30, 2012 7:41 am
    The theory is that wave action will slop water into the top of the funnel, and that gravity will then bring any collected water back to sea level. If the water is trapped in a funnel shaped device, it is true that water will be displaced from the lower, pointy end of the funnel to allow the water at the top of the column to return to surface level.

    Problem being: within the funnel itself the warm water will be rising to the surface of the column. The water expelled from the bottom of the funnel will be about the same temperature as the rest of the water at the same depth.

    To force the warm water to mix with cold water at the lower depths would require extra pressure, such as a pump, to shove the water down the cylinder faster than it would resume thermal equilibrium.

    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • Seattle Dad wrote...
    I doubt that fact is lost on the inventors Chuck
    October 30, 2012 8:10 am
    With most technical stories, the writers have to dumb down the science. Now I still think the application of the theory is impractical, I think the science is little better thought out..... in theory.
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • Forrest wrote...
    Heck with the scientists, lets use religion to fix the problem.
    October 30, 2012 9:20 am
    How about some extra hard praying. Or maybe rubbing your magic underwear if you're a Mormon. Let's consult the Bible to see if there is a solution there. I see the Bible had a cure for leprosy using dead birds(Leviticus 14). I wonder if it would work better for hurricanes. Maybe we could get the Muslims, who blew themselves up and became martyrs, to roll of their 72 virgins and stop the storm. What would Jesus do?
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • ron prevost wrote...
    Forrest, I think religion WOULD work better than this 'scientific' idea.
    October 30, 2012 11:45 am
    A time machine makes better sense.

    But, for a non-believer, you're pretty up in the Bible - or just Leviticus ?

    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • The King's Son wrote...
    @Forrest
    October 30, 2012 2:44 pm
    You clearly haven't read Leviticus 14. It does not describe a way to cure leprosy but the ceremony required by Jewish law to signify cleansing. Check out Matthew 8 where Jesus heals a man of leprosy and then sends him to the priest to perform the ritual in Leviticus 14.
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • captpuget wrote...
    Yeah, because humans are much better at handling nature than nature is.
    October 30, 2012 10:39 am
    Give me a break.
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • Fuego wrote...
    I now understand...
    October 30, 2012 11:01 am
    why Microsoft has had problems with their products.
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • 2112 wrote...
    I thought the plan to stop Hurricanes
    October 30, 2012 11:13 am
    Was to decimate the US economy with regulation and taxes to pay the rest of the world not to develop their economies.
    { "Thumbs Up":"1","Thumbs Down":"-1" }
  • hiskeyd wrote...
    This is a horrible idea as Hurricanes are an integral part of the Earth's climate control system
    October 30, 2012 11:19 am
    There is also the problem of the scale of energy in hurricanes. They are powered by so much heat that they can release 50-200 exajoules of heat energy per day. This is about the same amount of energy as would be released by detonating 45,000 nuclear bombs per day of the explosive capacity of “Little Boy”, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

    To put it another way, this is about 200 times more energy than human beings currently have the ability to generate if every electrical power plant on Earth was working at 100% capacity for the entire day. I for one welcome our new hurricane overlords.

    You can read more about why hurricanes are so important to the Earth's climate and the last time the U.S. government tried to stop them here: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/10/how-hurricanes-are-named/

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