While residents of Taiwan and China are cleaning up after a typhoon, another company has secured a patent for a submarine that might be able to stop typhoons in the near future reports the Telegraph.co.uk.
Ise Kogyo Co., a hydraulic engineering company based in Mie, central Japan, has obtained a patent for a submarine designed to dive in the path of a typhoon, pump cold water to the surface, and stop the storm in its tracks. The submarine drops 30 metres below the surface and then pumps cold water to the top.
Typhoon need surface temperatures 25 or 26 degrees centigrade to form and increase in destructive power, but by cooling the surface water, the company believes the typhoon will peter out.
“The idea is to have a series of 20-metre long water pumps, each with a diameter of 70cm, attached to both sides of a submarine to pump cold water to the surface,” Tomotsu Omori told The Daily Telegraph.
Devised by company President Koichi Kitamura, each submarine would be able to pump around 480 metric tons of water per minute and would work in coordinated groups of up to 20 underwater vehicles. In one hour, Kitamura estimates, the submarines would be able to reduce the surface temperature of the ocean by 3 degrees over an area of 57,000 square metres and take the punch out of the storm.
The company is now looking for partners to develop a prototype system to test.
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