Prevention of natural disasters.

One of the many vile qualities inherent in bipeds is the inability or unwillingness to face the truth. The consequence of this is expressed in the proverb:

“Until the thunder breaks, the man will not cross himself.”

The antithesis of this is the fabulous Dutch parable about a boy plugging a hole in a dam with his finger. (The story about this seems to be called “Silver Skates”)

Human history is teeming with examples when countries and states had to take decisive steps against unbridled dictators IN ADVANCE, but everyone was slow…

But we will talk about “natural disasters. These include hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, avalanches, floods, etc.

There are disasters that we can still foresee with varying degrees of certainty and no more: Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions… Here we are powerless to prevent certain shifts of continental plates, lava eruptions from volcanoes, and so on.

But, in my opinion, there are natural disasters that we can PREVENT IN the BUD. It is in the bud, because their power has been increasing for some time and it causes the main damage, devastation and death. And the embryo of the cataclysm does not have enough strength and here we have something to do!

For example, a tornado.

I witnessed the formation of three tornadoes at the same time and in almost the same place.

The windows of our apartment faced the sea. A severe thunderstorm was approaching. Low black clouds were moving in from the sea to the shore. Suddenly I saw on the surface of the sea, about a kilometer from the shore, some kind of white elevation. I took binoculars with a magnification of 20 times and saw: There was a certain hill of spray several tens of meters high above the surface of the sea. At first I thought that an underwater volcano was erupting from the bottom, although in this resort town there could hardly be a volcano right off the coast, and the depth of the sea there is no more than a hundred or two meters. Suddenly he noticed that a dark trunk poked out of a black cloud and, slightly writhing, crawled towards the water. Approaching this fountain of spray, I entered it and immediately began to darken even more. A few hundred meters away from him again – a fountain of spray, then a trunk and later – a curving “dark-gray snake” connected a black cloud and water. A few minutes later, another tornado. And all three of them quickly crawled towards the shore.

Our house was two or three kilometers from the sea and I thought that, judging by the speed of their movement, they would reach our dam in fifteen to twenty minutes. I thought that we should cover the windows with blankets so that if they burst or were broken, we would not be injured by shards of glass. He moved away from the window, quickly gathered up several blankets, took a stepladder and was about to fix them on the windows. Meanwhile, tornadoes, following the creeping clouds “on a leash”, reached the edge of the bullock and began to bend. It’s as if they can’t live without water and they don’t want to climb ashore. Suddenly one of the trunks tore, disintegrated into pieces in the air and disappeared. It was followed by two others that Bent, stretched to a certain limit, when their upper end was connected to a cloud, and the lower end to water. Then they too broke apart and disappeared.

What was going on?

For my reasons, it was a big temperature difference between the sun-warmed water and the cold air from the incoming thunderstorm. Warm air with steam above the water began to flow to the places where the water was warmest and there it began to quickly rise up to the cloud. Due to the rotation of the Earth, air flows began to swirl into a vortex (in accordance with the law of conservation of angular momentum) at an ever-increasing rate. Such a strong rotational and translational movement of the air generated a kind of vacuum in an area of several tens of meters and this caused a fountain of spray. But the jet of swirling and rapidly rising air was NOT visible to the cloud.

The rise of the air was greatly facilitated by the fact that the thundercloud was huge, black from the amount of water condensed in the form of droplets and had a mass of perhaps millions of tons. Such a mass hanging in the air naturally created a gravitational counter-attraction of the air to itself, it became LIGHTER under the cloud and this greatly increased the suction of air from the sea into the cloud. When an invisible column of air rotating at high speed reached the cloud, it, due to the vacuum created in it due to rotation, began to suck raindrops from the cloud and the dark trunk crawled down, thus already becoming VISIBLE and creating the illusory impression that the tornado was “born” in the cloud! Which is fundamentally wrong!

When he reached the water, he began to suck it in.

But the cloud was moving towards a colder shore due to the wind. And the warm water was only in the sea!

On the other hand, the zone of gravitationally lightened air under the cloud was also moving with it. And this (the heat of the water and the air lightened by the mass of the cloud) were two necessary sources of existence for the tornado. The tornado began to stretch out, “tied” by the ends to the sources of its existence. But when the zone of warm air above the water moved far away from the cloud, and the zone of gravitational relief also moved away from the warm water, there was not enough gravitational energy to maintain the tornado and it disintegrated and disappeared.

I described this process in such detail, which I accidentally saw, in order to immediately lead the reader to a simple thought: What would happen if, say, a certain geophysical service aircraft dropped a certain amount of “hailstones” of dry ice – hardened carbon dioxide on the spray fountain, This would greatly lower the water temperature and a warm spot The GERM of the tornado would have disappeared.

We nipped the tornado in the bud. For one gravity-lightened air under a cloud is probably not enough. He, of course, supports her while climbing up, like a parachute holds a load hanging under it. But we also need a strong stream of rising warm air.

So, preventing tornadoes: From geophysical reconnaissance aircraft and satellites using thermal imaging cameras, you can always notice such “WARM SPOTS” on the surface of water or land. And immediately cool them with something. Pour cold water over hot soil, as in case of fire. Hot water – with the same or with capsules of dry ice. Again, the emphasis here is not on fighting an already powerful tornado over sea or land, but EARLIER, PROPHYLACTICALLY, only GERM FOCI, while the tornado has not yet gained strength and has not even formed yet. Then it is still in our power to prevent its occurrence.

The same applies to typhoons and hurricanes. These giant tornadoes with a diameter of hundreds and thousands of kilometers originate from a SMALL WARM SPOT on the surface of the oceans. When you see such a spot on the thermal imager screen, cool it down. Something else arose in a slightly different place – similarly. This is how we nip in the bud the positive feedback that underlies ANY HURRICANE, no matter how huge it may become after successful development.

The idea is simple and trivial: Any giant tornado begins with a small germ of tornado formation and it does not happen instantly, like a bomb explosion, but gradually over many hours or days.. That’s when, with its timely detection, which is quite capable of today’s technologies, we extinguish it!

Any giant fire starts with a small fire! Therefore, it should be extinguished just THEN!

An avalanche.

Again, the same process with positive feedback and therefore self-reinforcing. If sharp heavy stakes with a black net attached to them are dropped from helicopters over the places of the alleged formation of layers of snow and ice, which, as they grow, become unstable, then they will perform a double role: The black net, heating up in the sun, will melt snow and ice, reducing their accumulation in dangerous avalanche sites, on the other hand stakes embedded in the ground, ice or even rock, with a grid, will serve as some kind of obstacle, a brake on the BEGINNING of the initial avalanche-like process. When the movement of snow and ice is still very weak and “unstable”. Again, a preventive measure to nip the danger in the bud.

Any, the most creepy and huge monster, is born from a relatively small egg.

And our task is to recognize THIS EGG IN TIME and break it BEFORE the monster hatches out of it!

Any river, the largest, begins with a small spring. If you turn it in the other direction BEFORE the RIVER FORMS, it will remain a streamlet! Or it will become another river.

As Aesop said in Figueiredo’s interesting play “The Fox in the Vineyard”:

“Go and drink the sea, Xanthus!” But, yielding to the plaintive whining of his master, he found a trick to:

“Tell them you’re ready to drink the sea. BUT NOT THE RIVERS FLOWING INTO IT!”

We cannot, and should not, drink the sea of troubles today.

We CAN prevent the streams that have become RIVERS of troubles from flowing into the sea of troubles!!

21 IV 2023