In 1999, Hurricane Gert formed on the eastern side of the Atlantic and began the long trip to Bermuda. Along the way, it happened to pass over a hydrophone (an underwater microphone) planted half a mile deep in the mid-Atlantic.
And made a little noise.
A hurricane’s intense wind whips the waves into a churning frenzy, and deep below the surface of the ocean the turbulence creates a “rushing sound whose volume is a direct indicator of the storm's destructive power,” according to an MIT press release.
MIT engineering professor Nicholas Makris, in a paper from a forthcoming Geophysical Research Letters, takes data from Gert's cacophonous performance and proposes a new way to gauge the destructive power of an oncoming cyclone.
