This Week

5 September 1998

Taken by storm

HURRICANE Bonnie did more than batter the Carolinas with heavy rains and
winds last week. It also siphoned tonnes of carbon dioxide from the Atlantic
Ocean into the atmosphere.

Nicholas Bates of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, with
colleagues at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, noticed this
previously unknown effect of hurricanes after observing Hurricane Felix in 1995
passing Bermuda.

In a paper in Nature this week (vol 395,p 58), they report that Hurricane
Felix increased the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere from the Sargasso
Sea by about 55 per cent in the summer of 1995, by cooling the surface waters and
so reducing the amount of the gas they could hold. Strong winds and waves
encouraged the release of the gas into the atmosphere.

Some climatologists believe global warming caused by CO2 in the
atmosphere will increase the number of hurricanes, or at least make them more
intense. So by encouraging global warming, hurricanes could in turn be spawning
more hurricanes.