The devastation wrought by hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters is mindblowing. To wreak the havoc that the these acts of nature unleash on the earth requires an immense amount of energy. Just how much? More than humankind can generate. Here are a few earth shattering facts from PBS’s Nova series, which highlighted hurricanes and the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, which occurred eight years ago this past week.
- The total energy released through cloud and rain formation in an average hurricane is equivalent to 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity.
- An average hurricane produces a little over half an inch of rain a day within a circular area 825 miles across. If you convert this to a volume of rain, you get about 1.3 x 1015 cubic inches a day. That’s enough rain to fill over 22 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.
- When tropical meteorologists calculate using the latent heat of condensation, they find that the condensation of those 22 million Olympic pools worth of rain results in the release of 600 trillion watts of heat energy—or 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity as of January 1, 1996.
- 1,500,000,000,000 watts in the average hurricane—or fully half of the global electrical output.
- The earthquake leading to the tsunami that struck Indonesia in 2004 released the equivalent to more than 23,000 nuclear bombs of the magnitude dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.
