Late Hawaiian crooner Don Ho knew his signature tune “Tiny Bubbles” had the power to charm generations, but neither he nor the song’s fans were likely to surmise that tiny bubbles in the water might have the power to cool the earth. It took a Harvard physicist to clue us in about that.

Our friends at Gizmodo noticed that Slashdot chanced upon a Science write-up about physicist Russell Seitz, who suggested that pumping tiny bubbles into the Earth’s oceans would heighten the oceans’ reflectivity, thus bringing the water temperature down.

Per Gizmodo, “the tiny bubbles essentially act as ‘mirrors made of air,’ reflecting the sunlight and keeping oceans cool. Early simulations showed that bubbles could potentially cool the Earth by up to 3 degrees Celsius.” Scalability is one hurdle – it takes a fair amount of energy, or as Seitz suggests, perhaps “the energy output of 1000 windmills” to bubble up an ocean.

Another problem – obvious to a toddler with a bubble wand but again, it sometimes takes a Harvard physicist to cast these things in the proper context – bubbles don’t last very long. Seitz, via Science, notes “in nature, a bubble’s lifetime depends on the level of dissolved organic matter and nanoparticles, without which small bubbles rapidly shrink and disappear. If the water is too clean, the bubbles might not last long enough to be effectively spread over large areas.”

That said, it’s a grand idea. Summing up the possibilities of reflectivity with almost perfect elegance, Seitz explains “since water covers most of the earth, don’t dim the sun. Brighten the water.”

Image source: Wikimedia Commons