Picture: A ring of tyres support a plastic tube that extends down 50–300 meters to cooler water below.

British marine engineer and Professor of Engineering Design at Edinburgh University, Stephen Salter, has proposed a way to weaken the force of strong storms and hurricanes by using old car tyres.

Known as the ‘Salter Sink’, the ‘hurricane suppression system’ sees thousands of tyres tied together to float hundreds of plastic tubes that delve 100 metres down into the sea and act as a pump to decrease the force of hurricanes before they make landfall.

According to Salter, the technology uses the natural action of waves to mix warm surface water, the main driver of hurricanes, with cool deep-sea water. This cooling action can see hurricane forces greatly reduced, and if water surface temperature can be dropped to below 26.5 degrees, hurricanes can be stopped from forming.

"If you can cool the sea surface, you would calm the hurricanes. I estimate you would need about 150-450 of these structures. They would drift around and send out radar signals so that no one would collide with them", he said.

It is hoped that these pumps could be set up in ‘Hurricane Alley’, a warm corridor in the Atlantic where the most damaging storms, such as Hurricane Sandy, most typically pass. In the last 10 years alone, damage caused by hurricanes and severe storms have cost the US and the Carbibbean US$200 billion (£125 billion) with Hurricane Sandy causing a reported $30 billion (£19 billion) in damage. It is hoped that the technology could save hurricane-prone countries from severe future damage.

The idea was first presented to the US government in 2007, after Hurricane Katrina, and has now been patented by Salter, along with Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures, who developed the technology, and Bill Gates, who backs the company.

Salter claims that the hydrological problems have been solved but that research funding is urgently needed.

"The Salter Sink concept is delightfully simple and singularly gargantuan", the company said in a statement on its website. "It has captured our imagination here in the lab. We have done some experiments and computational modelling work to validate this idea, but a lot more research needs to be done by experts in related fields such as climate science and oceanography, and we need partners to pursue the project further."

Salter has invented other marine devices, such as the 1982 mechanical ‘duck’, which floated in the ocean and could generate electricity from wave energy. This technology was halted after the UK Wave Energy programme was shut down due to expense.

Read more about the Salter Sink and watch a video on how the technology works.