Good discussion... I'm heading to Cancun this weekend and was concerned about TD27... while surfing for info, came across this page. Kudos to cyclonekiller for at least coming up with a creative idea. Great leaps in humankind start with ideas that start off sounding crazy. It takes investigation and research into these ideas until there is a feasible plan or it gets trashed. Asking for mathematics at this point is pretty useless IMHO, as long as the principles are sound, it's still worth talking about.

The others are right, we don't really know what the impact or cost of this would be... but a couple key points from a layman:

1) if the tunnels main purpose is to prevent or slow the development of land threatening hurricane, fine, then its only "on" for a few days out of the year, marine life and the gulf stream "should" be okay, but this won't generate siginificant or reliable electricity (hence your cost or energy savings formula is out), so I would just drop that argument altogether.

2) life will adapt to change as it always does... minor changes to temperature is not as threatening as it sounds... the little lobster is here today because it and its ancestors can adapt to the changes in the Caribbean including temperature change and hurricanes

shujat