With all this talk about the fluctuating haze in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, everyone's looking around for solutions to the problem.

Indonesia's been declining our offers of help to tackle it, but that can't stop us from proposing some nifty ones of our own.

For instance, this:

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According to the CNN report earlier this year, the idea capitalises on the fact that low-frequency sound waves deprive a given area of oxygen, therefore snuffing out fire, which in turn depends on that to sustain itself.

Their idea is simple yet pretty ingenious-sounding: aim a subwoofer playing bass beats at the flames. Flames disappear. Watch it in the video; it's pretty nifty!

Imagine the potential if it could be scaled up to fight forest fires just like the students said they hoped it will eventually — we could deploy our fighter planes, and perhaps SQ50 for good measure, and attach gigantic speakers to drop the bass all over the forest fires in Sumatra.

It's a pity some of the commenters on a version of the article carried on KULR8 News have pointed out that this device may not be plausibly scalable though:

1. Because the materials that caught fire won't have cooled off sufficiently and will immediately re-ignite.

2. How large would the speaker need to be in order to take out a forest fire in Sumatra, for instance?

3. And would low frequency sound impact wildlife resident to the forests suffering from these fires?

Ah well, one can hope that some years into the future, some other folks will scale this up and make it work! Could save lots of water, as well as property from damage by chemicals and, well, water.

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