Each decade around 13% of the ice in the Arctic Ocean is lost, but scientists are now exploring whether new technology can help refreeze the sea ice and halt its rapid decline.
Such is the rate of climate change in the region that experts believe, without intervention, it could be “ice-free in the summer in the 2030s”, said the New Scientist, with devastating worldwide consequences.
How bad is the situation in the Arctic?
The level of Arctic sea ice has declined starkly in recent decades due to increasing global emissions and the “oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic has declined by a stunning 95%” since the 1980s, said the World Wildlife Fund.
At this point, there is some consensus that even if “greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced” immediately, the Arctic would still be free of summer ice by the next decade, said The Guardian. Research published last year suggests 90% of the melting had been due to “human-caused global heating”, the paper added, and now the world must prepare for the knock-on effects including rising sea levels and more extreme summer heat and winter cold, as well as loss of habitat for wildlife.
What are the proposed solutions?
Stopping the thaw would take an effective global effort to reduce carbon emissions, but in the shorter term, scientists have proposed numerous innovative solutions to try and quell the impact.
The Arctic Ice Project has put forward the idea of “sprinkling parts of the Arctic with a thin layer of glass beads” which could “boost surface reflectivity and create more ice” and start a “cooling feedback loop”, said The Guardian.
Other solutions include building “free-floating” underwater sea walls that “block the warm ocean currents from melting the glacier from below” and mimicking the cooling effect caused by some natural events like volcanic eruptions. The latter is perhaps the most controversial, as it involves “releasing calcium carbonate into the stratosphere” that can block solar radiation and could damage the ozone layer in the long term.
The solution gaining the most traction appears to be the “audacious” refreezing proposal which is hoped can make the ice “thicker and longer-lasting”, said The Times.
How does the refreezing plan work?
The idea is that engineers will use pumps to spread seawater on top of the ice that will freeze over winter and last longer into the summer months.
Scientists from two enterprises, Real Ice and Arctic Reflections, have been testing the system, which involves sending an underwater drone to find thin ice and punch a hole through to the surface and “flood” seawater over the top of the ice. It is hoped that the extra water will speed up the “natural freezing process” and “create ice that is about a metre thicker” and therefore more durable in the warmer temperatures.
Though the system has been through numerous tests already, this year was the first time the pumps were powered by renewable energy, running on hydrogen.
Will it work?
The most obvious issue is scale. The sheer size of the Arctic means there is doubt over whether the technology could be rolled out effectively and widely enough to make a significant difference. Some research suggests “deploying pumps across a tenth” of the area could “reverse present trends of ice loss”, said The Times, but that would require “about 10 million pumps” alone.
There is also the “risk of unintended consequences”, said the New Scientist, such as negatively impacting the wildlife living there by reducing snow cover, as well as potentially creating a lower melting temperature for the ice by pumping salty water onto it.
Such innovations as refreezing are not a “solution” to the problem, Hayo Hendrikse, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology told The Guardian, but merely a “sticking plaster” that could be used on a “smaller scale”.