Part 1 of 3. (A team with Real Ice prepares to drill through sea ice in the Canadian Arctic, having already flooded a nearby patch (darker blue) to thicken it. Taylor Roades)
A haze of ice crystals in the air created a halo around the low sun as three snowmobiles thundered onto the sea ice on a February morning in far northern Canada. Wisps of snow blew across the white expanse. It was –26 degrees Celsius as we left Cambridge Bay, an Inuit village in a vast archipelago of treeless islands and ice-choked channels. This temperature was relatively warm—six degrees C above average. The winter had been the mildest in 75 years. The sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean was at its smallest extent on record. Scientists predict that within the next 15 years this ice cap will disappear in summer for the first time in millennia, accelerating global warming. The U.K. company Real Ice, whose heavily bundled team was bouncing around on the other two snowmobiles ahead of mine, hopes to prevent that outcome with an effort that has been called extremely ambitious, insane or even dangerous.
At a spot seven kilometers from the village, Real Ice co-founder Cían Sherwin, an Irishman with a red beanie and scraggy goatee, hopped off his snowmobile and started drilling with a long electric auger. A gob of water and frozen shavings sloshed up and out of the hole as he punctured the underside of the ice more than a meter below. Inuit guide David Kavanna widened the opening with a spearlike ice saw, then placed a wood box around it. Sherwin lowered an aluminum pump, which looked like a large coffee urn attached to a curved rubber hose, through the hole. He plugged a cable into a battery pack. After a few seconds water began pouring out of the hose, spilling onto the ice in an ethereal shade of blue. As it congeals, “the water acts almost like lava,” Sherwin said. “The ice formation starts almost instantly.”
Thin, broad sheets of ice expand from the ice cap’s edges in winter, when it’s dark and cold, and melt away in summer, when the sun shines 24 hours a day. The ice acts like a giant mirror, reflecting up to 90 percent of the sun’s radiation back toward space. Ocean water, in contrast, absorbs 90 percent of sunlight. The ice cap’s core of so-called multiyear ice, which persists year-round, has shrunk by about 40 percent in four decades, kicking off a vicious cycle: as more ice melts, more ocean water is exposed, and that water warms further, melting even more ice. If the ice starts disappearing entirely in summer, global temperatures could rise an extra 0.19 degree C by 2050.
Real Ice is trying to thicken seasonal ice so it lasts longer into the warm months, keeping the planet cool. Sherwin hopes pumping could someday refreeze a million square kilometers of both seasonal and multiyear ice—an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined and about a fifth of what’s now left in summer—to stop the ice cap’s death spiral. All it would take, Real Ice says, is half a million ice-making robots.
(Dolly Holmes)
Polar geoengineering on such an enormous scale could help slow warming until the world finally weans itself off coal, oil and natural gas. Many scientists think it will never work. The researchers at Real Ice argue we no longer have any option but to try; studies suggest that even slashing fossil-fuel use may not save summertime sea ice. “It’s sad that it’s ended up that way, but we’ve got to do something about it,” Sherwin said to me out on the frozen plain. “Emissions reduction is just not enough anymore.”
Cambridge Bay, which British explorers named for a 19th-century Duke of Cambridge, is a town of 1,800 mostly Inuit inhabitants located across from the Canadian mainland on Victoria Island, one of the world’s largest islands. When I landed at the one-room airport on a twin-engine turboprop, I was greeted by a stuffed musk ox and a placard about the 1845 British naval expedition of John Franklin. Cambridge Bay lies along the Northwest Passage, an icy sea route between Europe and Asia sought by explorers for 400 years. Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, were trapped in the polar sea ice that surges down toward Cambridge Bay in winter, buckling into ridges up to 10 meters high. All 129 men onboard died of cold, starvation or disease. These days cruise ships coast through the passage every year, often visiting grave sites of Franklin expedition members.
The Inuit call Cambridge Bay Ikaluktutiak, meaning “good fishing place.” For millennia their nomadic ancestors came here to fish Arctic char, a silvery-orange cousin of the brook trout. Inuit started living here full-time in the 1940s and 1950s, when the U.S. military hired them to help build a navigation tower and a radar station to detect Soviet bombers coming over the pole. The cold war also led to the idea of controlling the Arctic environment. The U.S.S.R. discussed destroying sea ice with coal dust or explosions and detonated three nuclear devices to try to excavate an Arctic canal. In the U.S., physicist Edward Teller’s Project Plowshare nearly got approval to gouge out a harbor in Alaska with atomic bombs.
(Real Ice co-founder Cían Sherwin drills through the ice sheet, a meter thick, into seawater below. Taylor Roades)
Geoengineering today is intended to cool Earth to fend off climate change. Some scientists and entrepreneurs are focused on dispersing sulfate particles in the stratosphere to block sunlight, which could lessen heating but also disrupt global weather patterns such as the South Asian monsoon. Mexico recently announced a ban on this solar geoengineering after Silicon Valley start-up Make Sunsets launched two balloons full of sulfur dioxide there. The city of Alameda, Calif., halted an experiment to spray sea-salt particles skyward to make clouds more reflective. Field trials targeting the Arctic, the Antarctic and the “third pole” of colossal glaciers in the Himalayas have stirred up less controversy, perhaps because unintended consequences would be confined largely to those distant places. In Iceland and the Himalayas, Silicon Valley nonprofit Bright Ice Initiative has scattered tiny glass beads and clay-based material, respectively, on glaciers to try to reflect more sunlight and slow the melting.* Chinese agencies have blown chemical smoke into clouds with rockets, planes, drones and chimneys to provoke snowfall over glaciers on the Tibetan plateau. Researchers in Scandinavia are developing giant curtains that could be anchored to the seabed to block warm ocean water from melting the undersides of ice shelves in Antarctica. Billions of dollars would be needed to affect the climate.
The idea for thickening ice came from outer space. At a 2012 conference a fractious forum about global warming soured Arizona State University astrophysicist Steve Desch’s hopes for quick climate action. Desch, who studies icy bodies such as Pluto’s moon Charon, wondered whether we could buy time by making ice in the Arctic. The problem is that sea ice freezes from below. Once the first layer forms, it insulates the seawater from the air, which can be 50 degrees C colder. The thicker the ice gets, the slower it grows. In 2016 Desch published a paper proposing that wind-powered pumps could thicken sea ice by pulling up water from below and spraying it across the top.
Around that time, students at Bangor University in Wales were inspired by a documentary on the Arctic to construct a “re-icing machine,” an ungainly spindle of hoses that twirled like a lawn sprinkler. One of those students was Sherwin. Encouraged by Desch’s paper, he and London entrepreneur Simon Woods founded Real Ice in 2022 to see whether sea-ice thickening could scale up. They eventually recruited Desch and several sea-ice scientists as advisers. The company put its first water onto ice in Nome, Alaska, in January 2023, ditching the sprinkler for a commercial pump. They moved to the Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Cambridge Bay the next year to do more. “It’s not exactly the same as a natural process, but it’s as close as you can get,” Desch says.
To be continued...
Ren Ecosystem