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Ice in the Arctic is disappearing.
The region is one of the fastest warming areas on earth, about four times faster than the global average. Over the past several decades, climate change has driven down the rate of ice formation by half of its previous range. And scientists predict the Arctic will be ice-free in the summers within a few decades.
One company, Real Ice, hopes to delay that grim milestone with a physical intervention: growing thicker ice. The idea is, theoretically, simple. Water pumps pull up sea water and spread it over existing ice at the beginning of winter, where it freezes into an extra layer. This is then repeated until a desired thickness is reached.
“Thicker ice will then have more chances to survive longer in the summer, when we need it to reflect a lot of [solar] radiation back to space,” said Andrea Ceccolini, the CEO of Real Ice. The target, he told The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler, is about one to two feet of extra ice, which would extend the life of those ice patches by a few weeks in most areas of the Arctic.
Beeler spoke with Ceccolini about the project as part of the Big Fix series, which explores the creative ways people are trying to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
A water pump during a field test in Cambridge Bay, Canada, during Real Ice’s most recent field season (Courtesy of Elise Imbeau/Real Ice)Courtesy of Elise Imbeau/Real IceSo, we’ve covered the how, tell me about the why. Is it mostly to reflect more of the sun’s energy back into space, like you mentioned?
Yes. The Arctic sea ice, in a single day in the middle of the summer, can reflect enough energy comparable to all the power produced by [the world’s] power stations in a whole year.
And that energy is in the form of heat. So, if you reflect more of it back into the atmosphere, you’re basically decreasing the rate of global warming.
Exactly. So, if there was the open ocean, that energy would be absorbed by the planet and then eventually warm up the planet. That’s the function that the Arctic has had for a long, long time, as a sort of [cooling system].
You have done some tests on this, some field work, and recently released data from your latest field season. Tell us what you were testing, what you found, and how big [the area was] where … you were able to thicken the ice.
This past winter, we covered an area equivalent to around 50 football pitches, and we created roughly 50,000 tons of new ice.
It’s still small. It’s a fraction of a square mile or square kilometer. [But it’s] large enough to show us the effect of this intervention. In fact, when we came to the melt season around the end of May — we’ve been working in Cambridge Bay, by the way, in Canada — we could observe for roughly five or six weeks that our ice was actually brighter in this period [which meant it wasn’t as melted as the areas around it].
It was a promising test. There are areas that we know we need to study more in detail. We need to study, for instance, the microalgae that grow under the ice and if there is any impact on those. So far, we don’t think there’s any major impact, [but we] will work with ecologists to make sure that that is assessed properly.
The Real Ice project is still at research scale. Many more tests need to be done to ensure there is no harm to the environment, including the ecology of the sea water (Courtesy of Real Ice).Courtesy of Real IceI know you are working alongside some of the communities that live near this area in Cambridge Bay in Canada. Some of the Indigenous communities in the area are working alongside your project. Some oppose it. What are their concerns, those who oppose this work?
To be honest, we found actually great support from the community. This will always be a bit controversial. It is a climate intervention, it’s active cooling. And there is a position of not trying to touch the environment, in general. People are concerned.
We tackle this by being transparent in what we do, by seeking for, not only approval, but collaboration from the community. They are the real experts in the region, and they’re also the legitimate owners of those lands. So, it’s not just about listening to the concern, it’s about seeking collaboration in the future. We would be really successful if we built something that is then led by the Indigenous communities themselves.
As you’ve said, these are early tests for this to make any sort of meaningful impact on fighting climate change. It would need to be scaled up. [And] obviously, it takes energy to pump water and it takes money. Do you think it’s likely that this could actually be scaled up in a meaningful way?
Well, we have a plan. We have an idea. We have a model to make it happen. We’ve done the calculations. I mean, in terms of energy, we are talking about a tiny fraction in respect to the energy that we reflect back to space. [And] we want to do it with clean energy.
In terms of scaling, we have a plan and we start[ed] to test [it] this winter [with] prototypes [for] underwater drones to automate the operation. Nobody wants to do manually with -40, -50 degrees temperature, strong winds. This is something for machines to do. They would be very efficient. Clearly, we would need thousands of them. The Arctic is twice the area of the United States. It’s a big area.
Right, a lot bigger than 50 soccer fields, right, which was your test area?
Exactly. Although every year at maximum scale, we wouldn’t need to cover more than like 5% of that area. But the costs to do these are tiny in respect to what we need to pay in terms of climate adaptation, or loss and damage, that will run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the next few years.
You’ve spelled out well the goal here to reflect more energy back into the atmosphere, to slow global warming. What would that mean for people all around the world who are very far from the Arctic but might feel some impact?
This means, first of all, buying time for what will actually be the actual solution to climate change, which is decarbonization. We can’t go around that. We need time for that. We are desperately late.
The second is the warming of the Arctic region. And it’s warming four or five times faster than the rest of the world, exactly because we are losing sea ice. It is creating an acceleration in the melting of Greenland glaciers, which is in itself creating sea level rise at [an] accelerated pace. So, this is really about the risk management by keeping the Arctic cooler. We don’t accelerate this phenomena which will lead to tipping points, which will be suffered by the whole planet.
Editors note: A new study published this week in Frontiers calls into question several different polar geoengineering projects, including ice thickening, and concluded that the scale required for ice thickening to be effective is not feasible. The findings of this study were not addressed during this interview.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
