Do the Polar Ice Caps Freeze Again After Melting
P hysicist Steven Desch has come upwards with a novel solution to the bug that now aggress the Arctic. He and a team of colleagues from Arizona State University want to replenish the region'southward shrinking bounding main ice – by building 10 meg wind-powered pumps over the Arctic water ice cap. In winter, these would be used to pump h2o to the surface of the ice where it would freeze, thickening the cap.
The pumps could add together an extra metre of sea ice to the Arctic's current layer, Desch argues. The current cap rarely exceeds two-three metres in thickness and is existence eroded constantly as the planet succumbs to climate alter.
"Thicker ice would mean longer-lasting ice. In turn, that would mean the danger of all sea water ice disappearing from the Arctic in summertime would be reduced significantly," Desch told the Observer.
Desch and his squad have put frontward the scheme in a paper that has only been published in Earth's Futurity, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, and have worked out a price tag for the project: $500bn (£400bn).
It is an astonishing sum. However, it is the kind of outlay that may become necessary if nosotros desire to halt the calamity that faces the Arctic, says Desch, who, like many other scientists, has go alarmed at temperature change in the region. They say that it is now warming twice as fast equally their climate models predicted only a few years ago and contend that the 2022 Paris agreement to limit global warming volition be bereft to prevent the region'south bounding main water ice disappearing completely in summertime, maybe by 2030.
"Our only strategy at present seems to be to tell people to cease called-for fossil fuels," says Desch. "It's a skillful idea just it is going to demand a lot more than that to stop the Arctic's ocean ice from disappearing."
The loss of the Arctic's summertime sea water ice cover would disrupt life in the region, endanger many of its species, from Chill cod to polar bears, and destroy a pristine habitat. It would as well trigger further warming of the planet by removing ice that reflects solar radiation back into infinite, disrupt weather patterns across the northern hemisphere and melt permafrost, releasing more carbon gases into the atmosphere.
Hence Desch's scheme to utilise current of air pumps to bring h2o that is insulated from the biting Arctic cold to its icy surface, where information technology will freeze and thicken the water ice cap. Nor is the physicist lone in his Arctic scheming: other projects to halt bounding main-ice loss include 1 to artificially whiten the Arctic by scattering light-coloured aerosol particles over it to reflect solar radiation back into space, and some other to spray body of water h2o into the atmosphere above the region to create clouds that would also reflect sunlight away from the surface.
All the projects are highly imaginative – and extremely costly. The fact that they are fifty-fifty being considered reveals just how desperately worried researchers take become nigh the Arctic. "The situation is causing grave business organisation," says Professor Julienne Stroeve, of University College London. "Information technology is now much more dire than fifty-fifty our worst case scenarios originally suggested.'
Concluding November, when sea ice should have begun thickening and spreading over the Chill every bit winter set in, the region warmed up. Temperatures should have plummeted to -25C only reached several degrees above freezing instead. "It'southward been about 20C warmer than normal over well-nigh of the Arctic Ocean. This is unprecedented," research professor Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University told the Guardian in November. "These temperatures are literally off the charts for where they should be at this time of yr. Information technology is pretty shocking. The Arctic has been breaking records all twelvemonth. It is heady but also scary."
Nor have things got ameliorate in the intervening months. Figures issued by the U.s. National Snow and Ice Information Middle (NSIDC), in Bedrock, Colorado, final calendar week revealed that in January the Arctic'due south sea ice covered thirteen.38 million sq km, the lowest January extent in the 38 years since satellites began surveying the region. That figure is 260,000 sq km below the level for January final twelvemonth, which was the previous everyman extent for that month, and a worrying 1.26 1000000 sq km below the long-term average for January.
In fact, sea ice growth stalled during the second week of Jan – in the heart of the Arctic winter – while the ice cap really retreated inside the Kara and Barents seas, and within the Bounding main of Okhotsk. Similarly, the Svalbard archipelago, normally shrouded in water ice, has remained relatively free because of the inflow of warm Atlantic water forth the western role of the island chain. Although at that place has been some recovery, sea ice remains well below all previous tape lows.
This paucity of sea ice bodes ill for the Arctic's summer months when cover traditionally drops to its lower annual level, and could plunge to a record minimum this year. Near scientists expect that, at current emission rates, the Chill will exist reliably free of sea water ice in summer by 2030.
By "free" they mean at that place will be less than 1m sq km of sea ice left in the Arctic, most of it packed into remote bays and channels, while the central Arctic Ocean over the north pole volition be completely open up. And by "reliably", scientists mean at that place will have been five sequent years with less than 1m sq km of ice by the year 2050. The first single water ice-free yr will come much earlier than this, all the same.
And when that happens, the consequences are likely to be astringent for the human and fauna inhabitants of the region. An ice-gratis Arctic volition be broad open to commercial exploitation, for example. Already, mining, oil and tourism companies accept revealed plans to begin operations – schemes that could put astringent strain on indigenous communities' style of life in the region.
Equally worrying is the likely touch on on wildlife, says Stroeve. "Juvenile Arctic cod similar to hang out under the sea ice. Polar bears hunt on sea water ice, and seals give birth on information technology. We have no idea what volition happen when that lot disappears. In improver, there is the trouble of increasing numbers of warm spells during which pelting falls instead of snowfall. That pelting and so freezes on the ground and forms a difficult blanket that prevents reindeer and caribou from finding nutrient nether the snowfall."
Nor would the residuum of the globe be isolated. With less ice to reflect solar radiation back into space, the dark bounding main waters of the high latitudes volition warm and the Arctic will heat upwards even further.
"If you warm the Chill yous decrease the temperature departure betwixt the poles and the mid-latitudes, and that affects the polar vortex, the winds that blow betwixt the mid latitudes and the high latitudes," says Henry Burgess, head of the Chill office of the Great britain Natural Environment Inquiry Council.
"Ordinarily this procedure tends to continue the cold in the loftier n and milder air in mid-latitudes but there is an increasing run a risk this will exist disrupted every bit the temperature differential gets weaker. We may become more than and more than long, cold spells spilling down from the Arctic, longer and slower periods of Atlantic storms and equally warmer periods in the Chill. What happens up there touches united states of america all. It is difficult to believe you can accept abroad several million sq km of ice a few one thousand kilometres to the due north and not expect there will be an impact on conditions patterns here in the UK."
For her part, Stroeve puts it more bleakly: "We are conveying out a blind experiment on our planet whose event is almost impossible to guess."
This point is backed by Desch. "Bounding main ice is disappearing from the Arctic – rapidly. The sorts of options we are proposing need to be researched and discussed now. If we are provocative and become people to think about this, that is skilful.
"The question is: do I call back our projection would work? Aye. I am confident information technology would. Just nosotros do demand to put a realistic toll on these things. Nosotros cannot keep on just telling people, 'Stop driving your auto or it's the terminate of the earth'. We take to give them alternative options, though every bit we need to price them."
THE Large SHRINK
The Arctic ice cap reaches its maximum extent every March and and so, over the next six months, dwindles. The trough is reached effectually mid-September at the end of the melting season. The ice growth cycle then restarts. However, the extent of regrowth began slackening towards the stop of the final century. Co-ordinate to meteorologists, the Arctic's ice cover at its minimum is now decreasing by 13% every decade – a direct event of heating triggered by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Climate alter deniers claim this loss is matched by gains in body of water ice around the Antarctic. Information technology is not. Antarctic ice fluctuations are slight compared with the Chill's plummeting coverage and if you lot combine the changes at both poles, you find more than a million sq km of ice has been lost globally in 30 years.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/12/plan-to-refreeze-arctic-before-ice-goes-for-good-climate-change
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