Ice machines pitched as melting Arctic’s salvation
Cost of proposal estimated at $5 trillion
With the Arctic warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, a new scientific paper is proposing a radical scheme to thicken the ice cap: millions upon millions of autonomous ice machines.
Specifically, between 10 and 100 million floating, wind-powered pumps designed to spray water over sea ice during the winter.
“These are expensive propositions, but within the means of governments to carry out on a scale comparable to the Manhattan Project,” reads the paper published in the Jan. 24 edition of Earth’s Future, a journal published by the American Geophysical Union.
The plan would be one of the most expensive single projects in world history, an endeavour on the scale of the International Space Station, the entire U.S. auto industry or a major world conflict such as the Iraq War.
In the most ambitious version of the plan, 100 million devices would be deployed across the Arctic.
With each device requiring 10,000 kg of steel, manufacturing alone would absorb the entire steel production of the United States. Hauling them to the Arctic meanwhile, would require half of the world’s container ship fleet.
Assuming no major setback, the paper estimates the final cost at about US$5 trillion, roughly the annual GDP of Japan.
The environmental footprint wouldn’t be insubstantial, either. Steel production alone would emit roughly 163 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — about one-fifth of Canada’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Nevertheless, given the end goal, the researchers from Arizona State University call the cost “economically achievable” and the environmental impact “negligible.”
However, they also costed a scaled-down, $500-billion plan that would deploy ice machines to only 10 per cent of the Arctic.
The whole point of the mega-project would be to preserve “ice albedo,” the phenomenon of sea ice reflecting sunlight away from the Earth.
Much like wearing a white T-shirt on a hot day, global warming is slowed down by the presence of huge portions of the globe that remain perpetually white.
At current rates of warming, by the 2030s the Arctic Ocean could see its entire ice cap disappear by late summer. With that ice gone, previously reflected sunlight will then be absorbed by the open ocean, speeding the rate of global warming.
“The need is urgent, as the normal cooling effects of summer sea ice are already lessened and may disappear in less than two decades,” reads the paper.
The fleet of ice machines would be designed to add an extra metre of sea ice to the Arctic every winter.
The report contains no specific designs on the water pump, but described it as wind turbine and tank assembly mounted atop a buoy.
Researchers did the math to confirm that the Arctic has adequate wind capacity, but the awesome, unforeseen logistical challenges of the project are only briefly mentioned.
Water tanks on the devices would be prone to freezing, wind turbines would be susceptible to seizure by rime ice and the whole device would be extremely vulnerable to salt water corrosion.
Not to mention the army of workers and equipment that would be needed to maintain 100 million remote machines in one of the world’s harshest environments — particularly when the machine’s whole function is to surround itself with sea ice.
“The engineering challenges of translating even such a common technology to the harsh environment of the Arctic are daunting,” reads a somewhat understated summary of the challenge.