New technologies are helping to regrow Arctic sea ice [View all]

By Grist, Matilda Hay published 2 days ago

But should we use them?

In the dim twilight of an Arctic winter's day, with the low sun stretching its orange fingers across the frozen sea, a group of researchers drill a hole through the ice and insert a hydrogen-powered pump. It looks unremarkable — a piece of pipe protruding from a metal cylinder — but it holds many hopes for protecting this landscape. Soon, it is sucking up seawater from below and spewing it onto the surface, flooding the area with a thin layer of water. Overnight this water will freeze, thickening what's already there.

The hope is that the more robust the ice, the less likely it will be to disappear in the warm summer months.

Since 1979, when satellite records began, Arctic temperatures have risen nearly four times faster than the global average. Sea ice extent has decreased by about 40 percent, and the oldest and thickest ice has declined by a worrying 95 percent. What's more, scientists recently estimated that as temperatures continue to climb, the Arctic's first ice-free day could occur before 2030, in just five years' time.

The researchers are from Real Ice, a United Kingdom-based nonprofit on a mission to preserve this dwindling landscape. Their initial work has shown that pumping just 10 inches of ocean water on top of the ice also boosts growth from the bottom, thickening it by another 20 inches. This is because the flooding process removes the insulating snow layer, enabling more water to freeze. When the process is done, the patch of ice measured up to 80 inches thick — equal to the lower range of older, multi-year ice in the Arctic. "If that is proved to be true on a larger scale, we will show that with relatively little energy we can actually make a big gain through the winter," said Andrea Ceccolini, co-CEO of Real Ice. Ceccolini and Cian Sherwin, his partner CEO, ultimately hope to develop an underwater drone that could swim between locations, detecting the thickness of the ice, pumping up water as necessary, then refueling and moving on to the next spot.

This winter, they carried out their largest field test yet: comparing the impact of eight pumps across nearly half a square mile off the coast of Cambridge Bay, a small town in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut, part of the Canadian Arctic. They now wait until June for the results.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/arctic/new-technologies-are-helping-to-regrow-arctic-sea-ice