Plan to refreeze Arctic sea ice shows promise in first tests

What they are about is absurd of course, but here we are.  I suspect they went in with a portable pump and a hose arrangement.  any real volume able to move just a little bit would simply have flowed back into the sea.

any bigger and most must do so unless you are spraying it out over the ice   This is literally watering the ice sheet which is millions of square kilometers.  first good wind storm and the shifting ice will grind it all up.

right now some promoters are running amok.

Plan to refreeze Arctic sea ice shows promise in first tests

Field trials indicate that pumping seawater onto the snow on top of Arctic sea ice can make the ice thicker, offering a possible way to preserve sea ice throughout the summer

By Madeleine Cuff

23 September 2024

Plan to refreeze Arctic sea ice shows promise in first tests

Seawater is pumped onto the snow covering the sea ice in an effort to thicken the ice

Real Ice/www.realice.eco

A bold plan to pump seawater over the frozen Arctic Ocean could offer humanity a final chance to save the region’s vanishing sea ice.

Field trials conducted this year in the Canadian Arctic to thicken sea ice using water from the ocean below have proved successful, says UK start-up Real Ice.

Arctic sea ice cover is shrinking rapidly in response to climate change. Many scientists expect the region to be ice-free in the summer in the 2030s, even if sharp cuts to emissions are made immediately.

Now the only way to save the region’s summer sea ice – which polar wildlife and Inuit communities depend on – is to find a way to artificially thicken the ice, some researchers say.

Real Ice’s solution involves drilling through the ice to reach the ocean, then pumping water onto the snow that sits atop the ice. The water would flood the air pockets in the snow and freeze, turning the snow into ice. This would increase the shelf’s thermal conductivity, meaning the cold from the Arctic air would spread through it and trigger the growth of more ice on the underside of the ice.

“Our objective is to demonstrate that ice thickening can be effective in preserving and restoring Arctic sea ice,” says Andrea Ceccolini at Real Ice.

The method was first proposed by Steven Desch at Arizona State University and his colleagues in 2016. They estimated that deploying ice thickening over 10 per cent of the Arctic could more than reverse recent ice loss in the region. “I am really excited that the idea is being explored,” says Desch, who is a scientific adviser to Real Ice. “We need all the options on the table.”

Working with the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge, Real Ice has been conducting field trials this year in Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island in Canada. The company says the tests have validated the idea, with a pilot borehole thickening the ice shelf by 50 centimetres compared with a control site between January and May. Crucially, the results show that the technique triggered 25 cm of natural ice growth on the underside of the ice shelf, says Shaun Fitzgerald at the University of Cambridge. “The results in May confirm that actually, yes, you do get this additional rate of growth of new sea ice from the underside.”

The experiment also demonstrated that the brine left over after the seawater freezes successfully trickles through the ice pack back into the ocean, rather than remaining in a frozen layer on top of the ice, which would weaken it and potentially cause earlier summertime melt. “That was very, very encouraging to see that we’re making ice that was good ice,” says Desch.

Deployed at a large enough scale, the technique could buy the Arctic region time while we make the emissions cuts needed to halt climate change, argues Ceccolini. It would also help preserve the albedo effect, in which intact ice reflects sunlight back into space, preventing further warming. “Every action we can take to make the ice last longer during the summer will give us extra weeks of solar radiation reflection back to space, which is less energy absorbed by the planet,” says Ceccolini.

Real Ice’s experiments this year only covered an area of ice the size of a football pitch. To make a meaningful climate impact, thousands of square kilometres would need to be treated, requiring thousands of pumps and boreholes. To do this, Real Ice plans to develop an underwater drone that could travel through the Arctic, coring through the ice at strategic points to pump seawater onto the ice. The firm has just agreed a partnership with the BioRobotics Institute at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, to design the re-icing drones. The aim is to have a prototype ready in 2025 and to test it in the Arctic in the region’s 2026-2027 winter.

A single drone could cover 2 square kilometres of ice per season. Initial calculations suggest that 500,000 drones would be needed to deliver 500 cubic kilometres of additional sea ice each winter, over a total area of 1 million square kilometres. Deployment at this scale would cost roughly $6 billion per year, Real Ice estimates.

This could be paid for by governments via the United Nations, Ceccolini suggests. Alternatively, companies could purchase “cooling credits” to fund Arctic restoration projects – Real Ice is one of a handful of firms exploring ways to preserve and refreeze Arctic ice. “From my perspective, it’s one of the most benign types of climate intervention,” says Ceccolini.

But schemes like this – often referred to as geoengineering – are controversial. Many scientists are cautious about tinkering with Earth systems, worried about the risk of unintended consequences and distracting the world from the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“I don’t think any of these ideas are viable, and especially not at a scale that would matter,” says Julienne Stroeve at University College London. She raises concerns about the energy requirements of such a scheme, as well as the impact that a loss of snow cover would have on animals such as polar bears and seals, which use snow to dig dens for their young. The only solution for saving Arctic ice is to cut emissions, she says.

Real Ice will return to Cambridge Bay in November to conduct a larger-scale experiment, with five boreholes spanning 1 kilometre of sea ice. The company plans to confirm how much the ice can thicken when treated at the start of the winter season. “It is so easy to thicken the ice,” says Ceccolini. “This is about optimising the methodology.”