Deep in the Canadian Arctic...
Deep in the Canadian Arctic...
Deep in the Canadian Arctic...
Wasn't this a Futurama gag
solving the problem once and for all.
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Just buy 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ice cube trays and fill those mothers up.
Doing this at the same time ice breakers are carving new shipping lanes through the arctic to more easily deliver
You would actually save more ice by sinking a couple of carnival cruise ships.
What is the second law of thermodynamics?
Fuckin...
Dare I suggest the problem isn't a lack of water so much as the temperature of said water. And that took like, 5 seconds of thought.
below ice is a lot warmer than above ice, so theoretically this helps in one dimension of the problem, which is probably the angle they're going for
practically it's still stupid because it's about as effective as moving a semi truck with a sewing needle
it's even stupider theoretically because the salt is gonna lower the melting point of the already-there ice, which likely has some freshwater snow precipitation on it
Ice isolates water from the cold air above though. And simply freezing lots of water makes the surface more reflective too, which mitigates further heating.
it's still stupid because now the ice on top melts easier due to salt. whereas the freshwater natural snow layer would not
So as others have mentioned, the water underneath the ice is warmer than the air above it. That's a problem, because then the glacial sheets melt from the bottom up. If you pump enough water out from under the ice, not only will it refreeze in the much colder air above, it will eventually cause the glacier to sink until it makes contact with the ground again. That would remarkably slow the speed at which it melts, and thus help retain more ice longer which would prevent sea level rise and keep the reflective surface and reduce warming.
This sounds dumb, but the science is pretty cool. It would require a metric fuckton of pump capacity, though. This is likely a small proof of concept test to secure future funding.
New daylight savings time just dropped
Did any of the literature describe the energy balance (or at least the expenditure side) of this intervention?
How would scaling this kind of process impact arctic wilderness conservation projects that should be as isolated from human activity as possible?
No guys we can reverse climate change and still make money.
They did this in Ministry for the Future
Freezing the water only moves the heat into the atmosphere. Not that it had to be explained.
There was one interesting thing I read about a few years ago, a heat pump that is able to absorb heat energy and radiate it into space at a frequency that the atmosphere is especially transparent.
At least someone's trying something even if it's dumb, as opposed to the usual flat-out ignoring
No. It's a a publicity stunt.