Christian Elliott: “This month, an international team of scientists has been trying to set up sensors on and around Thwaites Glacier, one of the most unstable in the world. It’s often called Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’ because, if it collapses, it would add two feet of sea-level rise to the world’s oceans. On Thwaites itself, part of the team will try today to drop a fiber-optic cable through a 3,200-foot borehole in the ice, near the glacier’s grounding line, where the ocean is eating away at it from below. Sometime in the next week, another part of the team, working from the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon, aims to drop another cable, which a robot will traverse once a day, down to a rocky moraine in the Amundsen Sea. The data the sensors gather over the next two years will fill gaps in basic scientific knowledge about Thawaites. They will also determine the future of an audacious idea to slow its demise.
“Right now, warm water is barely cresting the moraine, then flowing down a seabed canyon toward the glacier. If this natural dam were a little taller, it could block those warm ocean currents. Using the data on current speeds and water temperatures, scientists and engineers will model whether a giant curtain atop the moraine could divert warm water away from the glacier’s base—and if it would even be possible to construct one.
“To avert catastrophe in this way would be a massive undertaking: The curtain itself would need to be up to 500 feet tall and 50 miles long. But these local conditions are in such tentative balance—‘on a knife’s edge,’ David Holland, a climate scientist at NYU and a member of the Seabed Curtain Project, told me from the deck of the RV Araon—that Holland and some other scientists believe that an intervention could change the glacier’s fate. Of his colleagues on the boat, he may be the only one thinking along those lines right now, he said. ‘But everyone’s data is going to be used by people for years and years for that purpose.’
“A few years ago, the curtain project was a fringe idea that John Moore, a glaciologist at the University of Lapland, and a couple of like-minded colleagues had proposed in a series of academic articles. This kind of geoengineering, meant to address the symptoms of climate change without slowing it down, was a bête noire in the glaciology community. Now more scientists are coming to see targeted interventions in our climate as inevitable …
“Geoengineering—which could also include removing carbon dioxide from the ocean and using stratospheric aerosol injection to dim the sun—is gaining adherents in part because decarbonization simply isn’t proceeding quickly enough …
“Scientists agree that, absent intervention, Thwaites’s retreat will accelerate within the next century and the glacier will eventually collapse. And Thwaites acts as a cork in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough water to raise sea levels by nearly 17 feet. The price of localized interventions at Thwaites, proponents say, pales in comparison with the price of building seawalls around major cities. In one paper, Moore and two colleagues estimated that the curtain could cost $40 billion to $80 billion to install (and $1 billion to $2 billion a year to maintain), whereas adapting to rising sea levels could cost an estimated $40 billion a year. One way or another, we are going to have to build in order to fight the sea.”
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Christian Elliott: “This month, an international team of scientists has been trying to set up sensors on and around Thwaites Glacier, one of the most unstable in the world. It’s often called Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’ because, if it collapses, it would add two feet of sea-level rise to the world’s oceans. On Thwaites itself, part of the team will try today to drop a fiber-optic cable through a 3,200-foot borehole in the ice, near the glacier’s grounding line, where the ocean is eating away at it from below. Sometime in the next week, another part of the team, working from the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon, aims to drop another cable, which a robot will traverse once a day, down to a rocky moraine in the Amundsen Sea. The data the sensors gather over the next two years will fill gaps in basic scientific knowledge about Thawaites. They will also determine the future of an audacious idea to slow its demise.
“Right now, warm water is barely cresting the moraine, then flowing down a seabed canyon toward the glacier. If this natural dam were a little taller, it could block those warm ocean currents. Using the data on current speeds and water temperatures, scientists and engineers will model whether a giant curtain atop the moraine could divert warm water away from the glacier’s base—and if it would even be possible to construct one.
“To avert catastrophe in this way would be a massive undertaking: The curtain itself would need to be up to 500 feet tall and 50 miles long. But these local conditions are in such tentative balance—‘on a knife’s edge,’ David Holland, a climate scientist at NYU and a member of the Seabed Curtain Project, told me from the deck of the RV Araon—that Holland and some other scientists believe that an intervention could change the glacier’s fate. Of his colleagues on the boat, he may be the only one thinking along those lines right now, he said. ‘But everyone’s data is going to be used by people for years and years for that purpose.’
“A few years ago, the curtain project was a fringe idea that John Moore, a glaciologist at the University of Lapland, and a couple of like-minded colleagues had proposed in a series of academic articles. This kind of geoengineering, meant to address the symptoms of climate change without slowing it down, was a bête noire in the glaciology community. Now more scientists are coming to see targeted interventions in our climate as inevitable …
“Geoengineering—which could also include removing carbon dioxide from the ocean and using stratospheric aerosol injection to dim the sun—is gaining adherents in part because decarbonization simply isn’t proceeding quickly enough …
“Scientists agree that, absent intervention, Thwaites’s retreat will accelerate within the next century and the glacier will eventually collapse. And Thwaites acts as a cork in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough water to raise sea levels by nearly 17 feet. The price of localized interventions at Thwaites, proponents say, pales in comparison with the price of building seawalls around major cities. In one paper, Moore and two colleagues estimated that the curtain could cost $40 billion to $80 billion to install (and $1 billion to $2 billion a year to maintain), whereas adapting to rising sea levels could cost an estimated $40 billion a year. One way or another, we are going to have to build in order to fight the sea.”
Read more: [https://theatln.tc/Toyuze8h](https://theatln.tc/Toyuze8h)
The only way would be to drill 10,000 wells and pump the water at the base up to the surface. Building a wall is stupid.
We’ll try anything except stopping burning fossil fuels.