Artificially engineered sea ice grows—but tests are too small to combat melting

By -
By Hannah Richter, Science. 

Excerpt: A simple idea underpins an audacious intervention to augment Arctic sea ice and slow the climate feedback loop accelerating its disappearance. Drill holes through a floe, pump seawater onto its surface, and let the cold do the rest. The first results from two field tests show the technique can thicken the ice. But they also show those gains don’t last. The added ice—about 30 centimeters—is equivalent to decades of thinning from global warming. But ocean heat and surface slush erased the buffers soon after they formed. The tests, which were reported last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans and in a recent preprint, show how difficult it would be to meaningfully expand the strategy across the Arctic, says Leigh Stearns, a glaciologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the studies. The “effort to do these tests over a really small area was pretty enormous,” she says. “The thought of scaling it up is infeasible.” Arctic sea ice grows each winter to an expanse nearly the size of Russia, only to retreat in summer. That cycle is now in decline: Arctic sea ice has been shrinking for decades, threatening not only the habitat of animals such as polar bears, but also our overall climate. Because the bright ice reflects sunlight back into space, its loss accelerates global warming in a powerful feedback loop. To counter that warming, groups such as Arctic Reflections, a Dutch startup supported by public and venture capital funding, have proposed sea ice thickening.... 

Popular posts from this blog

New Lessons from Old Ice: How We Understand Past (and Future) Heating

By -
By Mariana Mastache-Maldonado , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Fragments of blue ice up to 6 million years old—the oldest ever found—offer key insights into Earth’s warming cycles. Researchers are using these ancient data to refine models of our future climate. ...In Antarctica...rare formations known as blue ice areas may offer a distinct look into that deep past. These areas, which make up barely 1% of the continent, form where strong winds strip away surface snow. ...The Allan Hills region, situated on the edge of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.... Here researchers have discovered ice up to 6 million years old—the oldest yet found. Their  study  of the ice, published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , revealed that parts of it formed during periods far warmer than today—times when sea levels were higher and open forests and grasslands covered much of the planet. ...studying the atmospheric remnants trapped in blue ice, the rese...
Read more

E.P.A. Delays Requirements to Cut Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas

By -
By Lisa Friedman  and  Maxine Joselow , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Wednesday that it would delay a requirement that the oil and gas industry limit emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas. Under the requirement, which dates to the Biden administration, oil and gas companies were supposed to start this year reducing the amount of methane they release into the atmosphere. Instead, the Trump administration is giving them until January 2027 and is considering repealing the measure altogether. The move dealt a blow to any remaining effort by the United States to slow Earth’s dangerous warming. It came after the Trump administration  boycotted the United Nations climate summit  this month, the first time that the United States was not present since the annual meetings began 30 years ago....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/climate/epa-delays-methane-oil-gas.html . 
Read more

Medieval volcano may have indirectly sparked Europe’s Black Death

By -
By Andrew Curry , Science.  Excerpt: The Black Death is the single most deadly documented pandemic in human history. In 1347 C.E., it spread from a few Italian port cities to nearly every corner of Europe, killing tens of millions of people within a decade and eliminating more than half the continent’s population. In a paper published today in  Communications Earth & Environment , researchers argue that cool weather  spurred by previously unidentified volcanic eruptions  set into motion a deadly chain of events. ...The authors of the new paper suggest volcanic eruptions a few years before the plague’s rapid spread played a role, by pushing plumes of sulfur high into the atmosphere that cooled parts of Europe and caused harvests to fail around the Mediterranean. These failures, in turn, forced Italian cities to import large quantities of grain from the plague-wracked Black Sea region—along with infected fleas, capable of subsisting on grain dust in the cargo holds...
Read more