I’ll note that this falls into the realm of highly-uncertain efforts with a significant chance of failure. It shouldn’t be considered as an alternative to ending fossil fuel use, but at most, something to reduce the harm we’ve already caused.
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a well written, worthwhile read.
the Atlantic tends to have good writing. It’s important to avoid confusing “good writing” with “full solution” — the two are not in the slightest the same thing.
I’m not sure what you mean. This is in depth, quality journalism on a niche topic within the sphere of climate change. I can’t imagine anyone is trying to parse out a “full solution” from this, and the article touches on the evolving thinking in the community about how this type of work could be perceived as a distraction. The scale of the potential operation is fascinating.
Thanks for posting the article and your work on this community, I often find interesting pieces here I wouldn’t otherwise come across!
Summary:
But then, in the geologically abrupt space of only a few decades, this great river of ice all but halted. In the two centuries since, it has moved less than 35 feet a year. According to the leading theory, the layer of water underneath it thinned, perhaps by draining into the underside of another glacier. Having lost its lubrication, the glacier slowed down and sank toward the bedrock below.
/…/
“The beauty of this idea is that you can start small,” Tulaczyk told me. “You can pick a puny glacier somewhere that doesn’t matter to global sea level.” This summer, Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, will travel to the Juneau Icefield in Alaska to look for a small slab of ice that could be used in a pilot test. If it stops moving, Tulaczyk told me he wants to try to secure permission from Greenland’s Inuit political leaders to drain a larger glacier; he has his eye on one at the country’s northeastern edge, which discharges five gigatons of ice into the Arctic Ocean every year. Only if that worked would he move on to pilots in Antarctica.
It’s not wild at all. :) The plan makes sense from a physical perspective, but should not be implemented lightly because:
- it’s extremely hard work and extremely expensive to drain water from beneath an extremely large glacier
- it doesn’t stop warming, it just puts a brake on ice loss / sea level rise