What if we could slow the melt of Arctic ice?
You can think of it as a kind of floating, very foot-friendly sand.
If we put this material onto young, thin ice, we instantly make
it more reflective.
We are in the race for our lives.
We could have completely ice-free Arctic summers by 2030.
It's a loaded gun pointed at the heads of our future.
Every degree matters.
Every degree is worth fighting for.
By restoring Arctic ice reflectivity, we could gain another
15 years that we sorely need to make the transition to sustainable
fuels and energy.
There's a lot of really terrific ideas being worked on hard by
really brilliant people that gives me hope.
Doing the kind of work that we do here at the Arctic Ice Project is a way
to turn climate anxiety into action.
And I have hit her.
I phrase it this way to myself,
I've been staring into the fiery pits of hell here for 15 years,
ever since I started taking this on and trying to see what could be
done about climate change to make things better for my kids.
The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than anywhere else on
the planet. This is warming all the world's oceans,
it's warming the atmosphere, destabilising the climate.
Scientists are predicting right now, we could have completely ice-free
Arctic summers by 2030.
When all the ice goes in the Arctic,
if all the ice goes in the Arctic, there are other tipping points you have
to worry about.
Permafrost melt.
You're seeing them already.
Methane release.
And these are more potent greenhouse gases than CO2.
And so it's really a terrible tipping point risk that we've got.
We are risking a huge sea level rise.
We're talking about, you know, climate refugees in untold numbers.
We're talking about the drinking water for over a billion people in
the Himalayan ice melt.
The ice on this planet really matters.
So it's tremendously important for climate to get our reflective heat
shield back again.
Historically, when the sun has been shining on the Arctic in the
summer, 24 hours a day, most of the sunlight has been
reflected by multiyear ice, which takes quite a while, many years to
grow and become really bright.
And now we have far less of that.
We have basically changed from a white T-shirt in the Arctic,
reflecting summer sun all day long,
24 hour day sunlight up there in the summer.
We've changed that to a dark blue or black T-shirt.
So we're absorbing a lot more of the energy than we used to,
and that accelerates global warming and destabilises the climate.
The question I ask myself, basically, for the
future of my kids, when I realised that this was a problem,
is there a safe way to rebuild that reflectivity?
And in fact, it looks like we might be able to restore Arctic ice.
It is called hollow glass microspheres, you can
think of it as a kind of floating, very foot-friendly sand, so it's
teeny, teeny spheres with a very thin silica glass shell around a
gas core. If we put just a few hairs widths onto young, thin ice,
that isn't very reflective,
we instantly make it more reflective. For implementation
what we want is to see what percentage of the Arctic would we
really need to treat to have a positive impact.
We're looking for areas of greatest impact in the Arctic so
that we don't have to carpet the Arctic.
And we have modelled around one percent of the area of the Arctic
and found that that is showing some very promising results.
Our first principle is, first, do no harm, and I'm really, we're all
really serious about that and we test, test, test continually, and
what we're using is as close to a natural material as you can get.
It's primarily silica, and silica is present in all the ecosystems on
Earth – marine environments, most of the rocks – material of the kind
that's already in the oceans.
It's got characteristics that say that it will not attract oil.
We were very careful about that.
And we're making sure that this doesn't have any bad effect on the
phytoplankton diatoms in the ocean.
We do that by collaborating with expert marine biologists.
One of the next things that we are working hard on getting funding for
to make sure that we can get those tests done.
People look at climate solutions and they think, is this the only
thing you have to do?
And absolutely not, the aim of this work is to add to the excellent
work already going on in mitigation, meaning let's prevent
greenhouse gas emissions and let's adapt.
And then this restoration is what we're doing or regeneration,
it's becoming called now.
It's part of a suite of things that one needs to do.
It's not the only thing.
But we believe that the Arctic is one of the most critical things we
need to do as soon as possible.
I think where people get despairing is where you start to
drink in the reality of just how bad it is.
But you don't hear about the hopeful solutions that are out
there. What keeps me going and what keeps me, strangely enough, is
fundamentally an optimist is that I'm working as hard as I know how
to on this in the most strategic way that we have found.
And to really see how hard people are working on things that could
really work.
And when I keep my focus on that, I don't despair and I just keep
working harder.