Damian Carrington

There's still lots of things they need to work out.

Well, there was one thing that surprised them, which is that the artificial ice, if you want to call it that, the ice that they'd thickened by pumping the water on top of, turned out to be brighter than the naturally forming ice.

And they don't really know why that is.

The theory, one theory at least, is that because it's frozen very quickly...

normal sea ice just forms very gradually as the sea slowly freezes as winter comes on and it gets cold you know but here they're just pumping up all this water and if it freezes quite quickly it might freeze more air bubbles within it which would make it more opaque and therefore more reflective another little bonus actually which is worth mentioning is that

When they pump out the water in the winter there's snow on top of the ice and it kind of floods the snow and turns it into slush and then into ice.

That snow is an incredible insulator and what it means then is you've removed that so that you've got these minus 40 degrees temperature above and that can therefore penetrate through the ice and so they actually grew more ice on the bottom than in the other areas as well so there were these sort of additional benefits which they hadn't expected.

Yeah, they happened across a different strategy, which was quite fun, also involved drilling holes.

But in this case, what happens as the ice begins to melt at the start of the melt season, you get these pools of bluish water on top of the ice that absorbs the sun.

But what they'd noticed is that some natural holes occasionally occur

And the meltwater drains away down into the sea below and then leaves the white ice exposed again, reflecting the sun.

So they thought they'd try and drill a few test holes just to see how that worked.

And it was really interesting.

So they drilled just five centimetre diameter holes and it was like pulling the plug out.

You know, the water started swirling around and then within half an hour, 45 minutes, it had broadened down to about the size of a dinner plate.

And when we went back the next day, it was like the size of a manhole cover and it was just swirling away, draining this water down.

So they, again, just at the start of looking into how effective that is.

But the kind of interesting thing about that particular tactic is that even though it only works in that short period during the meltwater season, it's just really easy to do.

An underwater drain could be poking holes up through and moving on.

Early days, important to stress that.