Damian Carrington

So they have ideas about this.

OK, and so one is that trying to do a large scale project using people as they do now would be crazy and expensive and very difficult to do.

So they've actually already tested a prototype underwater drone.

They tested this in Finland in the winter.

And so this little drone would go around and it has a kind of heated electrical probe, which it pushes up through the ice and that creates the hole.

So it's creating it from underneath and then you pump up through that.

Their sort of strategy is to do stuff under the ice because it's much easier to move around in the water.

It's actually warmer there.

It's like minus 1.6.

That's as cold as...

the seawater gets rather than on top in the winter when as I say you know it's like minus 40 degrees so they're hoping to be a bit more practical they have done the kind of back of the envelope calculation right so they've kind of made this rough estimate that if you were to do a really big scale project with these drones if they cost five thousand dollars a piece to try and thicken about eighty thousand square kilometers which is roughly what gets lost every year because of the climate crisis they reckon it might cost ten billion dollars

like 10 billion dollars sounds like a lot of money it really is a lot of money but it was interesting because the context for that number came from a story i'd done not long before i'd left which was about the excess profits that oil companies have made thanks to the conflict in iran and basically their excess windfall profits for the top 100 oil companies in two weeks was 10 billion dollars so it's not a crazy amount of money when you put it into that sort of context

Yeah, as you say, geoengineering generally is controversial.

And this particular project of rethickening Arctic sea ice, there's another group called Arctic Reflections, which are doing a similar thing.

So, you know, real life's not the only people.

And actually, not too long ago, a bunch of polar scientists wrote a critique saying it was environmentally dangerous, it was unfeasible.

and it was a dangerous distraction.

So, I mean, to unpick those things, which are the sort of general criticisms of geoengineering, first of all, it's unfeasible, you know, and certainly this project has not proven feasibility by any stretch yet.

It's still, you know, just a test, but a really interesting one in my view.

Secondly, it could be environmentally dangerous.